by Janette Le Fay (happyhobbits@hotmail.com)
The sun is almost up, a pale orb glowing low in the leaden sky, and he watches, blue eyes dull in the half-light urging it to rise quicker, willing it to blaze up in all its glory and dispel the pain of cold-dark-damp knotted at the base of his back. His fingers ache, stiffened into claws clutched tightly around a pen that's no longer there but was when he awoke, and the blood in his wrists is thudding, thudding.
He can see the veins like dark mauve lines traced by idle fingers on his pale skin, except that these lines are pulsing, moving, alive. It's not a cold morning but last night's sweat still clings chill to his aching back like a thin blanket of something that doesn't quite hurt but crawls with potent aggravation.
He can hear a thin wail beginning somewhere far away, becoming stronger as the sound quavers along the labyrinth of corridors and through the countless doors that seem to divide him from the world. He feels so separate now, as if he were sitting in a bubble of darkness floating in a beam of light; black-hallowed.
He listens to the cries for a moment, eyes still fixed blankly on the sun, his skin aching and pleading for the glow to kiss away the not-quite-pain. Somewhere beyond the peripheries of consciousness he hears another voice, making low soothing noises that he can't quite distinguish, and the wails slowly quieten. Then a third voice joins the first two, and he can hear them all fitting together, twining around each other, making a pattern of short sounds and long sounds and higher pitched noises that would maybe make sense if more of his brain were listening.
One of them will come and look for him soon, but this morning in the pale grey light of dawn he doesn't feel as if they will ever find him. They could look and look, and perhaps they'd see him floating there in his bubble, but nobody would ever reach him.
The sun edges its way over the sill, tiny slivers of light dancing over the line of his thumb. It is warm and bright and stealthy, sliding slowly across his hand, and he flexes his fingers slowly in its glow. Perhaps. Perhaps if they hacked at the skin of the bubble for long enough, they would get in.
The voices are closer now; the sounds almost make sense, but he can't quite arrange them correctly in his head, can't quite visualise how they ought to go. The sliver of light is wider now, a slanting shaft across his whole hand, and the skin of the bubble is thinning slowly. He knows that they are coming to snap it; can feel their voices gently gnawing away at it. If it is possible, they will do it, even this morning.
The bubble is not unbreakable, but it is strong. It reforms stealthily and slowly, weaving together a skin from darkness and dreams and cold-dark-damp mornings and not-quite-pain. It never stops spinning and twisting the threads together, not so long as the needle is there. The needle is great and black and dark, stronger than diamond and brighter than lightning, a child of blood and fire and tears. It takes too much to snap it, too much love and noise and laughter, too many promises, too much light.
But when the needle is snapped, the black-hallowed are free.
~
Pretty Good Year