The Room

I am being eaten, almost imperceptibly, by the room. It began on January 1st, as a flaking of skin. I swept the dust from my sheets and lived out the day. On the 23rd, the hairs on my forearms began to blow away on the currents of searching draughts from under the door. They would float in the air in front of me, before twisting off into corners, embedding themselves in hairline fractures in the skirting boards. By the end of the month I was hairless save those on my head, which had sickened to the hospital green of the walls.

On the 5th of March my fingernails fell to the floor while I was putting on a shirt, and a wispy grey mouse with its ribs showing scuttled out from a hole I'd never seen and ate them. After that I would dust off my flaking skin at the entrance to his house, and every day he would take the little pile of me inside. Until that time I could leave the room, but after it I became too dusty and abhorrent to be seen by the people I watched through the window.

On June 17th, my elbows became rusty hinges. I cried oil onto them for the first few days, but after that they were stiff. Sometime in October, my eyes were sucked out by a ghost in the glass as I watched a man and a woman in a tree.

On November 20th, my birthday, the mouse came out of his hole with one of my eyes, and I thanked him and could see again for a time.

Now it is December, and my wheezing heart, the pudding, is being worked away. This dank and desolate space is spreading me over itself ever more thinly. The mouse watches me from his hole.

The mirror long ago melted into the floorboards, but I get the impression that I have become transparent. The New Year looms, and I have come to believe something strange. I think that if another person tried to describe me, they would speak of walls. A ceiling, a floor.