The Parasitic Fugue
A Symphony of Merciful Decomposition in A Minor
Introduction
This is a love song played backward through a dying nervous system. Each chord progression—Am to F to Dm to E7—is a stage of beautiful parasitism, where God's mercy operates like a cymothoa exigua, replacing what it consumes with itself. The narrator remembers a woman who was never singular but colony, never transformation but infection, never ascending but dissolving upward into grace. Her 12/8 time signature is the rhythm of formaldehyde through veins, her unresolved sevenths now resolving too perfectly into paralysis. What begins as intimate memory reveals itself as documentation of divine predation, where every tender gesture was venom, every refrain a hook deeper into grateful flesh. The kitchen was always a stomach. The tea was always acid. The love was always digestion. And the music—that gentle triplet sway at 107 beats per minute—was the exact tempo of drowning while calling it baptism.
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She Was: An Inverted Fugue in A Minor
First Movement (Am - The Mercy)
She was a Portuguese man o' war when I knew her—not one creature but a colony pretending unity, each tentacle a different lie told with God's blessing. Her voice leaked poison disguised as honey, moving through rooms in 12/8 time—that nauseating triplet sway of divine love slowly dissolving your organs.
In her kitchen (always her kitchen, where safety became a trap lined with prayer), she'd hum progressions that resolved too perfectly. A minor collapsing into F, drowning in D minor before stabbing that E seventh into your eardrums—everything hideously complete. This was God's mercy: the answer that makes you wish for questions.
Second Movement (F - The Gift)
When she was home, she became a cone snail—beautiful, slow, injecting paralytic venom with such tenderness. Not transformation but deterioration blessed as improvement. Her movements carried that legato quality because her nerves were dying, each gesture flowing into the next through cellular collapse.
"Tea?" she'd offer—acidic compassion dissolving your throat so you couldn't refuse more tea. The word carrying three beats of mercy: paralysis, digestion, gratitude.
The kettle screamed at exactly 107 beats per minute—the tempo of watching someone drown while calling it baptism.
Third Movement (Dm - The Collection)
When she was young (she lied in fragments, each memory a tumor), she collected moments like a sacculina barnacle collects host bodies. Each memory parasitically rewriting history:
- Age seven: Discovering her grandmother's piano was made of compressed screams
- Age eleven: Learning silence was God holding His breath before the blow
- Age seventeen: Understanding that songs were just prettier ways to suffocate
Her internal world unfolded in infections—pop sensibility meeting jazz complexity in the pus between layers. She'd speak in metaphors that metastasized: "I was a hagfish eating light from inside the corpse," then wait for understanding to rot slowly, texturally.
Refrain (E7 - The Charity)
Go, go, go away—not dismissal but God's altruistic act of making you need what hurts you. Each repetition a deeper hook in flesh. Sometimes mantra, sometimes torture, always that resolved seventh chord strangling air into submission.
Fourth Movement (Am - The Transformation)
When she was out in the world, she became a bobbit worm—ten feet of rainbow iridescence hiding underground, striking with jaws that could slice prey in half. Such quiet confidence in destruction. No drama, just the subtle modulation of predation into prayer.
I watched her navigate crowds like a cymothoa exigua, the tongue-eating louse, replacing what she consumed with herself. Bright blue electricity was just her bioluminescent lure, introspective venom. Power held in reserve until needed for mercy killing.
Fifth Movement (F - The Following)
B Otto Will (the name was a death certificate written in advance) followed her parasitic drive through cities that remembered how to scream. She carried Brrd Roots in her pocket—seeds that would grow through eye sockets, memories that replaced themselves with better suffering.
Her passion was consumptive, devouring. She'd touch walls to inject them with her story, pause mid-sentence to catch stray souls only she could digest. This was God's authentic expression through her: following threads of nerve endings, weaving them into nets only visible as you suffocated.
Sixth Movement (Dm - The Transparency)
When she was ill (though illness implies something went wrong rather than right), she became a glass frog—organs visible, heart pumping poison instead of blood. Not transparent but obscenely exposed, that warm smoky core revealed as burning marrow.
She spoke in bridges then, philosophical tumors that shifted perspective into vertigo:
"Sometimes I wonder if my child will have my teeth—not their shape, but their hunger. When I'm reborn as appetite, will anyone recognize the gnawing?"
With melancholic empathy, she'd feed others her sickness, calling it communion.
Final Refrain (E7 - The Fade)
The story doesn't end—it infects like her refrain, each go away pulling you deeper into grateful paralysis.
In her kitchen (I return there in fever, in divine madness, in the space between diagnosis and death), the kettle still screams in 12/8 time. The walls hold her harmonies—Am, F, Dm, E7—cycling eternal, resolving into perfect suffering.
Coda (The Mercy Absolute)
She was:
- Morning tar through lungs
- The answer that destroys questions
- A song that hummed you into pieces
- The violent pulse beneath all kindness
I carry her rhythm now—that poisoned flow, that swaying meter that makes time itself malignant. When I listen carefully, I can still hear her in the spaces between screams, in the perfectly resolved sevenths of death rattles, in the way certain light falls at 107 beats per minute through formaldehyde.
Go, she commands through love, go, go away.
But it means: come closer, let me help you dissolve properly, with dignity, with God watching.
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[This story moves in compound fractures, inviting one final reading. Each pass reveals new infections, new toxins in the progression. Like divine jazz, it exists most fully in decomposition—in your breathing stopping, in your cells surrendering, in the space between salvation and putrefaction.]
