He drowns in excess, not of pleasure, not of fortune, but of filth. His suffering is gluttonous, a feast of misery served endlessly, force-fed without pause. The sickness within him gorges itself, multiplying like a parasite that never knows satiety. His fever is ravenous, gnawing at his flesh from the inside, a furnace of infection that demands to burn but never allows the body to break. His stomach twists with hunger, but food would be an insult to the gluttony of his affliction. Instead, he swallows rot. He breathes in the spoiled air, thick with the putrid perfume of decay, each inhale stuffing his lungs with the taste of the world’s leftovers.
The mountain beneath him, his throne, his grave, his prison, shifts with the wind, spilling over itself in an endless avalanche of waste. The land is an ever-churning stomach, digesting and regurgitating its contents, never empty, never full. Every gust resettles the filth, turning yesterday’s ruin into today’s landscape, a grotesque cycle that swallows history and vomits it anew.
The creatures that infest this place are not his tormentors; they are his guests. The roaches feast with no restraint, their tiny, greedy mouths picking at his sweat-slick skin, drawn to the feast of his fevered flesh. The maggots writhe in his wounds, gorging themselves on his suffering, fattening on his decay. They do not stop, they do not slow, for there is always more. His agony is an unending bounty, his body a bottomless meal.
His pain is indulgent. The world could let him rot in silence, let him waste away in forgotten agony, but it does not. No, it savors him. It keeps him on the edge, always suffering, never breaking. His body festers, but it does not fail. His mind fractures, but it does not collapse. The disease devouring him does not kill; it luxuriates in him, lingering, licking at his bones like a beast too enraptured by the taste to ever finish its meal.
He prays not for salvation, not for death, but for an end to the feast. He begs to be consumed fully, to be chewed up and spat out like the refuse surrounding him. But the wind only howls in laughter, scattering waste like crumbs, shifting mountains like table scraps, rearranging the gluttonous landscape of despair so it may devour him anew.
There is no end to hunger here. Not his, not the world’s. Only the grotesque indulgence of suffering, chewing and swallowing, swallowing and chewing, again and again, forever.
ImpChimp Art 