When the evening arrived, he emerged from his cocoon as raw as a freshly plucked chicken. The jet black shadow of the tendrils of the nameless god washed over his head like an asteroid hanging in the heavens above, momentarily blotting out the sun.
He wished that he could observe the full grandeur of the endless beast at once, but each eyelid, each swell of flesh, each tooth in his voluminous maw alone was enough to fill your mind with details in totality. It was very much the same way that you could observe a mountain from the distance, but once marooned inside of its forests, you could wander around completely lost until you died of starvation.
One singular detail was large enough to spend an entire lifetime charting out and analyzing. It was tough to gauge the true scale of the creature. Its stomach extended for distances that rivaled the orbits of the planets about the sun. But one thing was sure, that if its mouth approached the solar system in person, the mouth alone could cleave the earth in half, like it were biting the stem off a cherry.
It was so vast, in fact, he couldn't be sure that the voluminous gas giant, Jupiter itself, couldn't take more than five or six gargantuan bites. Still, his fury continued, unquenched.
Someone had to pay for denying him the warmth of his mother's touch. Someone had to answer for the crime of poisoning his young mind with the visual of that endless hallway, and the resounding voice calling out to him for desperation to at least see the face of her young child one last time, before it was all taken away from her.
The endless stretches of its tail stretched for longer than human minds were meant to perceive. Its anatomy was a physical impossibility. The amount of matter within its flesh would surely collapse such an expansive entity into its own celestial body. The gravitational forces alone would be enough to collapse the geometry into a sphere.
Yet, there it was, like a wraith upon his mind... and his tendrils still cast a shadow across the entire span of his small village. It was so obvious to anyone who was looking. It was a sight that he was so familiar with, that he simply ignored it, like the outline of one's own nose, or the particulates floating in the fluid of your eyeball.
It disappeared from existence simply because no one had any desire to perceive it. Derek was no longer under such a volition. Over the short 16 years of his life so far, he had become quite familiar with this part of the nameless god's anatomy. Even on a subconscious level, he had to know it, in order to know where not to look in an effort to blind himself to it.
Ironically, Since he had made the breakthrough, the night before, of momentarily comprehending the very outline of his resident demagogue, the form hanging out in the middle of space was just as visible as the moon, or stars, or anything else.
You didn't just see it with your eyes, of course. You felt it in your breath. The chill on your skin, the moisture in the air, the suffocating pressure on your ears right before the strike of a thunderclap, the shadow in the corner of your room at night, the creeping dread of being watched every time you enter a vehicle in the dead of night—all these were physical constructs that exude off its flesh and rain down upon the surface of the Earth in waves, striking catastrophic quakes of thought across the mindscape of humanity, when they were at their most vulnerable.
Namely, when they were asleep.
He stared at the shape occupying half the sky, as long as he physically could, trying to trace out the inconceivable vastness that extended out past the horizon. He'd almost managed to draw out the shape of its jawline, before the creature downstairs broke his concentration; calling him down for breakfast.
"Dereeek!" Cried out his mother, snapping his consciousness back into the fragile envelope of skin that constituted his mortal form. "It's time to get up! You'd better hurry, or you're going to be late for school."
The boy sighed, and closed his eyes, before turning his feet off the mattress, and climbing to a standing position. It didn't make sense to him, why he had to spend a third of his day at school, learning functional things for use in this mortal coil. He was on the forefront of the greatest breakthroughs of cryptological pioneering of all time!
He had no interest in growing to be a participating member in civil society. The things that he would uncover would change the very base understanding of how we interact with our world!
What was the point of gathering up slips of paper in order to exchange them for goods and services, when those very slips of paper were an unreliable store of value? From his perspective, all humankind would have to do is collectively change its mind, and all the money in the world would return to being dead matter.
What was even the point of this great fascination with living, to begin with? Wouldn't it be easier to just die, and not have to worry about working so hard, all the time? It's not like the ripples that echo through space are going to just fizzle out after death. We are the pond, not the excitation called life.
In the end of it all, he just couldn't explain to them how he had put god on a leash, just yesterday. They wouldn't understand, or they would accuse him of making it all up. His mother, who was a piece of its body, might even become violent, to defend its true master from the prospective threat.
So, he grinned sweetly, and applied the toothpaste onto his toothbrush, before scrubbing the stains and plaque from its surface. There! So fresh and so clean, even she couldn't protest.
He grabbed his backpack off the hook in the corner of his bedroom, slid down the stairs with a great deal more grace and acuity than he had the evening before, and waved at the spread she had lain out on the dinner table on his way out the door. "Seeya!" He called, doorknob already in his hand.
"Ahem," His father reminded him, wordlessly, without lifting an eye from his newspaper. He didn't have to look to know the look of pained shock that was writ all over his wife's face. "Okay, buddy. you know that your mother worked very hard to prepare you a healthy and nutritious breakfast. Don't disappoint her by going to classes on an empty stomach."
Sure enough, her face was completely nontractable. The table was piled high with biscuits, corn hominy, porridge, eggs, and sausage. Any young boy his age would be over the moon with the diet that she subjected him to. By all considerations, the boy was pampered beyond all recognition.
"But I ate yesterday..!" he sighed, shifting his pack onto his other shoulder. He knew there was no getting out of this, but he had to try. "Besides, like she said, I'm going to be late!"
"Derek, Sit." it was all that he had to say. The teenager sighed, and tried to slam the door, but he had yet to actually open it. Shoot, better luck next time.
But no sooner had he released the doorknob, as a red-haired figure decked out in vibrant neon colors burst in through the door. "Helllllooooo, everyone!" Sylvia shined with all the brilliance of the noonday sun in comparison with Derek's assumed muted palette of muted browns and grays. His pants were disheveled, and his black t-shirt matched the color of the circles underneath his eyes. It had been three years, and she hadn't broken him yet, but neither had she slowed in her efforts to change his mind.
He quickly attempted to close the door back on her, in hopes that his parents hadn't heard her arrival. "No, sorry, we're not interested, thank you!" He shouted over her cheerful introduction.
Again, it was no use, since his mother—the traitorous usurper always—had a clear line of sight to her bright and shining face. It lit her own up, like a pilot flame to a torch. "Sylvia!" She clapped, all hints of her former despondence vanished like the cloud of breath on a cold winter's day. "Do come in, I've made plenty to share."
She loved the young girl like her own daughter, and often encouraged Derek to pursue her more forcefully, in secret. He was no fool, though, and saw through the floating enigma's machinations.
She didn't have to tell him. She didn't even have to consciously know it, herself. Her opinion would not whittle his resolve even one atom's width.
He sighed, and relented, being caught red-handed. "Come on in, Sylvia..." He groaned, opening the door for her. There she stood in such a huff, he'd think he hit her in the face with the door.
She balled her fists, and stomped her feet in a way that just sent his stomach into somersaults. "Well, now I don't want to come in!" He wished that she meant that.
His father folded his paper, and turned to the smiling face at the end of the table. "Sweetheart, I told you, you don't have to keep feeding the neighbor's kid. They have their own food!" Jealous of their apparent wealth disparity, he didn't seem to cotton as much to Sylvia's saccharine attitude, which was Derek's only reprieve. He made no moves to stop her, though, as she strolled into the living room, and grabbed at his son's arm, which he so elegantly avoided.
He pulled out a chair, and she sat in it, thanking him politely. He imagined this might be what hell seemed like. He looked up into the expressionless face of god, and cursed silently. He might have imagined it, but from this angle it almost seemed like the dreaded face was smiling.—Amused at this futile resistance by a fragile corporeal being.