To Kill a Colossus
a written version of my colossus essay
They killed them.
They were killers.
The two of them, standing behind the old baseball diamond, smoking cigarettes and drinking warm beer stolen from their step-father’s fridge. They shared a plastic bat between them, taking turns to swing at fireflies dancing around them. When they’d hit, the incandescent bugs would explode smearing on the plastic in streaks of night light, or falling to the grass like shooting stars.
Swish, thunk.
The sound of the bat.
Swish, thunk.
Another comet streaking through their little atmosphere.
They were older, the two of them. Built like giants of eons past. Even with the dainty plastic bat, they swung it like a lead pipe.
Swish, thunk.
The muscles of their arms flexed tigh, each bug a tiny skull they crushed.
Swish, thunk.
My arms didn’t look like theirs because I was a boy. I had never killed. And what my dad said was true: a man was merely beer and death.
Every night after practice, as the sun descended, these two would come out of the woods, twilight at their backs, and swagger their way across the diamond. It was their unspoken ritual to hold the killing until the sun went down. They’d stand by the dugout with me, twirling the bat, sipping their beers, burning their lungs with smoke, until the night was free. Their legs would itch with excitement the few minutes before black, as the bright bugs came up and taunted them with their flashing yellow and green. They’d crush their cans, litter the field, and choke up on the bat.
Swish, thunk.
They cheered. And the bugs…the bugs never gave a care. They would never run or hide. Never fly fast to dodge. Only float through space, waiting their turn to…
Swish, thunk.
Die.
Jerrod, the eldest, held out a pack of Newports, long, and I shook my head. The other offered me a beer and I refused. I didn’t want to tell them that my mom would be mad, but I did. I didn’t want them to see who I was. I wanted to be a man and thought the growing moon had hidden me beneath its glow, but the truth shook out of every joint and bled and blistered from my eyes.
They offered me the bat.
“Well, you have to take one,” they said. Lips straight, shoulders back, arms flexed. “Beer, bat, or smoke.”
So I took the bat. The plastic felt heavier than the aluminum in my bat bag, slung over my shoulder. It was yellow and stained with orange and green. Pockets of tears up and down the faux-wood texture, where maggots crawled to die. Chris, the other one, took my bat-bag from my shoulder and emptied the contents in the in-field dirt. My gum, my bat, my balls. All fell out and rolled away. It was not my stuff anymore. They owned it.
He picked up the bat and gripped it, hands creaking and cracking like dice wrapped in leather, and then he swing it and I felt the wind off of it against my face. A lightning bug exploded and he chuckled. “Didn’t see the bugger,” he said. Killing without even wanting to. “You ever hit anything with this bat?”
“I hit a homerun once.”
“No,” he said. “Something living. A bug, a bird, your neighbor’s cat?” I shook my head. “What the fuck? What about the ground? You ever slam this hunk of shit on the ground? You know it’s living, right? The grass, the dirt. All the worms that crawl through that shit and eat dead bodies. You ever get mad and just hit the ground?”
I stared at the ground, the plastic bat on my shoulder, and saw an earthworm crawl onto my cleat.
“What about this tree?” He moved towards it, so we moved with him. He tapped the bat against it three time: ting, ting, ting. “You ever hit this tree? You won’t kill it. It’s just a bat.” The tree was a big, old, oak. “Like my grandpa,” I thought.
He hit it. His face went a-light with color and his knuckles stretched white. His entire body went with the swing, just like coach always said. “Follow through, follow through. Bend the knees, turn at the hips, and follow through.” Each thwack of the bat was like a foul ball, because he kept swinging and swinging. The bark chipped off in big flakes revealing a soggy underbelly. An entire colony of termites smashed like wet meat. An ant farm demolished like flesh. The wind moaned through the limbs and leaves, and I could not stop thinking about my grandpa.
But he was right. He didn’t kill it. It was just a bat, not an axe. But afterword, as he tossed the bat to the ground and we started the walk back to his house, the moonlight at our back, I thought about the wreckage left behind and how the bruise in the tree wouldn’t heal, just scar, and I realized there were worse things than death.
Jerrod’s room was dark, lit only by the muzzle flash of the submachine gun in Resident Evil 4. We all sat on his waterbed, bare arms touching, trying to keep quiet so his step-dad wouldn’t hear us from the living room, taking turns doing mercenary runs through the various maps. I was thirteen, and I couldn’t get on the leaderboard.
The heat from the outside summer, even while the stars were out, was suffocating. We sweat and stank of stale beer and cigarettes, and passed the slimy controller between us until finally it was tossed aside. The Gamecube was turned off and the PS2 switched on. “Got a new game,” Jerrod said. Shadow of the Colossus, the game we’d all been waiting to play.
Wander crosses the bridge into the Forgotten Lands and I can feel it embedding in me. My foundation still wet and malleable and beginning to take shape as the temple impresses into me. The intensely bloomed sun burning me. The horse and the girl becoming integral to my entirety. For the next 19 years I’d return to the Forgotten Lands. I would live in it for more years than I’d live in any one place. And even now, as I’m a year into my transition, I can feel the dust of it caked on my hands, rubbing off on my lived experiences and favorite art, like blood.
The amalgamation of voices tells us what we must do and we follow the piercing light across the field and into a tight culdesac of a canyon. We scale the ruins and lose control. We see it. The first colossus. Valus’s mighty hooves crack the earth with each step as he meanders through this small rocky cage.
We kill him.
We were killers.
Mercilessly. With malice. We ask no questions, have no second thoughts, feel no trepidation. We climb his mass, leaping from stone armor to fur, and plung our sword into his head. As his body collapses, we fall in love. With the beauty of its violence. The scale of its destruction.
The choir laments as black tendrils crawl from the corpse of the colossus. We jeer as our body is impaled by them, embedding into us, into me, and I can’t help but think it’s real. That this darkness is stabbing into me, digging a burr into my chest, turning it black. I say nothing, afraid to make a noise. Afraid of Jerrod’s step-dad. Afraid that I’ll be asked to leave, and I don’t want it to stop.
So we continue. To the four legged-monstrosity on the beach, to the knight on its platform. Sometime after midnight, the Doritos empty and the rest of the house silent, I shoot Koromori’s leg, and it plummets, smashing into the ground. I plunge from three stories up and drive a blade deep into its abdomen. It screams. And flails. And dies. The black tendrils take me again, pull me into that hypnotizing spiral of energy.
We kill them.
We kill them all. All sixteen of them. The blackness engulfs us for the last time and we are enthralled by our new monstrous form. We smash. We smash everything. The robed figures flee, firing arrows at us from a distance. We are gripping each other, trying to remain quiet. But the beast is hard to control. We keep getting shot. We go down. I realize then than I’m cold on the bed, the only warmth is where our shoulders touch. I’m wedged between these older boys, and we are leaned in, pulled into the glow of the CRT.
The robed figures flee across the bridge and collapse it, trapping us there. Forever. “If it’s even possible to continue to exist in these sealed lands,” the robed figure says. “One day, perhaps you will make atonement for what you’ve done.” I think about the tree. I feel the swish, thunk of the bat.
The girl awakens. She finds a baby and climbs the temple. “Dude, I knew you could climb that thing. I knew it. I fucking knew it.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Jerrod says in a hush yell.
At the top of the temple is a secret garden. A deer. Flowing water. Birds. Life. The end. We go out to the backyard so they can smoke and talk about the colossi in more than hushed whispers. The fireflies dance around us and all I can think about is the girl trapped at the top of the temple. Forever.
We continue into the night. We want to climb the temple, so we kill them again and again. We kill them faster. We hunt fruit and lizards and eat them in a feverish rush. Time and time again, we become monstrous. Watch ourselves die. Watch the bridge collapse. Become trapped. I don’t know how long we’ve been there or how many times we’ve slept, or if this time is stretched throughout my life. Each play through existing then and now and there and everywhere. A series of connected dots on a timeline squished flat. Spatial memory made manifest.
Either way, I’m sweating as I return to Valus again. But in my haste, I forget he’s already been killed this play through. I climb through the stuttering pixels, cross the field through a twisting canyon, over the barricades. When I reach his domain, the game remembers me. The forgotten lands remember me. Valus is nothing but a pile of earth, bits of stone poking out, roots taking hold in his hip and chest. Eyes, nothing but hollowed out sockets. His corpse rotting into a landmark. A melancholic mausoleum. No more sigils to stab. My chest itches as the burr scrapes against my ribs. The tendrils have already found me.
I think about the tree.
Swish, thunk.
I know that if I crawled into Valus, there would be a colony of termites, an ant colony, a layer of flesh.
Swish, thunk.
I think about my grandpa, his old body hanging onto the edge of his pickup truck, crying as he knows he’s going to die. He can’t look at me. I want to hug him, but it hurts too much.
Swish, thunk.
I’m rubbing my eyes in the dark because it’s so dark, and I’m so tired, and I feel so small.
Swish, thunk.
The corpse of the colossus begs me to crawl in. To do it again. Plunge the sword into his head. I killed them. I’m a killer. I do it again and again as the dark of the room swallows me. I watch them fall, watch them decay. I do it until I’m able to climb the temple. Up, and up, and up, so high up. The image of the girl trapped up top is the only thing keeping me going. The life, the doe, the water. The bridge is not collapsed, I can take her and we can run away. We can escape before we are trapped.
But when I cross it, the game refused. The game remembers. I cannot leave the Forgotten Lands.
I climb the remainder to find her up in the secret garden, and she is not there. It’s only me, and I’m surrounded by fireflies.
Wow. This piece aches so deep down.