In a Perfect World Only Paper Will Age [WRITING BACKLOG - COMPLETE SHORT STORY]

 

In a Perfect World Only Paper Will Age

By London Oscuro

It’s quite simple, you see. Given any amount of time, the human body will begin to break down. This is simply a natural process of the object- were its gears not to start grinding to a halt we would be nothing more than shifting, cancerous masses, or lobsters who grow so tired from moving their own body they simply die. These physical processes are relatively easily defined and understood and there’s absolutely no reason they cannot be averted.

    The process is simple: press the body flat. Crush it against a smooth, white surface to see how it stains. In this form your body is no longer susceptible to the most grating of scrutinies; that is, its perception by others. Sure, they may still look at you. As a matter of fact, they will- they will most certainly look at you. They will judge the quality of your crushed form. They will look at your stain and assess it- its color, its shape, its thickness, its sex. They will most undoubtedly do that. The solution then is to twist your splattered stain-body, twist it right up and around your canvas into whatever form you so choose.

    There have been such a great number of chosen forms- really, it’s incredible, you’d do right to look at a catalogue- that any and all debate as to the ‘correct’ one has reached a point of inscrutability. Still, some claim that the only reason the issue is so complicated is because we went ahead and made it such. Of course there’s a correct manner of staining- they say- but you all had to go and change it, argue about it. How stupid. You’ve gone and crushed a person’s body against a big canvas and now you’re saying, ‘Well, they shouldn’t have done it the way they did,’ like you’re looking at something deliberate and not some awful two dimensional splatter of cells.

    In any case, with the capability to reform yourself at will, you are no longer subjected to natural bodily processes. Good for you. You’ve become indistinguishable from your idols, those images you see every day and look up to undoubtedly. Now you can take their form, and none can tell you otherwise. No need to restrict yourself to pre-existing forms, either- something of your own design is perfectly acceptable.

    Now, you may say- ‘You’ve gone and divorced yourself from all extant forms of reality,’ and you’d be correct in doing such. Is that so horrific, though? Is it not natural to long for a complete separation from your reality? Of course it is. To denounce humanity in all its forms is the ultimate desire of all human beings and for that purpose we will go to any lengths. It is a fair assumption to make that a human is defined by their body and, as such, only reasonable to utterly destroy it.

    No shame will be felt in that new form. For all that it is, no shame can be felt. Your body is nothing more than a small stain upon the Earth, now more its true form than ever before. Perhaps in a few days the public servants will come with their hoses and wash your body away but for now it’s here, and you’ve got to make the best of it. For now you are immortal and imperceptible and completely yourself, and that is what you were meant to be.