Before The Archive: Entry 1:Anniversary of The Death Day

**Name: Malik Oda**
**Title: Genesis**
People always ask me how it began.
They expect me to tell them about the agency, the creatures that should never have existed, the people I couldn’t save, and the things we witnessed that no amount of science or religion has ever been able to explain ,But they’re wrong. It started long before any of that. I was nineteen, and it was another mundane day.
Funny thing about my memory:
for some strange reason, it isn’t the important moments that stay with me. It’s the little things, like the way smoke dances around a room with a slight draft or the songs of birds on a blissful Sunday morning.
I remember my car.
A maroon 2009 Honda Civic my mom somehow managed to buy for me. It wasn’t much, but it was mine. The passenger door never worked quite right. Every few weeks I’d tell her we should fix it, but she’d just smile and say, “You know, if you did it yourself, you’ll trust it more.”
We never got around to it.
I never blamed her.
I understood our circumstances, even then.
I remember taking that little Civic to get straight piped. We thought it sounded cool. You could hear us coming from a mile away, and for a while I convinced myself it made the car seem faster than it really was.
Looking back,
that exhaust was probably the loudest thing I heard that entire day.
I woke up that morning expecting the same sounds I’d heard every day for years.
Birds outside my window.
The neighbor’s kids yelling over a basketball game.
Somebody’s dog barking at absolutely nothing.
Instead,
I could only hear silence.
It settled on me.
I remember lying in bed, staring at the ceiling while that silence pressed against my chest. It felt heavy, almost physical, as though someone had laid a blanket of concrete over me.
I honestly wondered if I’d gone deaf. Then I heard it.
My heartbeat.
Slow.
Steady.
For some reason, hearing it comforted me.
It reminded me that I was still here.
Still alive.
I wish I’d listened to what everything else the eerie silence was trying to tell me.
Instead, I got out of bed and decided I’d spend the day hiking.
I walked out my room to see my mom sneaking pills in the kitchen. I said nothing, then moved on to the bathroom.
Turned on the shower and stood naked in front of the mirror, looking myself deep in the eyes, trying to ignore the eerie feeling that was washing over me, admiring my toned physique.
There was a knock on the door, but I only heard a muffled thump. I was only about 2 feet away from it.
I opened it, still ignoring the silence plaguing me.
“Hey, Mom.” I smiled while cradling resentment in my chest, as I did for years.
Mom asked, “How are, Oda? Were you aware it’s the anniversary of your dad’s death?”
I said, “Yes,” knowing that I was lying. I already knew what she was going to ask me to do next, so before she could speak, I quickly said, “Yea, I’ll get some flowers and leave them by his death site.”
I turned back into the bathroom, finished taking a shower, and got ready…
Without a word, I gestured to my mom that I was leaving. She was too high to notice.
I climbed into my Civic, backed out of the driveway, and eased onto the road.
The radio was dead, same as always.
Usually I’d roll the windows down and listen to the wind.
That morning there wasn’t even that.
No animals.
No people.
No traffic.
Just the loud hum of my exhaust and the steady rhythm of my own heartbeat.
The silence followed me all the way to the trail.
When I parked, I grabbed my backpack and wandered over to the clearing with a lone cherry blossom tree. Every year we’d place our flowers against its trunk, its roots twisting through the ground like giant fingers. It was a majestic sight, but I didn’t bring flowers.
I leaned against the tree.
The bark dug into my spine through my shirt.
Uncomfortable.
Solid.
I don’t remember much about the trail anymore.
But I remember this tree.
Too young for me to remember fully, but too old to not understand what happened here.
Sometimes I think trauma decides for us what gets remembered.
I reached into my backpack and pulled out a tiny zip lock bag.
Some weed I’d borrowed from a friend.
She’d spent twenty minutes telling me not to smoke all of it.
She seriously underestimated how much of a chimney I was.
At nineteen, it wasn’t about rebellion or breaking rules.
It was about freedom.
No parents.
No teachers.
And no real responsibilities.
Just me, the forest, and an entire afternoon that belonged to nobody else.
It’s crazy how at a young age you can have no job, no degree, no real plan for your future and still feel like you’ve got life completely figured out.
I emptied what little remained in the bag onto a rolling paper.
Spread it evenly.
Rolled it tight.
Tucked the edge.
Licked it shut.
Perfect.
I pulled out my lighter.
Strike.
Nothing.
Strike again.
A tiny flicker.
The breeze stole it before it caught.
Strike.
Flame.
I held it to the tip of the joint and took my first inhale.
The click of the lighter sounded strangely muffled beneath the paper resting between my lips.
I heard it.
The paper crackling.
The leaves burning.
The resin boiling.
My heartbeat.
Just fire, smoke, and me.
The silence was still here.
It felt as if everything was trying to avoid me.
One of the strangest moments of my life, but I chose to ignore it.
Still, no animals.
I finished half the joint before putting it out against the bark beside me, leaving behind a tiny black mark I’ll probably never stop thinking about.
I tucked the remaining half into the side pocket of my backpack, slipped the lighter in beside it, cleaned up every scrap of paper around me, and started up the trail.
Three minutes into walking,
I turned a corner.
At first…
I thought it was just another hiker.
So I stepped to one side of the trail to let him pass. He didn’t.
He kept walking towards me,
slow and unhurried.
The morning sun hung behind him, turning him into nothing more than a dark silhouette.
I remember squinting against the light.
At first I blamed the sun.
Then I rubbed my eyes.
His outline…
It wouldn’t stay still.
It rippled and warped
like rising heat from asphalt.
I couldn’t decide where his body ended.
I blinked.
His shoulders looked wider.
I blinked again.
Now they were thinner.
The closer he came, the less certain I became that I was looking at a person.
“You’re just high,” I muttered.
I almost laughed.
Almost.
I looked down at the ground and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands.
When I looked back…
He was closer.
A lot closer.
I never saw him take another step.
The silence changed.
It was louder now.
I could hear my heartbeat.
The saliva moving inside my mouth.
Blood rushing through my ears.
My own breathing.
Everything inside me was making noise.
But everything outside me was already dead.
I wanted to leave.
I really did, but I couldn’t move.
I turned my shoulders.
My feet refused.
It wasn’t fear. Fear comes after you recognize danger. This was something else, like I was being held against my will.
It felt as though the trail itself had decided I wasn’t allowed to move.
The sun behind the hiker got brighter, then the light reached me.
Warm and comforting.
Soft as a precious memory.
For one impossible moment…
I wasn’t afraid.
I felt known.
Accepted.
And loved.
Every fear I’d ever carried simply disappeared.
Maybe this is what people meant when they say they’ve felt God’s presence.
The thought embarrassed me almost as quickly as it came.
“I’m just high.”
I said it out loud this time.
“I smoked too much.”
I closed my eyes.
Took a breath.
Counted to three.
When I opened them…
the light was even brighter.
I looked down.
My skin was separating from my flesh.
Like dust lifting from old paper.
There wasn’t any pain.
Not yet at least.
I watched my hands disappear.
My arms followed.
Flesh drifted away from bone.
Bone crumbled into dust.
For the first time in my life,
I wasn’t afraid of dying.
I wasn’t afraid of anything.
It felt peaceful.
Beautiful, even.
As though every part of me was finally returning to wherever it had come from.
I came apart atom by atom.
Every strand of my DNA unwound until I wasn’t a body anymore.
Tiny fragments floating through a place that had no light. No sound. No direction.
I couldn’t tell whether my eyes were open.
I couldn’t tell if I still had my eyes.
There was only me.
Weightless, endless.
Then something grabbed me.
Every piece of me was pulled backward with a force so violent it felt like creation itself had gone into reverse.
I thought being torn to atoms would’ve been the painful part. I was wrong.
Coming back hurt.
I heard something.
A screech. Then another.
Wet tearing, chewing.
Bones cracking.
Something was eating.
Something very close.
“My eyes!”
The words barely escaped my mouth.
“My eyes!”
Louder.
“I need my eyes!”
Then I screamed.
“Somebody help me!”
No answer.
Only chewing, cracking, and the sound of flesh being pulled apart.
My vision returned one piece at a time.
Yellow.
That was the first thing I saw.
Yellow eyes.
Too many to count.
I tried to find its face.
Every time I thought I’d found it, another eye blinked open somewhere else.
My mind refused to understand what I was looking at.
Hands, claws, wings, even more wings.
Eyes spread across its chest.
Across its back.
Even now, I’m not too sure what I saw or what it was. Just the closest thing my mind could invent.
One of its mouths opened.
I didn’t realize it had more than one until that moment.
The jaw kept stretching.
Farther and farther.
It should’ve torn itself apart.
But it held.
It stood there looming over me, drooling.
I actually thought I couldn’t feel pain anymore.
Then the second mouth found my waist.
Everything changed.
Pain isn’t a strong enough word for what happened next.
Every nerve in my body suddenly remembered it existed.
I tried to scream.
I don’t know if any sound came out.
The thing bit down again.
I looked down just in time to watch it pull something out of me.
I couldn’t understand what I was seeing.
Then I realized, those were my organs.
I should’ve looked away.
But I couldn’t.
One head fed while the other simply watched.
Waiting.
Patient.
Like it already knew it would get its turn.
You’d probably expect me to fight.
To kick.
To claw.
To do something. Right?
Well, I didn’t.
Not because I’d accepted death.
It’s because I had never felt so completely powerless.
There are moments when your mind simply gives up trying to survive, and this was one of them.
I remember staring at it.
Trying to understand what it was.
An animal?
An angel?
A nightmare?
Every time I thought I’d recognized part of it, something changed.
Its shape refused to stay the same.
Eyes became mouths.
Mouths disappeared beneath feathers.
Wings folded into something that looked almost like arms before becoming wings again.
It was as though my mind couldn’t decide what it was seeing…
No answer was correct.
I lowered my head.
I couldn’t bear to keep looking.
Somehow…
I was still alive.
But just barely.
Strong enough to move my one arm.
Long enough to reach toward my backpack.
My fingers searched blindly through the side pocket.
Then I felt it.
The half-smoked joint.
Funny.
After everything that had happened…
that tiny piece of paper was the most familiar thing left in the world right now.
I slipped it between my lips.
My hand trembled as I reached for the lighter.
Strike.
Nothing.
Strike again.
A flicker.
The creature’s saliva splashed across my hand.
The flame died.
I laughed, then flashed the lighter.
I struck it one last time.
Flame.
I lit what remained of the joint and drew in the smoke as deeply as I could.
It burned.
As if it wasn’t smoke I inhaled but the fire itself.
It burned everything. Every part.
I exhaled, part of the smoke drifted from my mouth.
The rest escaped through the hole in my side.
I watched it rise into the air.
It looked beautiful.
I smiled, but I didn’t want to die.
Everything suddenly felt ordinary again.
Just me…
a joint…
and the sky.
I looked upward.
“Lord…”
My voice cracked.
“If You’re real…”
Another bite.
I almost lost consciousness
as I screamed in pain.
“…help me.”
The words barely left my mouth.
“I’ll do anything.”
“I don’t want to die.”
The creature never stopped eating.
No one on the trail to help or answer.
Still not even a bird making noise.
Yet somehow…
I survived.
People ask me if that day strengthened my faith.
I wish I could tell them it did.
After everything I’ve seen & learned at the agency,
I don’t think it was ever God who saved me that day.

**Notes:** This is my first time writing a piece like this. I’m more used to poetry. If you enjoyed it, I’d really appreciate any feedback on how I can improve. And stay tuned for entry two!

*Inspired by the mood and introspective style I admired in Christian Wallis (a NoSleep author)*

\-***ODA SAMS-***