whimsically about watching his own thoughts. We gather the three and usher them surely back to their institutions through the coax of kindly mirage and encouraging whispers. We do not show ourselves. They will never have to know how close they were to facing unthinkably worse — it’ll be like a dream. Good and gone, never to be watched again. But a man who has been swallowed and spat out will carry himself wraithlike once back in his own world. Like a crudely neutered alley cat with a threat around every corner and no home to return to. This is not our problem. One of them is unaccounted for. There is one more fool we must find; one who burdens us with spades of dullness. Irrational hubris urges him further into the wood and downward into the throat with the bravado of conquest, brandishing his weapon and exercising keen eyes for shelter he does not know is as useless as his pride. We must follow. Early each day of his trek the man is shaken awake by a deep shudder, shuffling off nightmares that echo millennia of anguish. We place comforts, bits of food and cloth in the direction of safety like transposed baitworms in insignificant defiance of the throat’s will. But the man’s senses are flooded with obscenities to untether his cognitions — a compass deciding it was incorrect on a whim; a pack of preserved food now maggotous and inedible; a vision hung midair of tree branches slithering and undulating in loose circular motions — hypnotic and yet barbarous to rationality. It’s my mind playin’ tricks on me, his mantra insists as he deftly advances further into the pit of that old wood. Many would gain flashes of sharpness at these checkpoints; ceasing the dullness of bravado, sprinting in the opposite direction in a lastditch hope of finding the mouth and prying it back open with whatever tool the last traces of their rational minds can conjure. This one, however, continues flickering with a sharpness rationalized only by his own hysteria. He is overheated and sopping as the humidity of the pharynx closes in around him. Our methods mutate to the logic of consoling a traumatized child. As he nears the bottom of the esophagus, he is barely a whisp of what he was before the wide smile closed around his fragile body. He glimpses a flash of our watchful eyes. We coo motherlike to him — a final bid to wrap the wretch in vestigial ease before the unthinkable — and still, he assures himself that we are predators, we are hunting him, and there is only one place safe from us. A man enslaved to the sensibilities of the stomach must be digested. We do not dare attempt to retrieve him at this point. Our eyes no longer watch, but we dream vividly of the rendering; invasive sprouts penetrating gangrenous skin, and plant matter seizing the extents of the body’s mechanisms. Acids break down all the remaining meat. Mangled old sinew disconnects and purposefully rewires. As he enters the intestinal finale of the digestion process, all his cells come undone; an all-embracing panopticon before eventually trickling downward, droplet by each suffering droplet, slowly organizing back into the lowly, unmistakable form of a man. He is alive but accustomed now only to torture. A man that has been digested is nothing less than a virus born of waste. A venom, a danger lurking with a vow of sadism; noxious and senseless to his world and his people. As the infernal digestion comes to an end, we must meet him at the cloaca. We have no choice but to usher him back to the realm of man where he belongs. 31
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