Work Text:
The hand around you like a second set of ribs. It unfurls from within your skull, the nightmare, folding in on itself until it is all encompassing and reality is pressed into fine lines between it, like dead fossil fish in sedimentary mud, and making a Jacobs Ladder of you. The gift is in your palm like you are in the palm of the spider. The weight is lead, the texture glass. Pockmarks under the thumb that evoke eyes. You wonder what your body feels like in these cosmic fingers. You were a baby once, fleshier, softer, but you were never held like this. And what does this one know of soft? Across the cosmic stars - do you sink into the void like a feather bed? Can you press warmth like juice from the sun with your grasp?
It holds you like stone. It can feel the shape of the city within you. Your bone is buttress, your skin slate. Your eyes have become spires turned to the heavens and you are full of blood.
The headstones are like broken bone, the names upon them gone.