In the middle distance is my living room.

My eyes open to the slow, pained groan of the sun against a single-pane window. It is cold and harsh, the blankets heavy and thin. The floor is miles away. I fall.

I land on the smooth floor. Grainless, artificial. There are no seams between the floorboards, just the illusion of them.

The world comes into focus. Light dragged across the room like a soldier’s dying crawl, smeared like a tilted painter’s pallet. Blues and yellows and oranges bleed into each other and hang in the air. The walls are bare. White paint on white drywall.

I can’t see the ceiling. There is a vast nothingness. Above the window, the light fades ineffectually, grasping up to heights it will never bother to reach. Not darkness. Not grey. Just nothing.

At least, there may as well be nothing.

I close my bedroom door.

In the middle distance is my living room.

Hours fly away like birds after a gunshot, and all I'm left with is the hike between rooms. I set one boney foot in front of the other, clattering against lacquer and laminate. The joists creak, but they don’t do a convincing job at making it seem real.

I am an hour into the hike. I am nearing the bathroom door. I am tired and I am frail.

The thing is open, just a crack. He is inside. I see him, clammy, necrotic hands on the bulging countertop, blurred nails prying on the sealant, lifting the stain. Exposing the dark below.

There isn’t wood below the stain. There’s nothing at all. The tap drips acid into the porcelain sink and I can’t bear to see beneath.

I avert my eyes. I can see him through my closed eyelids, upside down, etched on my cornea. I can’t look away.

I didn’t pack for the hike. Still, I press on.

In the middle distance is my living room. The door closes behind me.

I reach the stairs. The door at the bottom is sealed with thick tar and caulk, leaking this gooey, viscous something onto the white paint, streaking all the way down to the threshold. The transom is blocked with chipped eggshell paint. It’s breathing.

The wind howls. The sunlight cloys at the broken window aside it. The banisters sway like willow trees with leaves of flaking white paint and liquefied wood glue. I know he’s on the other side of the door. I can hear him toying with the mailbox, the old metal one mounted on screws dug a half-inch too deep into the foundation. I hear rustling paper. I can’t see what it is, but I can smell the mold through the door.

In the middle distance is my living room. Each step I walk brings it no closer.

I see him when I round the corner, if only for a moment. In the kitchen, staring into the window, his reflection's eyes locked onto mine. I'm sure I'm seeing things. I hope I'm seeing things.

His eyes are pallid and white. His teeth chatter with the ringing of a rotary phone, his breath like turning the dial, his fingers tapping against the aluminum sink like switchboard cables loose in the wind. Without rhythm, without whim, without wont.

He is gone. I don’t see him leave. The tap is gone and the water is stale. I choke it back.

Another hour I walk. My feet are worn to the bone. I track thin footprints through the hall, like a skeleton that ran through a bucket of paint. That’s a ridiculous analogy. I hate it. I hate this hallway.

The lamp in the living room is on, wreathed in the impenetrable shadows of a winter dawn filtered through shuttered blinds. It glows, and little else. I am sick.

The floor is cold against my feet. Against my threadbare clothes. Against the back of my head.

I kill time.

No, I murder time.

I slaughter the day. I take the hours in my hand and I gouge them, slash them, bleed them dry and rend their flesh. I cast them away and dismember the remnants, I plunge my teeth into their neck and my hands through its ribs and I leave the cadaver on the floor to rot into the floorboards where it belongs. I hear it scream and I revel in it.

I lick the blood from my hands. It comes off clean and is bitter on my tongue. I swallow it down and know, deep down, no one will ever know.

No one will ever want to know.

No one will ever care to know.

The TV glares at me. The screen is white. The taste of blood crawls down my throat.

The walls are white. They are without mouldings, light switches, outlets, cracks, crevasses, studs, nails, tacks, caulk, corners, deviation, cripples, headers, sills, joists, trimmers, noggings, plumbing, cabling, sense, or reason. They simply are.

White rectangles in a dead space.

The sky outside is blue.

The sky outside is blue.

The sky is sick, and it grows a tumor. I can see it crest the horizon through the blinds, hanging pale and bilious on a sky, teal and black like a butterfly pinned to a chalkboard with hundreds of little steel pins.

The lamplight grows faint. It was never plugged in to begin with.

He turns the TV off. The screen is black. His white eyes reflect in the dead screen’s glare. His frostbitten, baleful fingers set on my shoulder for just a moment like cold spoons against bare skin.

I rise on my scabbed feet, steady against the tide of already-evaporating gore smeared against the floor and walls. I take steady, firm steps. He is gone.

The hallway yawns open before, vast and quiet. The light of a fading smoke alarm flickers red and green like a dying runway's signals, beckoning this pathetic aircraft of bone and sinew that can’t even fly. In the far distance is my bedroom door. Blue light creeps through the crack, slightly ajar. I didn’t leave it open.

My tracks are gone. I start the journey, cursing each step.

The floor groans. I whine in pain and I hate myself for it.

Hours bleed into more hours. Hours bleed out on the floor. Hours patch the other’s wounds and kill more hours. Hours go to war and I walk on bloody, wretched soles down an uncaring hallway.

The bedroom door groans open and I enter. The glow is a screen. It isn’t plugged into anything.

It sounds like silence. It sounds like insomnia.

The bed is miles below the laminate, a depression sunk underneath a bulging floor. The wood smells like rot and hangs luridly in the air, slinking off molecules like syrup off a marble, gently cascading down, down…

I fall. I fall for long, bloody hours.

I impact. The bed is warm. The blankets are soft and full, like clouds pulled down from the heavens and placed, gently, on my fetal form.

The average cloud weighs five hundred fifty-one tons.

I am smothered. I am safe. Soft fingers that aren’t mine pull the blanket over me.

The bed sinks below the floor. A hand grabs my chest.

In the middle distance is my living room.

But here, nothing can hurt me. Not until tomorrow.