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On Dark Wings

 A knock at the door. 


It’s him. 


Uncomfortably tall. I feel like he is leaning over me in the doorway, leering down like I am something small and frail and exposed. I have a memory of being a child once at church dwarfed by an enormous, agonizingly detailed Christ, bloody and bruised but with a stone-still expression staring down at me from lifeless dark eyes. I am there again. 


It’s dark out. Moonless. Even now I can feel the heat, moisture collecting on my skin. Pouring down my spine. I start to realize I have been waiting for hours. The tension of my muscles spasms like I’m being pulled on marionette strings. 


The Man is in a trench coat. He does not sweat. His face is angular, but smooth, with the wax-clay composition of a corpse. My heartbeats seem to take centuries. Beat.. Beat.. Beat.. 


I blink and gag, gasping for air as a freakishly long finger reaches down my throat. It’s like something alive. But I can’t move, I can’t scream, even the gag is caught and silenced as if it were a small pathetic thing quickly extinguished. His hands are pale spiders. I have seen them everywhere, reaching into my windows and retreating under my bed, I know their too-smooth texture, remember the ease with which I am subdued, carried, hoisted. 


We are outside now. In the Forest. It should be dark but there is light, so much light, and it hurts to be beneath, an appalling brightness that brings out bottomless animal fear. Heat across my body. The probing, painful digit brushes my heart. Flexes across my spine. 


His sunglasses are eyes. Huge, black spheres around an inhuman face. His coat becomes wings, black cataclysmic wings.

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