Bone Pattern

Fisher Has Come- October 5, 2014

Time is slipping by me.  Time spent staring into the hole in the palm of my hand.  Gazing into the void growing in my body.  I glance at my hand for a moment and when I look up hours have passed.  Or even days.  The shallow world is slipping away from me.  I can't remember the last time I visited a grocery store.  The closest I have come is to turn on my computer and update this blog for you.  I am only managing that now by wearing gloves, to hide the tumbling emptiness growing in my skin.  It is the size of a pea now.

For a time, I thought I would not update this blog anymore.

But last night I lay on my floor in the dark. In a world of burnt out light bulbs, I stared at my unlit ceiling in a faint wash of sodium arc streetlight.  I don't know what time it was when I heard the scratching at my door.  Only in that deep night silence, could I have made out the scrape of nails against the screen door on my porch.  I almost thought it was an animal.  Perhaps a raccoon smelling for food.  I turned my face away and waited for the noise to cease.  Instead it persisted.  Minutes passed, and I tried to ignore my visitor.  I turned my gaze into that empty eye unseen and yet seeing all of me, and shut the noise from my mind.

But the scratching continued.  It kept dragging my attention away from thoughts of Shroud and the hole in my hand and back to my screen door.  Eventually cold dawn light filtered in through my blinds to cast pale stripes on the floor, and I rose.  I pulled myself to my feet and went to open my door, to look again upon a world I want to forget.

Fisher lay there.  Crumpled on the cold concrete steps leading to my door, one hand extended to run his fingers over the screen.  He lay with his perfect face turned up to me, head on my top step.  His open eyes blinked slowly, and did not seem to focus.  For the first time, I realized they were grey.  We stared at each other.  He was half eaten away by void, and I was just beginning.

He was lighter than I expected.  Empty space weighs nothing at all, I suppose, and he is hollow at his core.  I pulled him to my bed.  Washed his glass-smooth flesh with the softest rags I could find and clear hot water.  It didn't seem he could withstand even the gentlest soap.  Fisher was smudged and streaked with mud along his knees and thighs, smeared with soot from his smoldering middle.  When I finished and he rested on my quilt, I light candles around my room.  I wanted to bath him in that same holy glow I had first seen him in.  I wanted to restore the peace that had been in his features then.  One of his eyes was blackened and swollen still, although healing now.  Other bruises, newer than that, mottled his flesh.

Throughout all of this, he watched me.  His eyelids fluttered, drifting closed and then dragging themselves open once more.  Thin white smoke drifted up from the hole in his belly.

I knelt beside my bed, my face on a level with his as he lay on his back.

"How did you get here?" I asked him in a whisper.

"Lydia," he replied.  "She is frightened."

I could see it then.  His sister growing fearful of the thing that slept within him, that could reach through him at any time.  I imagined her stocky form lifting her slender brother like a child.  They traveled through storm in that other grassland, wind whipping their faces and turning the stems of the grasses into whips about their legs.  I could see him fall again and again, into mud and wet.  When they got here, Lydia must have dumped him on my porch and stalked away home.  She didn't even knock.

He looked so fragile.

"What is going to happen?"

"I don't know."

"But you called them here!"

"I still don't know what they are, or what they will do when they get here."

"Why, then?  Why did you do it?"

A smile spread across his lips then, and he let his eyes drift closed.  Somehow, he looked less peaceful in that moment than when I had found him, filthy and sprawled on the concrete outside my door.

"To change the world," he told me.

He is sleeping in my bed as I type this.  As I sit here with my computer and ignore then hole in my palm.  I really should go to the Weaver for help.  I can't do this on my own.

Sometimes, if I am very still, I can feel movement in my the vast empty space inside my hand.  A faint and fetal twitching, stronger when I am near Fisher.

Something is coming.

I don't know if I am glad to have Fisher here or not.