A Reinvention of the Wound
Joseph Zozaya

The body, delicate, morose, and yet defined by a persistence in things immersed, was upon the table. The man looked at it as if he were attempting to extricate a divine memory, but it was futile. He moved away towards the window in which he saw the trolley pass by, and the numerous people, all inoculated from the paltry abundance in that room, went on their way. His overcoat was musty. He wandered about, putting his hands within his pockets, looking over vials and ornaments, eradicated books and ineffectual time devices upon the shelves; there was really nothing he could do except be included in the unfathomable limitations of that disturbing room, a room with no inherent pattern of departure. To allow the occasion to furnish him with understanding, he looked at his watch piece which was near a small desk. Various papers were also scattered there and a tipped over ink jar struggled on its side, converging its blackness onto the decaying brown wood. “Exuding with a conformity towards eternity,” he muttered, staring at a piece of broken glass upon the floor. He preferred to merge with everything, including that enclosure which imprisoned him and yet not all was intact, indeed, nothing seemed as an immanent or coherent perception. Fragmentary. Looking at the body, the man began to endure convulsions, regressing him to an incident and forlorn place. His eyes swelled, and he reacted violently against that specter which was before him. “The epoch of the living does not allow the limbs to move,” he thought to himself, recovering from the ambient sense of monstrosity which had just engulfed him. He lifted himself up from the floor, where he was transposed after the bout of perturbation which dismantled his ability to stand up properly, and, without any discretion, he vomited upon the table. Locking the door, he removed his coat, expelled his hat from his skull, and rolled up his sleeves so that he was capable of better performing the incessant and variable actions which were to follow. The naked body on the table did not change its substance. A corporeal texture adapted itself to the skin. A certain debilitating odor was featured in the air and something yet uncertain was yet to be indicated. He grasped the sharp utensil and, before placing it upon the skin of the body, he looked out through the window. He could already detect that people were nearing the small building and that a group of eyes were against the substance of the glass, subdued by the inevitable context within that room. Their gestures were horrendous. They were not even consistently human, dark, rotund faces with peculiarly distracting teeth, groping mouths etched by years of vacuity. Diseased skin was to be the featured divergence of semblance, found upon all their guises, and they lumbered against the building until their shadows extorted the light from entering. The electric bulb struggled to create a fitting source of impression within the room. The man before the body placed the utensil along the skin and produced a hole which expanded at the surface and then below, into a further perplexing realm. Soon there was a laceration which exaggerated itself from the umbilical region towards the neck. Then the man unveiled it even further by the use of his hands. He looked one last time at the aggregation of horrid creatures which were threateningly attempting to enter, and he showed a penetrating nervousness upon his face and demeanor; even sweat leaked from his forehead. His hands revived the wound, and then with one last glance at his surroundings, he immersed first his feet and then his legs, and then all his body was thrust through the fissure in that corporeal mass upon the table. His head disappeared. Unavoidably there was no more of him. Adjusting the wound, he closed it from underneath and the sounds which he had created in that uproarious silence were evacuated. He suddenly inherited another ambiance, somewhere in a sphere of meaningless arrangements and labyrinths and yet imbued with an adoration for the deceased and their ability to transcend time and barrier.

Currently living within the boundaries of an expansive sewer tunnel located beneath the morose city of Vienna, Joseph Zozaya finds that oppressive odors are what suit him the most. An ambiance of generosity is exhibited by the denizens of the underworld towards his presence. At times he peers upon the contortions of everyday life, listening to conversation which seeps into his vanquished labyrinth. One would think that he is possessed by some hideous affliction or some horrendous facial disturbance, but no such ailments plague him. Often he comes out to associate with humans, but only in the night when all hats are no longer upon heads.