Quoted By:
>Push the big red button
A second ticks past. Several of the desk people are reaching for something. One brave one has lurched toward you. You smell earth and taste metal and are aware of sweat beading up on your forehead. You are aware of a loosening around your heart and a thickening within your throat.
Virginia never killed or betrayed anybody. She never murdered her own father with a knife and ate his blood. You haven't consulted her, but you're sure this is true. That's you who did that: you inside of her, and the red stuff inside of you. It boils up when you're desperate. The question is if it'll boil over.
A second ticks past. You look into the eyes of seven or eight people and into the hard dark shiny glasses of the man by the wall. He is looking through those glasses, through Virginia, and into you. You're sure of it. He can see what's writhing under your skin. You're absolutely sure of it. A drop of sweat slides down the bridge of your nose and dribbles onto your lips, so you can taste salt along with metal. Red rust.
You have to. Sorry, Gil. Sorry, Teddy, you guess. He's gone: snuck out of your head. 20 brown beetles on the back of your neck. Saw what was coming. Poor Virginia can't. You hope the mind closet's wedged nice and shut.
A second ticks past. No time for dramatics. You take the lid off the pot; you bite a single neat hole in your tongue and all the <span class="mu-r">b</span>lood in your body comes out of it. You didn't know you had so much blood. You didn't know it was so slimy, so goopy, so full of bubbles and knots, in parts like wet clay; you didn't know that it'd writhe and spit and extrude from your paper-lantern body. You the paper, the sun the lantern, bright as day: the office was dim, and its bare-faced creatures duck or squint. This is all the good you're doing. More blood drips out from the sun, pooling in your toes, fuzzing into your skin, leaking into the ground. Maybe you're doing that too. You don't feel well.
>[-1 SV: 0/???]
>[SUNSTRUCK]
>[-2 ID: 3/14]
>[+1 SV: 1/???]
You are standing because you can't move. You are standing because there is nothing of substance left in you: you've been drained, vacated, taken. Richard in your head is talking about blood. Strings are in it. <span class="mu-r">You</span> are in it. You are all over yourself, all over the mirror-shards; you are in the air, striking, wrapping, stretching— dragging your husk along, tugging it off its feet— shoving tendrils down throats, up noses, down ear canals, fuzzing into pores, under fingernails. Slinking from the front of the office to the back, so the creatures in the back have time to see, and run. The creature by the wall does not run. It does not remove its glasses.
(1/2)
