五

The dark is an eternal fear.

One of my earliest memories is of an elderly family member reassuring me about death. 

It’s just a sleep that you never wake up from.

It was somehow meant to be comforting, that things would simply cease to be at the end of my life. Experience would simply stop.

This is so much worse. My body remains but it’s all that I can feel. Neither eye has been removed, there’s just nothing to see. Every heartbeat echoes in the silence. Only now have I become aware that air normally tastes of something.

I’m trapped, curled up in the fetal position, with nowhere to go and no one to scream to. This is so much worse.

I hear a stage light turn on somewhere in the distance. In front of me, Keisuke has appeared, backlit by a karaoke machine's cascading lights.

He has no mouth.

I begin crawling backwards but he stumbles towards me faster. He falls on my body, pinning me to the floor. The skin where his mouth should be is forced against my lips.

I hate this. This doesn’t feel good. But I can’t stop it. He’s stronger than me. This was always going to happen, right? Why resist the inevitable? Why raise your hand to block the axe that’s coming down on your head?

My lips are so dry that they keep catching on his featureless face, dragged up and down, left and right as he shifts his weight around me. His hands move from my chest to my shoulders and then my neck, clasping around it just enough to not strangle me but leave me gasping for air.

Why fight? Why do anything?

…

…

…

“Gerroff mwe..”

My voice is weak and muffled against his skin. But it’s there. For the first time in a long time, it’s there.

Summoning all of my willpower I rip my arms off the ground. It feels like my skin is peeling away as I do, as if I’d been glued down. I push him off me the tiniest bit.

“I said get off me!”

I dig my fingers in between his hands and my neck and start prying them off me. It’s a messy struggle, I cut myself a number of times with my nails but that ends up being a good thing, the blood making it hard for him to keep his grip. Finally, I wrench his fingers away from my neck and kick him away from me. He tumbles over and scrambles back to stability, first onto his hands and feet like a predator before standing up on two legs when he remembers he’s supposed to be human.

“Stay away from me!”

He cocks his neck away from me as if trying to hear what I’m saying better, then his head twitches a couple of times. It’s clear that he has no idea what I’m saying and that means there is no reasoning with it.

My fists come up, ready to fight. It's something I haven’t done in a very long time. I’ve been screaming and shouting for years but when push has come to shove, I’ve always been passive.

“Why fight? Why do anything?”

Keisuke lurches at me and I step toward him, delivering a right uppercut that feels like it does more damage to me than it does him.

Feeling confident I go for a roundhouse kick to the head as he recovers but he easily blocks it with his off arm, knocking me on my ass.

In my mind, this was my moment. I had decided to fight, I was going to win, and I was going to do it in style. But all of that confidence disappears in an instant as Keisuke jumps on top of me, trying to strangle me for real this time.

There’s no room for style in a fight for your life. Confidence is never warranted in a competition you stand no chance of winning, with consequences so dire. It’s like getting into a boxing ring against someone 10 times your size. It's crazy to even hope you could last all 10 rounds.

Keisuke tries to crush my windpipe as I rip his hair from the roots with one hand and gouge at his eyes with the other. Slipping my thumb underneath one of his eyeballs, I cause him enough pain that he relaxes his grip on me for a second and I roll us over to switch positions.

I hold our torsos close and knee him in the ribs several times. If he breaks free of my grasp again I know it’s over, it would only take a single punch for him to kill me and he’s surely done playing with his food now that it's fighting back.

He headbutts me so hard that I nearly pass out but I barely manage to stay conscious whilst also keeping my arms locked around his neck. I keep my head close to his so he can’t generate any momentum for another headbutt. He claws some flesh from my back. I bite off one of his ears. He crushes the bones in my left hand so I shatter his teeth with my right, breaking it as well.

Without functioning hands I use my arms like hammers, repeatedly striking his temples with my elbows.

“Why fight? Why fight? Why fight?!”

I ask this question allowed with every elbow strike I inflict to his head, long past the point that there is even any head to continue striking. Without understanding why I should fight, it remains the fact that I fought. I struggled against immense pain when it would have been so much easier to provide no resistance. I continued to fight even when it became clear that fighting would cause me even more anguish.

Once his head becomes so mushy that hitting it is no longer satisfying, I stand to my feet. The blood drips from every part of me onto his torso, the shifting colour of lights from the karaoke machine changing how much of the carnage is visible in any one moment.

Why should I fight? Why should I do anything at all? 

Because fighting is all I can do, and I can’t do nothing.