It’s crushing but slippery, like a birth but better but worse; there are eyes on you, through you, but you can’t summon any numbers to your mind that make sense. There are too many—for the daylight—and not enough—for the nightmares.
A brush against the back of your neck, the rise of your hip. It might be a breath, slightly sour with a metallic glint, and ghostly fingertips that never fully land.
You could fight it. You could turn around and look—but you can’t, can you? You’re not ready to face this, this monster that refuses to settle into your brain long enough to become a singular, precise fear. It’s every fear, all the fear, all the cold in your bones and your mother’s bones and her mother’s bones.
The slick roll of wet, oily shadow across your shoulders brings you out of your mind and uncomfortably into your body. You fit, but barely; your skin feels smaller, like you’re sharing it with someone—something.
Something else is in there with you. It’s in your finger bones and in your eyes. It smells like sweat and grease, but a little crisply burnt. You have never smelled this in your life but you smell it in the back of your throat like it’s coming from inside you.
It is, of course.
If it can unravel you by pulling at your edges, it will. You feel the nausea of bile in your blood, the staccato of your heartbeat, controlled by a thing that has never had one. It was not alive until it took you, and inch by creeping inch, the parts of you that are you begin to erode. It devours you, erases you, becomes you.
Breath after breath. Slowly. Slowly. Slower still. You are drowning in air. Your mind is fading, reduced to the sensation of all the hair on your body standing on end. The powerful wrongness is eating at your very soul and you know you cannot stop it.
You feel it pull back your lips in a crude, ugly smile. Your teeth are slick, your tongue is cold. You taste the rank decay this thing carries with it. You can’t scream, not anymore. It’s too late for that.
It has taken your throat, and it laughs.
Kaille Kirkham is a queer American poet living in Tokyo. She is the single mother of a rescue cat and a rude conure. By day, she teaches English literature at a secondary school.