Bono Fodell and The Shackles of Torment - Flash Fiction by Kaif Shaikh
Bono Fodell and The Shackles of Torment
Bono Fodell is frail and tired, a tragic ethos somewhere in his 30s who is on a devastating misadventure, seeking exemption from all sense and essence. A failed body and a treacherous psyche with a demented face, sharp nose, and dusky brown hair. He harbors excruciating, bodily discomfort and neverending ache of an incessant psychical conflict.
Bono wakes up and starts panting for a morning ritual. This dreadful being has no notion of time, nor does he pay heed to the clocks. These machines, he very spitefully calls ‘troublesome tickers’, and yet he possesses about five of them to displease himself.
Caffeine only adds up to his anxiety and there is nothing more, he longs for breakfast than a shot through the skull. He reaches out and fails to seize the cup, rather spills the coffee onto the table. Helplessly, looking at the fluid slowly seeping down into the cracked floor tile, from a dark to a darker abyss, he pours another.
He spends his time in a chamber covered with black curtains and mosaic tiles, the other rooms have gradually become too bright to his gaze. Sometimes, he drags himself around the house and no further, to feel worn out and play dead until he feels anxious again.
Around midday, Bono wants to be splattered on the ground, with his limbs and organs scattered all over, resulting from a fatally long decline. All he gets, however, is a piece of rotten bread, wrapped in spider web and water which one could easily mistake for urine. He quickly unties his neck from the rope he was so thrilled to tighten and hook the other end to a running freight train. Gaging and tearing up, he again splits his jaw broad open, forcing the bread into the mouth and down his throat.
Bono Fodell fantasizes a spear through his heart, he yearns for the warm embrace of the last rest. His greatest fear, the idea, that this restlessness may not cease to persist, even after death. He spends his evening defending himself from rats which ever-so-often cleave a piece of flesh from his body if he dares fall asleep. The rest of the day is unremembered.
Awakening from a brief blackout, he pulls a string, slightly elevating the blinds behind the curtain. Morning was, when the blinds came up, regardless of the absence of light. Coffee, poured pot to cup, on the surface, reflects a gloomy face, such is every day. The anguished soul does not know any better but lives by his lunacy. This noise-induced divergence between body and mind has forced upon a void like senselessness. Swayed by the spectre of a deceitful illusion called life, he no longer questions his means to carry the day. Bono breathes as he is, and has no other choice. He has long abandoned the notion that what he lives is a perpetual nightmare. For if it is a nightmare, it is the only reality there is.
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About the Story: Written in 2019, Bono Fodell and the Shackles of Torment is a piece of dark fiction that draws a rather pitiful character. Bono is trapped in a looping nightmare of pain and existential dread. He has an extreme and narrow response to suffering, fixated on a singular, destructive solution to his problems. This flash fiction captures one radical end of the human narrative, despair, and inaction at its most severe.
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Tags: Flash Fiction | Dark Fiction | Existential Fiction | Dark Fiction Novel | Psychological Drama | Tragic Short Story | Mental Health Fiction | Despair and Coping | Existential Crisis Story | Narrative on Suffering | Fictional Desperation | Isolation in Fiction
[This is the 2019 edition of Bono Fodell and the Shackles of Torment, Published as it is]
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