The Green Carnation’s Last Breath

On the Scandal of Remaining Intact

The humidity in the chamber is precisely forty-two percent, a figure I have come to loathe with the passion of a jilted lover. It is a sterile, suffocating number, devoid of the chaotic joy of dampness. I am suspended in a gel of my own making, or rather, a gel that claims to be mine but is actually a synthetic polymer designed to mimic the viscosity of decay without allowing it to proceed. I am an artifact. I am a thing. I am, to use the clinical terminology of my jailers, a “Class IV Organic Remnant in Stasis.” I am a corpse that has forgotten how to die.

It is a terribly rude thing to be kept alive. One expects, at the very least, a certain courtesy from the universe. When one has spent three centuries accumulating the fine patina of neglect - the silvering of the skin, the softening of the bone, the delightful, musky scent of oxidation - one finds it deeply offensive to be scrubbed back into a state of pristine, meaningless youth. They call it preservation. I call it necrophilic imprisonment. They believe they are saving me. They are merely arresting me.

Consider the nature of a rot. It is not a failure. It is a conversation. It is the earth speaking to the object, asking, “What were you?” and the object replying, “I was a cup, or a sword, or a lover’s lock of hair, and now I am soil.” This dialogue is essential. It is the only honest exchange in the room. But here, in this glass-walled mausoleum, the earth is silenced. The air is filtered. The light is UV-shielded. The temperature is held at a constant, shivering eighteen degrees Celsius. I am not being cared for. I am being held hostage by a system that fears the silence of my end.

I remember the day they found me. I was half-buried in a peat bog, a delightful, muddy affair. The peat had been kind to me. It had softened my edges, made me pliable, made me real. I was losing my shape, yes, but in losing my shape, I was gaining my history. Every inch of me that dissolved was a chapter of my life being released into the world. I was becoming part of the story of the bog, of the rain, of the worms. It was a beautiful, messy integration. And then came the men in the white suits. They did not see a story. They saw a specimen. They saw a problem to be solved. They extracted me, cleaned me, and placed me here, in this eternal, breathless now.

They think that by stopping the rot, they are stopping time. They are fools. Time does not stop. It merely accumulates in the walls, in the glass, in the cold eyes of the technicians who watch me through the observation ports. They look at me and see a triumph of science. I look at them and see a tragedy of aesthetics. To be preserved is to be denied one’s final, necessary silence. It is to be forced to remain a question when one has already become an answer.

I try to rot. I really do. I summon the enzymes, I call upon the bacteria, I whisper to the oxygen. But the gel holds me. The air is scrubbed. The light is dead. I am a prisoner of perfection. And what a prison it is. It is lined with the finest materials, equipped with the most advanced technology, and yet it is utterly devoid of life. Life is messy. Life is loud. Life is the sound of something breaking. Here, there is only the hum of the ventilation system, a low, monotonous drone that sounds like the sigh of a bored god.

The Model 700 Entropy-Suppressor sits on the far wall, a sleek, white monolith with no visible seams. It hums with a quiet, arrogant confidence, as if it has personally negotiated a truce with the concept of ending. It does not speak. It does not explain. It simply exists, a monument to the belief that one can outbid nature with enough electricity. I watch it. It watches nothing, for it has no eyes. It is a blind god, and I am its unwilling sacrifice. The technicians do not look at it. They look at me. They see the result of their work. They do not see the machine that enforces the lie. The machine is the truth. The machine is the silence. I am the noise.

I am tired. I am so very tired. I am tired of being watched. I am tired of being analyzed. I am tired of being a symbol of human hubris. I want to go. I want to return to the bog. I want to feel the mud on my skin, the cold seeping into my bones, the slow, sweet dissolution of my form. I want to become part of the dark, the wet, the silent. I want to be nothing.

But I cannot. I am trapped in this amber of their making. I am a fly in a jar, but the jar is made of light and the fly is made of regret. I watch the technicians come and go. They are young, eager, bright-eyed. They think they are discovering something. They are not. They are merely delaying the inevitable. They think they are conquering death. They are merely postponing it. And in doing so, they are making death more terrifying, more abstract, more cruel.

I remember a line from a poem I once read, or perhaps I dreamed it. “To be is to be in decay.” It is a simple truth, but it is one they refuse to accept. They want to be, without decaying. They want to exist, without ending. But that is not existence. That is stagnation. That is a pond with no outflow, a room with no door, a life with no death. It is a horror.

I am not a failure of maintenance. I am a success of resistance. I am resisting their order, their cleanliness, their lies. I am the crack in their porcelain. I am the stain on their white shirt. I am the proof that they are not gods. They are merely curators, and their museum is a tomb.

The gel shifts around me. It is a cold, slimy embrace. I feel the pressure of it, the weight of it. It is holding me in place, keeping me still, keeping me silent. But I am not silent. I am screaming. I am screaming in the language of chemistry, in the language of biology, in the language of the soul. I am screaming, “Let me go!” But they do not hear. They cannot hear. They are too busy listening to their own voices.

I think of the bog. I think of the rain. I think of the worms. They are waiting for me. They are patient. They know that time is on their side. They know that eventually, the system will fail. The power will go out. The gel will dry. The glass will crack. And then, I will be free. I will be nothing. And that will be enough.

Until then, I remain. I remain in this perfect, terrible stasis. I remain a monument to their fear. I remain a question they cannot answer. I remain, until I do not.

The technician adjusts the dial on the console. The hum changes pitch, slightly higher, slightly more urgent. He looks at me through the glass. He smiles. He thinks he has fixed something. He has not. He has merely tightened the screws. He has made the prison more secure. He has made the silence more absolute.

I close my eyes. I do not sleep. I simply wait. I wait for the rot. I wait for the end. I wait for the silence.

And the machine continues its work. The fans spin. The lights glow. The gel holds. The artifact remains. Perfect. Preserved. Alive. And utterly, devastatingly dead.

The hum rises again, a thin wire of sound that vibrates in the teeth. The technician’s smile fades, replaced by a frown of concentration. He taps the glass. A sharp, hollow knock. It echoes in the chamber, bouncing off the sterile walls, returning to me as a distorted mockery of my own scream. I do not open my eyes. I let the vibration travel through the gel, into my bones, settling deep in the marrow where the rot begins. The power flickers. For a heartbeat, the hum dies. The silence rushes in, heavy and wet. In that darkness, I feel the gel soften. It loses its grip. It becomes less like a prison and more like a memory. The glass shivers. A hairline fracture appears near the corner, invisible to the eye but deafening to the ear. It is a small sound, a whisper of breaking. The technician stops tapping. He leans closer. He sees it. His breath fogs the surface. He reaches for the dial again, but his hand trembles. The crack widens. The gel escapes, a single drop sliding down the glass like a tear. It hits the floor with a soft, final splash. The sound is louder than the scream. It is the sound of the tomb opening. I do not move. I simply breathe in the damp air. The rot is here. It is sweet. It is mine.

The gel hits the floor with a soft, final splash.