https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3dyvwo
The Story
Walter stared at the dead leaves blowing through the open front door. They screeched across the tile entryway. He ducked behind his father’s chair, where the man had grown thin, gazing through it for days. Muttering things. Walter pressed his hands to his ears.
His mother wept in the kitchen. He couldn’t hear it, but seeing it was bad enough, so he turned back to the door his father had left open. Stepping around the dead leaves, he eventually found the knob. A brief shock to his fingertip wasn’t enough to scare him away, and he closed the door.
It was a silence he’d never experienced before. His mother was no longer crying, behind him on her hands and knees, collecting the leaves into neat stacks. She looked up at him a moment, then down at his hand he’d closed the door with. Her face twisted. “How could you?”
Walter kicked one of the stacks, then ran upstairs to his room. It was larger than he remembered, the window so far away, the ceiling tall and dark. His breath fogged the air. The window was open, but he couldn’t reach it. Instead, he reached for the lukewarm mug of cocoa he’d snuck up after dinner. Melted marshmallows clouded the surface. He shook it. A dark hole formed at the center, white marshmallow arms spiraling from it. He put it back in his drawer and turned the end table around to face the wall.
Walter went to bed without undressing. His wool sweater itched. His jeans burned. If he just went to sleep, his father would be back in the morning. A reset. A fresh start.
Walter couldn’t sleep, because he couldn’t close his eyes. Above him, growing from the ceiling, a black whirlpool formed. Pinned to his mattress, all he could do was gaze into the many-armed anomoly. His head wouldn’t turn. His eyes still wouldn’t close. It hypnotized him much like campfires did, and no matter how long he stared, giving himself over completely to the task, he could never find a pattern.
But this was different. It reminded him of the creature he’d found in the tidepools last summer. His mother had said it was a starfish, but he knew better. It was too precise, a spiral that seemed to want to twist his head from his neck. He stole it, discovered by his father after they got home. “Of sea and stars,” his dad had simply said, folding Walter’s fingers around his prize. Walter hid it under his mattress until the smell was so foul that he had to throw it out, except when he went to gather it, nothing was there but a black stain.
“Of sea and stars,” Walter said. Tears budded in his eyes. There was more to say. Why couldn’t he say it? He felt the meaning, saw the meaning. The starfish shape on his ceiling yawned black. White dots that didn’t twinkle but he knew to be stars floated in the depths he desperately wanted to fly with, swim with, exist with.
Then he found he could move. A single digit. His index finger. And it curled at his side, hooking his soaked bedsheet, fingernail cutting through it, even deeper, trying to burrow through his mattress. It found a spring, so sharp, and he yelped in pain, jerking upright. He waited for the whirlpool to take him away, his head so much closer to it now, but when he looked up, it was gone.
Walter’s bedroom door creaked open. “Wally?” His mother, hall light filtering through her nightgown while she rubbed her eyes.
“Bad dream,” Walter said.
She crossed the room. “Told you about hot cocoa so late.”
Walter’s face warmed.
“Did you brush your teeth?” His mother asked.
She grabbed his blanket, which he’d kicked to the floor, and pulled it over his body. One finger held the hem, his right index finger.
She put her hands on her hips. Her face contorted again, just like downstairs. When he blinked, the expression softened.
Then it came to him, a feeling. The whirlpool birthed again in his mind, its arms curling even more, to fine points, hundreds now.
She brushed his hair from his forehead and leaned in for a kiss. He smelled . . . life between her parted lips, writhing, microsopic but there, multiplying until it filled her mouth, and then he saw it. She was a monster, those organisms dripping from her mouth in black tendrils. He lashed out with the only weapon he had, the one bestowed to him by the whirlpool in his ceiling. His finger caught her lip, hooked it like a fish, nail gouging the soft tissue in her mouth, and she slapped his hand away.
She didn’t say a word, just stood there, nursing her wound. But her eyes said enough, moonlight casting them in silver.
“I’m sorry,” Walter said.
“How could you?” she said with half her mouth. She stormed out and slammed the door.
Walter slept. He woke before morning, pacing his room, restless, feeling his finger locked into that wretched hook but not dare looking. He shivered, feet gone numb. He tore the blanket from his bed and drew it around himself, continuing to pace. The movement should warm him up. Eventually. He saw his breath. It spiraled before his eyes.
The window, closer now, within reach, framed a raven. Silent, still, black orbs looking right at him. He shooed it away with his hooked finger. It fled into the sky, joining its brothers and sisters in a great flock that grew arms, so many, so long, so sharp.
At that window, morning peeked over the horizon. The front lawn was more leaves that grass. Among them stood men. Hoods drawn over all but one. In his hand, a hook. On his face, a smile. On his breath, words.
“Of sea,” his father said from below.
“And stars,” Walter finished, beaming. He went to get his mother. They had so much to show her.
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