Bone Pattern

A Conversation- October 9, 2014

I sat on the floor, my back to my bedroom door.  Another sleepless night.  Gorgeous, delicate Fisher turned into a threatening shadow locked away in my bedroom.  I've been sleeping on the floor, waking at every little noise.  Now, I sat outside the door and wished for my own bed.  

"Why, Fisher?"  I said.

"I was afraid," he replied.  His voice came close to my ear.  He must have been right on the other side of the door, perhaps kneeling to press his flower of a mouth to the wood.

"How the fuck does standing over me with a knife, with my knife I might add fix anything?  You  cut my face!  You really scared me!  How is anything better now because of that?"

There was a long pause.  I heard no movement behind the door.  I had a hole in my palm and a cut on my cheek and he sat unmoving behind the door like I didn't deserve any answers.  I started to get up, perhaps to leave.  Perhaps to finally go and find the Weaver, like I should do even now.  

"I'm sorry," he whispered.  I only barely heard it.  Maybe I only imagined it.  I don't know.

"What the fuck were you doing?"  I shouted at him.  His pathetic little apology did not seem even close to good enough. My thoughtless hand slammed into the door.  The hollow bang made me feel a little better and the door rattled in its frame.  I still did not hear Fisher move.

"I was scared," he repeated.  "I thought...  If I did that...  I thought I could make it stop.  All this was okay before, when it was only me.  I could handle things without you."

"What, are you jealous?  You want to take me out and go back to sleep in your sister's house?  Just curl back up around your hollow self?  And you thought you could do that by cutting me?"

As I spoke, I thought of him again as I had first seen him.  Laid out like a saint in holy candlelight on the altar Lydia had built for him.  He was like a marble sculpture sleeping there, even marred as he was by the deep darkness running into his core, and making many little puckered holes along his cheekbones.  The strangeness only added to his beauty.  Then I thought of him as he was last night, standing over me with a knife, pinning me down to cut my face.  Fisher on his altar was driven away by that.  The serenity of the first image couldn't stand the truth of his waking self.

"I can't go back to sleep now."

"Then why do that to me?  I'll probably have a fucking scar."

"Do you really think that matters now?  A scar?"  There was scorn in his voice.  I would be lying if I said that didn't hurt.

"I wish I'd never met you, Fisher!  I brought you into my home, and this is what you do?  Fuck you."

Silence stretched away and tension rose with each passing moment.  He wouldn't answer me and I wanted my own bed again.  I want the peace of wandering around to visit Ellis and the Weaver and selling things on the internet again.  I want my hand whole, unpierced with darkness.  I want to go back, and I cannot.

"Tomorrow, I am going to take you back to Lydia," I said.

"You can't," he said.  His voice flat and simple and matter of fact.

"Why not? You still shake when you try to stand.  You're in no condition to stop me."

"Lydia is dead."

Just that, and nothing more. 

I don't think I'm going to try to talk to him anymore.