Almost

I. The boy breathes.

Crystallized air floats in clouds around his lips, their part as pink as fallen petals and crusted with rime. The cold of it stings. It melts, only to freeze and hurt again. Each silvery exhalation weaves into the mist of predawn smog, escaping the velvet abyss of his mouth in shimmering plumes. Beneath his— their— feet, similarly shimmering pathways shine with spider webs of hoarfrost and ice.

There are mirrors in the frozen surfaces of shallow puddles, their glitter dangerous. The cobblestones are laden with cracks as extensive and dark as those that riddle the mind.

He thinks. That is dangerous, too. He breathes, which is more so.

There is something frightening in the act of respiration. In the simplicity of so integral a need, and in how easily it can all go wrong. His breath haunts, hovering before him in spectral palls that fade to nothingness.

Everything good is dead. Gone. Life is as evanescent as a sigh, and there is none to be found here. The garden cemetery is littered with the shriveled corpses of weeds, nostalgia, and those clawing, persistent memories that are too deeply rooted to be dealt with on one’s own. They linger like paranoia, or insanity.

Ice splinters beneath his sole.

Above emaciated bouquets and the jagged teeth of stone markers, gnarled hands are scraping epitaphs into the sky. There is a cry, or a caw, or a cackle. Only when the boy blinks does he realize that those straining arms are branches, and the contorted fingers are twigs. A willowy hand alights upon his shoulder. Or perhaps it is a snowflake.

In the dead of winter, the creature stands too close.

And he breathes.

II. It began at the beginning, and it will end at the end.

However, as with most dreams, he is unsure of the course that the journey will take between those two junctures. Once, the creature had been little more than a nightmare, flittering in his periphery. Like a reflection in a half-noticed looking glass, It was only ever seen out of the corner of his eye.

But then he had begun to look. After looking came seeking, and if one seeks, they will find. The pearl of Its toothy maw glistened, reflecting things both horrible and welcoming. Beckoning, beautiful, that Cheshire smile hung in suspension within a gilded frame, urging him down a rabbit hole that may or may not have led to a rumbling belly.

For a time, the boy could do nothing but resist being gobbled. He would thrash and writhe, buckle and scream, until the strange specter had no choice but to regurgitate him. With a wet retching, he would find himself atop his rumpled bed sheets, drenched in all manner of fluids.

It had been a dream, then.

But that was then. Some point before the end, sometime after the beginning. Then is not now.

Now, when the boy breaks through the clammy skin of midnight-swaddled horror, he finds the hungry nightmare waiting outside of himself, as if the whole of the world has been turned inside-out in mimicry of the creature’s stomach.

Sitting by his side, the monster clutches to him with the passion of a silhouette, never once letting go. The roseate dim of a lamp casts hellish highlights over the malleable gloom of the creature’s chin, nose, cheekbones. Simper.

It is like gazing upon the countenance of an old friend.

The boy can taste salt on his tongue. Spit on his lip. And every gasp and gulp of air scorches his throat as he chokes it down, fighting against the bile that tries to rise, rise, rise. He clings back just as desperately, fists coiling around curls of shade and satin.

The monster stays with him until terror subsides. It escorts mania out the door, leaving the shadowed bedroom quiet, still, and smelling of rotten apples.

III. He is a fragile thing, the boy with the dead garden.

He thinks of himself as a sickly sapling: brittle and breakable, wooden and wan. For a decade and three-quarters, he had been protected by the strength of a forest. Then came a man with an axe.

He is no longer part of a family tree. He is exposed, and weaker for it. Since birth, his lungs have been like the parchment that makes up the tomes on his bedside table. They hiss and crackle with each shallow inhale, every raspy exhale.

In, out. Pain, pain.

Though he is lonely, he cannot stand the company of creatures furred or feathered. He barely trusts those who had been hired to dust his home. Sometimes, he’ll crack a window for fresh air— the window closest to his wilted plot—, but the chill and the damp are a threat to him, as well. Whatever he tries, the boy cannot fully evade the consequences of a delicate constitution.

Asthma, flus. Cold after cold. Perhaps consumption, one day. He comments on the inevitable offhandedly, with the sort of long-suffering nonchalance of his favorite novel heroes. That he earns the reaction he had hoped for is an unexpected surprise.

The nightmare, by nature, is a superficial creature. Its emotions and expressions have never once reflected anything of particular depth. But in this moment, It exudes something akin to genuine concern. It looks as worried as he feels.

With the tinkled grind of icicles, the being’s features pinch. It frowns. Already pressed against the boy, the nightmare sweeps a frigid palm over his temple, clearing away the matted sheaves of his bangs.

At first, all he feels are Its fingertips scoring sigils into the perspiration on his brow. Then he feels something else.

There is a finite sound. There is finality. The creature leans forward, pressing Its forehead to his.

He would gasp, were he able.

But in the minute gap of space that lingers between their lips, there are no mingled breaths. How can there be, when neither is breathing?

There are only glassy eyes and darkness.

IV. Sometimes, he breathes not at all.

Other times, he breathes too much.

Blunted nails rake at the bedspread, screeching down sweat-slickened silk as fingers scrabble and feet flail and toes curl. Bony heels beat against the back of an arched spine as a paper-thin chest is blotted in beautiful bruises.

Blue. Green. Love-you-red.

After every thrust and shudder, the boy feels his mouth open wider, wider, jaw unhinging like a snake’s. The garden outside the window is little more than a collection of husks, its dry leaves rattling like air in his gullet. From the depths of that mortal chasm, silent screams waft over the monster’s dew-dappled face, the strings of snapping spittle scented strongly of apples. Other things snap in time. Time itself snaps, too fast and then too slow.

Forelocks flutter, mimicking the countdown of a clock’s pendulum: four, three, two, one, back and forth and in and out.

Pain, pain.

The creature loves to make him pant. And whether during waking dreams or waking hours, It is very, very good at it.

V. After his nightmare becomes his monster, and his monster becomes his companion, and his companion becomes in all ways his, the boy allows a kiss.

He does not like kissing, though he is not sure why. Perhaps it is because the creature takes such obvious delight in the act. Predatory talons cleave to his shoulders with the tenacity of a shadow, and he is pulled close— too close— so close that he can hear skin dimpling in each corner of Its smirk. The tip of his lip is teased, his gums cut by the sharpness of a silver tongue.

He does not like kissing. He does not like the way the sexless sensation crashes over him, simple and sweet and toxic. Something within him throbs. His heart, he thinks, before it drops like a stone.

He recalls then the waves of high tide: ripples that start small, but soon surge into a surf. Before he has a chance to escape, the waters have risen and he is caught in the undertow, spinning, swirling, sinking. When he finally breaks the surface with a splutter and a wheeze, arms flailing like one of the half-drowned, he discovers that the heavens have been replaced by his ember-eyed monster.

It looms, starry stare blazing above the sickle moon of Its grin. A crescent strip to start, that same moon begins to wax, bones creaking and teeth unsheathed. Time passes in a blur.

In the spotted haze of his asphyxiated gaze, the creature’s wonderland leer grows and grows, grows and grows, until it has swallowed all. Until there is nothing left above the boy but the void of a mouth. A black hole, ravenous and all-consuming.

The vacuum of space suckles oxygen from all hidden places, including the spongy air pockets of secreted lungs. The boy chokes, the sound disagreeably shrill. His face purples; his body seizes. Panic sets in, and he can do no more than cling to his throat, holding to it with the same determination that he does his consciousness.

His plight is acknowledged by a sympathetic coo. Blackness enshrouds more than just the edges of his vision. The smiling creature dips low once more, as if to help resuscitate.

But It is breathing in, not out.

VI. Lately, he has been very tired.

Lethargic, listless, and limp, there are days when the boy can do little more than lie in the feathery down of his bed, chest rising and falling, rising and falling.

Too weary to lift a book, he passes the endless hours by studying his own story. He turns his gaze inward, diving into the cataleptic depths of his subconscious. Again and again he returns to that place, as if hoping to find something meaningful there. Something lost, or forgotten, or unsullied, or profound. But his sleep remains deep and dreamless.

It makes sense, he supposes. More sense than anything else. After all, he had expunged himself of nightmares long ago. He had let them loose— he had let It loose— and It had been far too happy to begin a life of Its own outside the prison of his thoughts.

And he, in turn, is happy too, because he is no longer alone.

Day after day, when the wheedling light of dawn urges his eyes to open, the first thing the boy sees is his monster waiting at his bedside: body tilted, nostrils flaring, flushed features burning with secret pleasure. As It becomes more humanoid, this is more of a comfort than a terror.

But perhaps it should be the other way around.

When the creature whispers this morning’s salutations, the boy cannot help noticing the way It has cocked Its head.

The way Its smile reflects his own.

The way Its eyes seem a little more familiar.

VII. The mirror is cold. His breath is hot.

Out of petulance, the boy smears the steamed surface with his withered finger. Doing so will leave stains, he knows, long after the vaporous mist has faded.

The monster arches an eyebrow, but does not speak. Never a complaint from those twitching lips uttered, though a smirk does curl their elastic edges when the design becomes an encircled, five-pointed star. In afterthought, the boy inscribes the familiar symbol with equally-familiar runes: sigils once lifted from the pages of childhood readings.

Condensation drips like transparent blood from the thick, liquidizing lines. His hand is wet, cold, and stolen by the creature.

It bows. It lowers Its head. An elegant tongue laps at the beads of tepid water that have pearled on the tips of knotty digits, as white and frail as the bones that shape them.

Spindly. Spidery. Like a skeleton, half-alive and still writhing within the embalming sheets of semi-translucent skin.

Breaking the mirror would do no good now.

The creature lifts Its looking glass face, politely patting Its mouth with a captured wrist. It smiles, and Its sire cannot help doing the same, for a smile is a skull’s only choice of expression.

Losing strength and air in equal time, the boy gazes upon himself as a ghost might upon its body, and finally makes a connection. Finally realizes something.

It leaves him breathless.

Over the rush of this last exhalation, he hears his own voice whisper into his ear:

“Thank you for the meal.”

Whenever you breathe, you exhale a small piece of your soul.

Fortunately, you almost always inhale it back.

—Inspired by Quote from Unknown