An Octopus' Mind Within The Body Of An Elephant, or, The Affliction of Mundus, Part I

    I come to consciousness with my mind feeling like a dying Catherine wheel spitting and erratic fizzling its last bursts of genocidal colours like dying fireworks. I reel like the victims in a car crash, captured in slow motion, then accelerate and my brain impacts the front of my cranial cavity so heavily that I imagine it fracturing and disintegrating into nothing but coarse dust.
    For a moment I am still, eyes heavily closed. Then I languidly move my tentacles, and find to my horror that I cannot. My consternation is confounded even further when I cannot even feel my appendages. My skin that is usually so moist feels cracked and dry, an arid desert devoid even of decay. I try to open my eyes, but the effort is murder. I am baking, cooking under some intense heat. Perhaps that is it, I have been ensnared by some crazy chef and delivered to his hellish ovens to become some cephalopod sacrifice on the alter of his chopping board. Mutilated, vivisected and served for a meal. Perhaps I can no longer move my luxurious arms because they are no longer attached to me! And yet I feel no pain, I realise that I am breathing.



  The air is heavy and intrusive, raping the tubes and chambers of my body with its musky presence. New senses begin to bedazzle my conscious mind, and my mighty intellect, though in some stunted body, reveals in this new pleasure, this expiation of sensation. I adjust to breathing, and it’s unpleasant character begins to wane as whole new tactile regions open up for exploration. My skin fizzles with electricity, and to my joy and waking mind I discover at least once tentacle. Like I am lifting up some great trophy I raise it high in the air, against the effort required. This new found strength and confidence causes me to again attempt to open the drape like lids covering my eyes, and breaking through crust and mucus I part those great fleshy bags. Ripped open like some new formed sexual organ, I undergo a great awakening and metaphysical crisis on taking in my new surroundings. I see my victorious appendage, but it is not the coral coloured collage that I had so lately graced. No, it is grey, and dusty, some filthy phallus severed at the end. My body has become desecrated, what fresh hell is this?

    I feel disgust, my once great crown of arms redacted down to this feculent parody, nothing but a half hearted imitation of my former glory. Nevertheless, I have always been practical and put this embarrassment to use, exploring the undulations and new forms of my body. I am large, large like some great rock covered a rough rug of skin. What is this new nature of me? Weight and heaviness overcome me, but they are me, this new beast, hideous and huge, like a megalithic statue of some pagan God, covered in the fornicating bodies of primitive heathens.
    I look around, and it is conformation of my enduring suspicion that I am no longer within that great womb of the ocean, smothered happily on all sides by the calming waters of life, the great surface of the Earth. For some cosmonaught spinning out into space, his capsule out of control drifting further and further from the gravity grip of the Earth, that tiny home to every aspect of man’s history from the cave men to the grand inquisitors, for this man, his last sight of Earth as he drifted into the great expanse untouched by men, it would be of a blue planet, shimmering with the sparks of life and love.
    But I am not there. I am in some barren land, some infertile waste of dead trees and sickening grass. The air is sour, and the soil is sour. Birds wheel overhead like shadows caught up in the sky, but they are decaying things, feathers fraying from their wasted wings like antique hand-me-downs; they, like the earth itself, are dying.