From: nmiseroc@orlith.bates.edu (Nathan Miserocchi)
Subject: Short Story
Organization: Bates College, Lewiston, Maine
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1992 18:42:08 GMT

			The Succubi and Lazarus

	Misty shades of light, darkness like the haunting
hours of youth stretching out before me in the vast untamed thoughts of my
own self before recollition.  Hazy grey, the beginning of that awfulness
we call memory, my mother's face and gentle caress on my helpless face and
my father's stern, foreign face and smell.  All swirling about some core,
some phantasmal portcullis of boiling ebulliance; shimmering light that
sifted in and out of what I had been, distorting.  Still far away, this
core, this essence of myself, my being, my presence on this Earth hung.  
	So close to myself, so burning hot with intensity of recollition yet so far
away from understanding; it was mine to forever be but never to accept.  The
very facade of society, full, boiling over in its milky thickness that had
shrouded what I had been in life, what we all have been, enveloped me
still; the hypocrisy of self, of humanity.
	Yet I grew wary, I moved away from doubt, the debilitating disease
of all man; Blake's very Idiot Questioner that was born of society.  There
I learned, at the brink of my annihilation I saw truth in my self, found
that God was the devil and the devil was God and that the wavering truth
of man was all so whimsically based on the fears and distortions of man's
own perception of his uniqueness to others so that he wallows in the
misery of his self and the imposed solitude and begs and pleads, gnashing his
teeth to be founded upon something more firm, stronger than himself and he
falls. 
	Society the pit, society the eternal despair that man has
enshrined in the plastic molds of Burger King, Mary Kay, Equal Rights,
servitude, Heavy Metal, Mozart, Hitler, Reebok.  Society the confine that
demands conformity yet yields submission to unique desires that tempt and
tempt until the very taste we must palate, and fall upon grovelling hands
and knees to the base of the mountain Society.
	There, there how many times! I have spent in that swirling core of
myself, deranged and misunderstood at my own thoughts and actions while I
knelt to the very temptress, the very sickly orbs that are said to hold
truth, sanity, righteousness and is but conformity!  How many times
before, the lasting years of my life that make up the greying mists of
this recollection, have I lain with the Succubus and her very cold bosom
been pressed to mine?  
	Without seeing, without knowing, everything warped and blighted
with conformity, I walked through those years and created that mist so
uncapturable, so evading to reason and understanding, so without power, so
without.
	Salvation.  Salvation I have reached up for, salvation in the very
knives of knowledge come running through my body, cutting and tearing,
salvation that is the pain, salvation that is the unburdening, salvation
that is the scars which cut away the addiction which is the very heart of
society that had tasted so sweet yet dissipated before ever touching my
tongue.  Salvation dressed in the flowing white, salvation my muse who
came down with knives; tools of destruction and salvation that left with
bloodied hands and a jar of screams.  "Come", I called, I screamed, I
pleaded with intoxicating fear, like the very spider and snake that may
crawl upon your flesh, I wanted it gone because I could see.  I could feel
and I now knew that the mist had been a prison, my mind its captive, my
Being the slave, kneeling, the very dry, choking dust of the barren fields
suffocating me at the base of Society.

N.Z.M
	

 

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nmiseroc@orlith.bates.edu
                               Bates College
                               Lewiston, ME