And my world....

The Perfects

Prologue

Everyone has heard about them, but not many have actually seen them and no one knows anyone who has.

The Perfects they are called. Named by whom? Nobody knows. Where they come from? Nobody knows. Everything heard about them is speculation, passed-on by words of condemnation and intrigue. Legend says they were born from the core of the planet; a production of all the rotted bodies and carnage buried there, fused with the earth to create them, like the creation of mankind from Adam’s rib. Earth their mother.

The Perfects are men with no skin. Not ‘visible’ skin; only an impenetrable translucent film, covering muscle, fibre, sinew, arteries, and cartilage. Their veins are molded within the landscape of muscle, pumping the blood and making it look as if the blackness of it is racing around their forms, like charges firing through live wires. The sinews in their necks are taut, synchronizing with the strains of their movements, liaising with their brains and the workings of their bodies, pulling it all together; collaborating with it.

At six-feet-six tall, their limbs are long and powerful. Calves and forearms like a giant’s fingers, working and laboring over a task of precision and accuracy. Their hands and feet are weapons, so powerful and manipulative that to confront them would be perilous. Their shoulders, like great mounds, hold a protruding chest, breathing as if a thunderous storm was about to offload onto a daisy swaying peacefully in the breeze.

Their backs are like rods of steel, unyielding with no arch to take away their erectness. Their buttocks, tight and pert are rounded above thighs of bulging magnitude. And their manhood’s are tucked into a pouch of skin, protecting it from the day.

And above it all, their heads are their guides.

A visage of grey, white coloured bone, cover their delicate brains and the flesh of their faces like a gladiator’s helmet. From the skull there branched protrusions, protecting the cartilage of the nose, covering the brow and the cheeks and the chin that pointed outwards, as if to go up against its authority would be to face certain death. Two round holes perforate the molded bone, enabling them to see with their penetrating blackened gaze. And the only flesh, pink and human-like, was the flesh of their ears, like ours, listening and twitching as they respond to cries of distress and torture.

The Perfects they are called. Everyone has heard of them but not many have actually seen them. And hardly anyone knows someone who has.

Thomas Stone was a photographer. He was freelance, with a contact in every paper in New York City. He told them he was twenty-five when he went touting for work, but the truth was he was only seventeen and he still lived at home; living with his mother and her boring boyfriend, who were trying for a baby of their own to seal the deal of their alleged love for one another. Or so they said.

Tom didn’t see it that way. The walls were thin, and the grunting and groaning that came from the room next to his was the reason he left at night, climbing through his window to the city below their apartment, their home on the lower-east side. And wherever he went, his camera went with him, like a conjoined twin, never leaving his side, working with him as he ate and slept and even when he peed. As far as Tom was concerned, his camera was his lifeline, a perpetual rope-ladder to drop out of his window so that he never had to go back; so that he could afford to stay on the streets where he dreamed and flourished.

Now tonight as Tom left the apartment, going down the rusted fire-escape at the back of the building to the stench and the sirens and the sin of his favorite city, he wondered if this would be the night he caught the Perfects on film. The night when he would at last record their entities for prosperity, spreading the word of their magnificence and their power to defend us against evil forever and ever.