Fucked – Eric Angal

October 3, 2025

When I saw you the first time, I saw a flash of plasmablue light, the ionization of the air’s oxygen, a jettison of photons like a shriek. My body was momentarily oven hot. Ten quadrillion fast neutrons were released omnidirectionally from the center of the room where you stood. The boron in my trifluoride counter disassociated so quickly that the resultant reading was nil due to the avalanche of helium in the cylinder. The apian chatter of the instrument had momentarily ceased and the room was silent in the heat and I was silent and not breathing and you were there unmoving. All the rods and cones in my eyes bent the light to receive you better. Like: was I seeing this right. I tried to conjecture some macroscopic cross section of neutron absorption in my own body, a composite of atoms mostly fixed in that bottom lower quadrant of the chart of nuclides. It would be acute radiation poisoning and cell death that would kill me. I remember closing my eyes and the image of you silhouetted all dark in the neon of the circumambient photoelectric ejecta was burned silly into my fucked brain. I didn’t know what to say.

All of a sudden everything I saw had some sort of meaning. Everything was so beautiful it was overwhelming. I found myself interested in the stories of strangers. I started letting people cut me off in traffic and I didn’t feel some type of way about it. I stopped trying to control every little thing, I did some paint-by-number, I tried my hand at True Restfulness. We took walks with what little time we had left; got to know each other. We observed the clinquant dew simmer in the falltime petrichor. The panoply of verdure in false bloom. Mild strolls through pallid daylight watching the pyrotechnic leaves in their diffuse shedding—the canopy-to-carpet timeline. You averred that perhaps this autumn air possessed restorative powers that could prolong my life through some preternatural mechanism which neither you nor I understood nor discussed. I believed you for a little while, succumbed to the nostrum of the pure of heart.

My death was slow, drawn through many filters. Maybe the morning air helped more than I’d cared to admit. I remember feverishly fucking through the haze of your pinetar conditioner. Spilling myself everywhere like some hellish gyre of effluvium. Skin sloughing to sinew, sinew to bone, the saline taste of the neoprene over the lead jacket where someone else’s incisors had left prints before my own. You were constantly apologizing to me for every little thing. I didn’t understand why, still don’t.

The materials which comprised me began to fail. My stomach was always hurting. My teeth were boiled from my gums. Memories eroded, individuated themselves such that my chronology was made foreign to me, and I grew confused and wary. When I looked into the mirror’s ruin I saw no semblance of myself. Sight and sound were distorted for me in strange and exciting ways, creating a world through which only I could navigate. ‘We can reconstitute you,’ you insisted after long and careful thought. ‘The spirit is eternal—the body a vessel.’ This was a special lie you told yourself which I knew better than to question. I nodded, purpuric skin splitting to grin reassuringly at you.

After a while I was held together with bandages which could no longer be removed. The calcium in my bones decayed to scandium and the phosphorus in my bones became sulfur and the sodium in my blood became magnesium. I had become a whole different guy. None of the medical instruments worked anymore because of the continuous flux I emitted. Eventually my body rejected water, rejected food, and you were the only one with the courage to stay bedside. ‘He can’t hurt me,’ you said. You are so beautiful and I love you so much.

We laid there listening to the susurrous whispers of the hospital staff through the special yellow glass of the room they had us in. We laid there in twice-filtered air conditioning that was vented through an ion exchanger. We laid there in the snuff lighting of the recessed fluorescents while I labored out a few halfassed dying breaths. I couldn’t talk but hear and what I heard near the end was a voice, maybe not yours, even, but just some voiceless voice telling me that you were there, still, that some people don’t die all alone. Then the world opened up and swallowed me.

They buried me in mylar and lead and poured boron carbide over the hole, and yet I could hear the tinny clamor of the exhumation all through this composite of absorbents. I watched through glaucous eyes as you opened me up, as you pored through my corpse and rearranged my bones this way and that, this way and that, trying to figure it out, spiteful girl that you are.

‘I don’t know anything. I can’t do anything right,’ you said as you cradled my remains, speaking to them. ‘I can’t do anything at all.’ It felt bad to watch. That you could love without authority, without benefit: does that not count for something? Are there no points for effort? As we considered you from above, I turned and asked this of God. He shook his head dolefully, and beside him the Devil opened his mouth as if to protest.