JACKMOUTH:
✹ STORY ✹
November 0f 2004 - February of 2012
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This story covers an expanse of seven and-a-half years, centering around Nikolae Ruzicka's slow metamorphosis into something unknowable. He, his partner (whom he is irrevocably obsessed with), his twin, and their two other friends live in a dilapidated house on the shore after graduating high school. Niko is inhuman. He can die, but is always doomed to be brought back. He keeps hearing stories about a sailor named Ol' Finneas. Dead things keep washing ashore. Because his sense of reality has been slipping for a very, very long time, the world he inhabits is viewed through a lens impossible to understand.
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"I was nine when I died for the first time. Nobody believed me, when I said that I was an angel who was brought back from the dead. But I was playing near the train tracks one day, and there was the blaring of the whistle before the impact, and then I woke up vomiting the next morning, hands digging into the coarse dirt. I clutched at my abdomen, searching for the clean split through the middle that should have been there, but found nothing. My vision cleared. I was whole. The news said only that I was missing for a day. But I was exactly where I ought to have been, among the wheatgrass and gravel.
When I returned home, my twin, Ramona, was hysterical on the front porch, sobbing and only half-there from the throne of their wiry old wheelchair, utterly incoherent in their babbling; I just stood, dirt sprawled across the caps of my scraped knees. There was a ringing in my head and I didn't speak a single word for three weeks. The doctors couldn't explain it, and of course everyone else had assumed that I was abducted. But the truth would be something everyone in my life denied for years to come, and only accepted when it was certainly too late. Oh, I'm sure I sound insane, don't get me wrong-- but I saw the face of something the day that train tore me open, something with the eyes of an elk, a halo made of algae, a thousand blunt teeth, the clothing of a traditional Slavic muse. I was imagining nothing, I swear to you."
November 0f 2004 - February of 2012
✹✹✹✹✹✹
This story covers an expanse of seven and-a-half years, centering around Nikolae Ruzicka's slow metamorphosis into something unknowable. He, his partner (whom he is irrevocably obsessed with), his twin, and their two other friends live in a dilapidated house on the shore after graduating high school. Niko is inhuman. He can die, but is always doomed to be brought back. He keeps hearing stories about a sailor named Ol' Finneas. Dead things keep washing ashore. Because his sense of reality has been slipping for a very, very long time, the world he inhabits is viewed through a lens impossible to understand.
✹✹✹✹✹✹
"I was nine when I died for the first time. Nobody believed me, when I said that I was an angel who was brought back from the dead. But I was playing near the train tracks one day, and there was the blaring of the whistle before the impact, and then I woke up vomiting the next morning, hands digging into the coarse dirt. I clutched at my abdomen, searching for the clean split through the middle that should have been there, but found nothing. My vision cleared. I was whole. The news said only that I was missing for a day. But I was exactly where I ought to have been, among the wheatgrass and gravel.
When I returned home, my twin, Ramona, was hysterical on the front porch, sobbing and only half-there from the throne of their wiry old wheelchair, utterly incoherent in their babbling; I just stood, dirt sprawled across the caps of my scraped knees. There was a ringing in my head and I didn't speak a single word for three weeks. The doctors couldn't explain it, and of course everyone else had assumed that I was abducted. But the truth would be something everyone in my life denied for years to come, and only accepted when it was certainly too late. Oh, I'm sure I sound insane, don't get me wrong-- but I saw the face of something the day that train tore me open, something with the eyes of an elk, a halo made of algae, a thousand blunt teeth, the clothing of a traditional Slavic muse. I was imagining nothing, I swear to you."
