THE WAY OF HIS is a piece of micro-fiction by Justin Mezzapelli, as well as yet another entry into our recent (and unintentional) theme of animals in horror. In this case, the animal in question is never given name, defined to the reader only as a series of short and violent descriptive bursts; a hulking menace which remains always in the corner of one’s eye. Or, inversely, as a staccato of gorey yet hauntingly still notes, delivered after the fact.
Ostensibly an enraged bull, the beast itself matters far less than the moment of suspension which it forces upon our nameless protagonist. Driving him, the handsome young man with the alluring but untruthful tongue, up into a tree; transforming a moment of sensual, even erotic communion with nature, into a harrowing trial of endurance. A violent break from which neither man, nor beast, nor even tree will emerge unscathed.
With each brutal thrust against the young man’s impromptu refuge, his would-be-lover turned unwilling defender, the great horned creature steadily unearths the deeper yet subtler violence already at work within him. Makes literal the war between the young man and the second, far more sinister beast at the heart of this story. The little liar, the ever cunning serpent that both buoys him along and betrays him in turns. His own deceitful tongue.
This, throughout all my several readings, is what struck me most powerfully about Mezzapelli’s entry to the archive. The revelation of its true monster, the man’s own tongue, and the terrifyingly self-negating violence of that monster’s demise. That, and the incredible economy with which it weaves together a narrative that is equal parts horror story and character portrait.
Nothing in this brief gut-punch of a work operates on only a single level. It is simultaneously a cat’s cradle of invisible but intersecting pressures and motivations, and a hall-of-mirrors of double meanings. The bull is the man, is his tongue. His tongue is the deceiver within himself that the young man despises, but also the inert tool through which he constantly fails to say the right thing, to get straight the parts of himself he wants to project beyond the beautiful facade.
In the end, the little liar is excised, in a moment of violence that blurs the line between internal and external. The striking of horn against wood and tooth against flesh; though the realization of this end doesn’t come until later, when all is once again quiet. The nature of this destruction, being bitten off in a moment of panic by our protagonist, only to be spit up again along the side of the road, is ultimately an act of punishment rather than redemption. The harm and self-loathing and failure to communicate which the now expelled tongue represents in the young man’s life has not been cured by this act of auto-violence. The facade behind which he lives, and his inability to tell it right, to speak truth to the lies at the heart of his own existence, are just as present, if not moreso, than before.
The serpent is slain, but the sin remains. The beautiful young man is absolved, perhaps, but not forgiven; and in his new trauma he has only grown more isolated.
This sort of short, violent, and brutally revelatory conclusion is, to me, exactly what makes short horror so powerful; and Mezzapelli’s THE WAY OF HIS is a more than worthy inclusion into the ranks of great short horror. The kind whose twist-but-not-a-twist ending shocks, certainly, but doesn’t truly surprise. Rather it affirms what we already knew but didn’t want to know plainly. The un-coming-together of tangled and overlapping anxieties, like the sudden undoing of a knot that we’ve watched grow more and more strained before our eyes.
In such moments, it’s only natural to want to condemn the offending eye. To resist the truth it tells us, and attempt to blink bank the knowledge of the blow already struck, but not yet felt. But ultimately, no matter how hard we hold on, how enduringly we cling, white-knuckled, to the edge, the fall is unavoidable. it will all come out on the side of the road.