Bone Pattern

The Knife- October 7, 2014

I woke this morning to see Fisher standing over me.  He stood solid and unmoving, and I lay in  nest of blankets on the floor.  He has been sleeping in my bed, and I am afraid to be that close to his empty, ravening hole. When he moved before, he trembled and sighed.  His long sleep has left him weak, and his gaze continually drifts away and inward.  I have never seen him stand before.

But there he was above me, one foot planted firmly next to each of my shoulders.  Cold dawnlight brushed his features and tried to press into the holes in his skin.  It failed.   He held a knife in his right hand.  A ridiculous kitchen knife I cut vegetables with.  It fit so well in my hand to peel potatoes.  There it was in his, its blade trailing along his thigh as he stared down at me.  I noticed he had cut himself.  Slight, scratching grazes along his leg where the knife hung.  He seemed utterly unaware.

"What's wrong?" I asked him and started to pull away from him, and push myself upright.

His knee slammed into the floorboards beside my head.  The other drove itself into my arm.  It hurt, but I didn't say anything.  I was watching his face.   His throat worked and his jaw clenched, just for a moment.  Pain crossed his features until he forced it away.  I am certain I saw that.  

Now, I am holding onto that brief grimace.  If he could feel that, he has not become wholly alien.  The void might have him, but not completely.  We still have time.  I might be able to feel something slide over the tissues inside my hand, stroking my flesh from the inside, but it has not yet decided.  

Pinned now, with one arm beneath him and the other above my head, I squirmed.  I tried to push him away.  It ought to have been easy.  Last night, he was weak enough that he could not stand.  Before I went to my nest of a bed on the floor, I had dribbled broth into his mouth.  One  careful slow spoonful at a time.  Now, I tried to find the leverage to push him away.  My feet scrabbled across the floorboards and I thought of the young man slim and fragile enough that his sister could drag him for miles.  He was the same in his delicate beauty now.  But I could not move him.

Fisher raised the knife, my knife, toward my face.

I told him to stop, and he did not.  

I slapped uselessly against his chest and throat.  My shoulder popped as I dragged my arm around and fought again to rise.  The blade touched my cheek.  Some part of my mind began to wonder how well I had washed it, last time I had used it, and if it had been to cut up carrots and potatoes or to open a package of meat.  As he began to press down all that fell away.  My word narrowed to the tip of the blade against my face.  The strange thing was that it didn't hurt.  In that moment, I could feel only the sharpness of the knife and a blooming heat against my face.

My fluttering hand found the smoldering ring around the chasm in his flesh.  I didn't know what I was doing as I plunged my hand into him.  I was just trying to make him stop.  But my hand passed through the slow burn of his flesh and into the tunnel within him.  I found there no hot organic mush.  No organs to crowd my hand.  Fisher was as empy as an eggshell, smashed and scraped clean.  Only a vast space lived within him.  Empty and cold as the space between stars.  Wind passed over my hand and between my fingers, somehow even colder than the impossible space itself.  I could almost hear it howl.

Worse, something seemed to answer it from within my hand.  Something called to its like, suddenly discovered.  I forgot the knife at my face.  Forgot Fisher still pinned me to the floor.  I could see an empty, wind whipped plain in my mind.  Could see a reddened moon rising over a place that had seen no light in a thousand years.  In his flesh, and is mine, I could feel eyes lifting from their tasks to turn toward us.  Tiny minds looking toward our world, as small and ravenous as the eye in the cavern was huge and patient.

I pulled my hand away.

The other world let me go.

Fisher began to tremble again.  The muscles of his legs began to struggle to support him.  The only thing I can think is our contact, the current of it, drained him.

I pushed him off me.  

He is back in my bedroom now, and there is a chair braced against the door handle.  He is trapped, I hope.

I keep asking myself if I feel more hollow.

I don't know what to do next.  I can't keep Fisher locked in my bedroom.

How do I keep making things worse?