“Canvas”

The mind is pulled, changed into something terrible.

I am coming unbound at the seams, unstitched at my spine. My shadow stretches longer, dusk swallows the city, and streets don’t go where they ought to anymore. I think I left work in my truck; I think I clocked out and took a right. I think I left in my truck but now my feet ache and I won’t be able to find my way back through the dark. Right, straight, left, right; houses pass. Hours pass. “Go away from here. Keep going. Come closer.” Lights dim, all sleep behind closed doors. Something is tugging at my guts, a hoarse whisper growing louder.

The alley brought me to the back gate and every window is dark, save one near the ground. I can hear it calling me from inside. I have to move closer, have to be near it. The gate squeals but the swings are silent as I pass. Mulch crunches below and my breath fogs the glass but I can see it in there on the wall, glowing, pulling me. I can hear it laughing; I can see it grinning for my arrival. At the back door, the clear panes ripple under my touch and with a palm the glass stretches like a balloon, conforming to my fingers. I push the boundary inward, the film keeping the night, keeping me from entering but now I can turn the lock, can enter the safe place. I know They don’t want me to be here with it so I go with quiet, aching steps now and draw nearer. I have to look at it; I have to touch it.

Now, presented with the object of my torment, I am humbled. The texture is like a gauze bandage that has fused with the skin it’s meant to hold in place and the deep, gray band across the upper third presses down on the barren, fleshy region below with a weight of decay and necrosis. The canvas, the painting pulses and writhes, it whispers to me, calls me to submit, to do terrible things so that I may grow closer. I know I should run I know I have to run I know I have to run I know I have to run. The canvas must not be moved but I can take it with me and keep it forever. I can take it with me. I can be consumed.

My skull buzzes and my eyes vibrate in their sockets. Humming in the throat, heaped harmonics shake the screws in the walls too. I’m falling deeper into the divide now, deeper into despair and there’s a screaming as I’m pulled down into it. Wait. Silence. A creak of the floor breaks the trance and a ghastly face floats from the darkness around the corner. A demon, a terror sent to destroy us both erupts from the shadows shrieking and the flash of a blade cuts the night, cuts me deep at my side. I recoil and shrink back from the beast; the wound sears and stings. It pushes me back with the blade, slowly back and back and it’s yelling but the blood rushing in my ears leaves everything the beast utters, my own ragged breath, a muffled drone. Back against the wall now I grab the canvas down from its place and it protects me from the demon and its blade. The glint punctures the painting and I can see the fibers separating to accommodate the thin metal. With this, I can turn to the door and run through the house to the back where I came in. Glass crunches and slides under foot and I’m in the backyard with the creature shrieking after me though I’m soon lost again in the night. It does not follow.

Consciousness is frail now and I have to move I have to keep moving I have to hide. I can feel its texture on my fingertips and I can breathe again though with each drag of night air my wound hisses in protest. When I’m back in my head again I’m in the center of a dusty room. The ceiling is caving in and moss and mold grow from the floor and the walls. The canvas is there, hanging from the wall and I’m here too, here in the darkness in the center of the room. The canvas is illuminated only by the moon and what little glow streams in from the window. A hundred thousand shadows quiver beneath a hundred thousand peaks and strokes of layered paint. Fibers hang from the gash and my own blood has dried to a tack, just there, where it pressed against my side. My blood mixes with its own, begins to dissolve into it. My throat buzzes again and I’m drawn back into the painting, down and down into the boundary where the dark band presses down onto the flesh below.