Excerpt: Hunger

My body was a wreck, it was broken beyond repair.

The fragile bird-like bones that made up my skeleton felt like slivers and shards, shattered and in pieces just like the glass window I had been thrown through. My whole chest was swollen and caving in on itself as I tried uselessly to breathe. My copper-smothered throat barely took in a breath, each more of a gasp than the last and steadily becoming weaker. My eyes were bleary. Nearly blinded by my own blood as it ran in rivets down my forehead, it burned my eyes and forced me to blink. Through the bloody haze I could see the endless inky expanse of the sky above, littered with twinkling stars and their constellations that I could never name.

It’s funny (and not in the ‘ha ha’ sort of way, but rather the soul crushing, heart wrenching sort of way) that it’s only when you’re dying does everything finally seem to come to life.

My head was a pulse and my skin, which was as cold as the small refrigerator I kept in the apartment in town, felt three sizes too small for my frame. I couldn’t breathe. I knew I was losing a lot of blood, I could feel it seeping out of me onto the cold, lifeless concrete flooring where I knew it would stain. I was dying, I knew that much, and if they didn’t find anything else of me, there would at least be that stain. That red stain would be proof of my existence and of my last miserable moments on this earth.

I flexed my fingers slowly, the only part of my body I could move at all – though it still was accompanied with an agonizing ache, not as if I expected anything less. The ache snapped through my skull like a blast of lightning, blinding my sight white while the small delicate bones of my hands threaded themselves back together. Like pieces of a puzzle they fitted perfectly, connecting with ease though not without pain. My nails, which by then had really become more claw-like and lead covered, cut through the red lake that had begun to form under and around me, to scar to the floor beneath.

A stain is what I would become, and with each liter of blood I lost I knew I was drawing closer to that fate.