On the Virtues of Wish-Fulfilment

When you get home from work tonight you're so tired your hands have finally stopped shaking, which is kind of a bitch since you went to all the trouble of stopping at the drugstore for pills that would steady you. No, steady them. Them, because you're kind of flyaway right now, coming apart at the seams, you're taking dragging steps in case your skin rubs off and your long hunched body dismembers itself; the disconnect is important. It's been a horrible day, a horrible year. You can't remember when you last got a good night's sleep.

Night terrors, that's the thing.

You pull the hanging cord and light slices across your eye. Brightness-blind and dizzy you stumble on the pair of flip-flops that are treacherously near the door (that will stay by the door until you work up the energy to answer your friends' invitation to the pool); you stumble, yeah, thinking about over-chlorinated water and how tired you are, and then there's movement, scuttling movement under your heel. You trip and fall, heavily. Inside, it's all ugh ugh ugh, because while you're a slob it's not like you ever eat anymore, thank you nervous disorders, and you don't deserve this. Rats, you think, flat on your stomach, covering your eyes with your fingers, more for the grounding pressure of knuckle-to-socket than for defense against whatever is still an inch from your face, you can feel it.

You look and, surprise! It's not a rat. You can't quite focus but it's definitely not a rat, because it's wearing a sweater and hello, that's him.

"Colin?" you mumble, and prop yourself up on your elbow and shake the hair out of your face and whoa there, that is definitely him. (You would know. Didn't you memorize the shape of his skull under his thick brown hair while he was fondling your hip? Because, you thought, still think, that if you want to put a dent in something it's only fair that you learn everything about it first). Only he's tiny, you don't even know, he's probably smaller than a real rat would have been anyway. Seriously. He's tiny. The thin pink mouth, the forehead, the eyebrows, his half-tucked in ears, every detail is absolute and familiar, but so small it makes you shudder. Size shouldn't matter, ahaha, but oh it does. He looks like some kind of alien doll, miniature and perfect, like, perfect, because it's him it's all of him compressed into an inch, a breath, a candle-stub of being, and what the fuck is this?

He's gaping and then he gets it together and he says something only you can't hear him. Short vocal cords now, your hindbrain supplies. Like a bat's. Too high a pitch for human ears.

You think about finding pencil lead and giving it to him and setting him down on a sheet of paper or something, so he can tell you what the fuck is happening. Or else, hey, you could just put him on your laptop and he could play hop-scotch! (Dear god, you're going insane. Or maybe that was the thing where your one-inch-high step-brother appeared in your room). And then you think about how this is madness, and you don't have to play along. Why would you even want a hallucination to explain itself to you?

He's playing charades now. You stare at him and sometimes you can't see him and sometimes you can. Note to self, get more... something. Sleep?

You'd forgotten how much you hate him, actually. There's nothing like having him right in front of you to depress you. Your shrink would probably be proud of what you swiftly realize your not-shaking-anymore hands and your still-stinging feet want to do to him. Therapeutic, right? It's good to hash it out again and again in your imagination until it works, right?

But maybe you shouldn't because you're better than that, even in your head.

He makes this exasperated look and he runs forward on his little legs in shrunken jeans and suddenly he's clinging to your wrist, all of him wrapped around it instead of just his fingers (not strong but strong enough to hold your wrist to the wall, yes). That decides you and you slam him down onto the spongey sole of the flip-flop because what the hell, sleep-deprivation is making you crazy so you might as well clock up some brownie points for your next session on the psychiatrist's clean clean sofa.

He shrieks like a hungry baby, flat under your forearm. You admire him for a moment, wiggling and colorful, and remember that he's claustrophobic, that the one time you tried to drag him into a closet and give him the sloppy kisses he convinced you you needed he threw a fucking fit. His fingertips are like needles against the lacy blue veins of your wrist.

You tap him lightly on the temple and he passes out. You watch the bruise form, blue under his yellowing skin. He lies there on the sandal, back where he started you guess. What he was doing there you can't say. He hated it when you wore sandals back in the fucking salad days of your shared childhood. He hated the way you used to admire the white knob of your anklebone.

You roll him out of the flip-flop and kick off your loafers and peel off your socks, because it's not like you haven't heard enough fairy tales to know how dealing out just deserts works.

When you're done what's left doesn't fade away like a video game corpse, even though now it's just a mess on the paper towel you laid out. You can still see thin intestines and a tablespoon's worth of blood, most of which is staining your sole (but not your soul) in a lovely chrysanthemum of drying red. It reminds you of the frog you dissected together in fifth grade. How romantic, you think, and go to bed confident that you won't recall any of this shit when you wake up.

Except... the remains aren't gone, in the morning. You try to think what to do with them but it gives you a splitting headache. You end up feeding it to your neighbor's small, yappy dog, which finds it delicious, chewing the globs off clumping paper sideways, in the same way it eats grapes with ill-designed teeth. And a week later you get to tell your shrink that the nightmares have stopped. She taps her digital watch's annoying digital face, smiles at you.

And everyone is happy.