The man awoke on the bare wood floor in his old, rotting house. The windows shattered, the front door open as usual. The sky smothered in dark gray clouds which never broke up. The man's body was damaged from the years of life on this world. He was as skinny as could be, every bone in his body visible to the naked eye. He was so thin that his vertebrae looked as if they would rip out of his back at any moment. Open cuts, bruises, welts, scabs, scars, rashes, and severely dry patches of skin covered his body. His skin was clammy and a pale gray. He had little hair across his slender body, with only a few strands on the top of his head and another few strands in each armpit. The skeletal man was absent of eyebrows and eyelashes. His fingernails and toenails were cracked, bent, and spilt, of which he would shorten by either ripping or biting them off. His teeth were worn down from grit in his food, and he left eye was completely blind from malnutrition.
The man opened his cracked and bloodied lips and let out a small croak that meant nothing. He was hungry and he needed to defecate. He slowly crawled on all fours to his backyard which was devoid of any life except a patch of carrots and a few weeds. It was surrounded by a nine-foot-tall rotting wooden fence. He crawled into the right corner of his backyard, held himself up with his slender arms and defecated and urinated. The man proceeded by crawling over to the patch of carrots and ripped one out of the ground and ate it on the spot. He ate three before moving over towards a dented metal bucket that collected rainwater. He drank sloppily, much of it spilling on him and the lifeless dirt below. He sat down for a few moments, looking at the eternally gray sky, his face stolid and his mouth open. He sat there doing nothing but breathing and looking, his mind absent of any complex thoughts. He thought seldom of the future or the past. In the muted daylight his veins could be seen in his somewhat transparent flesh, full and blue.
The man went back to all fours and began to dig in the dirt like a dog. Once he dug about a foot down, he began to rifle through the dirt, sniffing it as he did so. His right eye caught a pale spot in the dirt and he grabbed it. It was a small creature, long and pink. He shambled back to his house and went into a room with nothing on the floor but dust and cobwebs and a jar full of dirt in the corner, along with a piece of charcoal. On the walls, however, was bizarre writing made of swirls, curves, and triangle-like shapes. He crept towards the glass and put the long pink creature inside it. With both hands, he held up the glass jar to the gloomy light of the window. Over a dozen of those long things writhed within, making tunnels in the dirt. The man observed the jar intensely, watching those wondrous creatures wiggle, defecate, and eat. He put the jar back into the corner and grabbed the piece of charcoal and began to write on the cracked pale blue walls of the room. The long ones live, he inscribed. He took one last glance at the glass jar and headed out the front door to patrol the neighborhood.
The sidewalks of the neighborhood were ancient, with pieces of concrete constantly crumbling off and much of the rest of the sidewalk cracked and raised due to roots from leafless tree pushing up. Gray ash caked the corners of where the black tar road and the sidewalk met. Dead leaves, branches, sticks, broken glass, and other debris covered the streets. He scrambled around the streets looking for anything of use. The man came across a broken device made of wood and brass in the middle of the street some number of blocks from his house. He approached it carefully, sniffing it. He grabbed a stick from nearby and poked it. Nothing happened. A pink, hairless rat over a foot in length wandered on the sidewalk pulling his attention away from the broken object. He held the stick above his head and let out a war cry and chased after the rat. The rat ran into a dilapidated house and he followed. Upon entering the house the rat was gone. He held the stick tightly in his right hand.
He looked in room after room, with no sight of the rat. He eventually entered a room where the spindly, eyeless corpse of an old woman laid in a rocking chair. He forgot about the rat. He cautiously approached the body and poked it with his stick. His poking caused the chair to rock slightly back and forth. A centipede emerged from the mouth of the corpse and slithered down to the bony torso. The long slimy thing kept crawling down the withered flesh, getting longer and longer, one foot long, two feet, three feet and more. The man bolted out of the room and headed to the front door but stopped in his tracks after he heard a bizarre noise echoing from outside the abandoned house. He got down on his chest and did a slow army crawl to the front door to investigate, sniffing the air curiously as he went along. He stuck his head between the door and the doorway and looked outside to find a humanoid creature crawling up an old telephone pole. Its body was gray and slender, the arms and legs disproportionately long to the torso. Above the creature's neck there was no head but instead a gaping hole that had multiple sets of inward pointing teeth with several tongues that flailed about wildly and out of this hole came the sounds of wailing human infants and the cries of cows. The creature contorted and shifted on the pole, producing this wail as if it was a mating call.
