NEW WRITING: Drumming.

 

He sat, back firm against the bathroom wall. He drummed his long thin fingers silently but insistently on his raised bony knee. He drummed a rhythm that only he would know, would understand, would consider. He bent his head, his near-shaved blonde scalp shining through the speckled dust motes of the morning sun, as he sucked up the full rhythm of his drumming fingers - from broken eye to the wide smooth back of his skull in one full-bloodied swoop. He let the rhythms play around - bounce across the expanse of the encased world of his cranium - front to back, side to side - and back again. Rhythms began to suck into phases, phases that strung across the cosmos of his hand - passed along the divine galactic stretch of his drumming fingers. His vision faltered as his good eye blistered uncontrollably, and rhythm turned to perpetual thump - just behind his broken eye, where sat the drum that started the whole scene really running, started his search for a centre once more. Static began to strobe across the room, stretching the space from station to station. His broken eye caught the pulse of the room - reflecting it back - receiver and reflector, with no part to play. His fingers drummed on that bony knee - faster and faster - now that they knew where to go - following the strobing static in mirror-copied movements. His breath sliced through his chest like a dull sickle through corn, as the strobing static tried to find him, tried to pinpoint the drum behind his eye, the opening, flowering, and closing rhythmic motions of his fingers on that bony knee. But he knew, tangled as he was in the moment, that he was ready to be excised from the eternal, ready for the ripple that would come. So he opened to it, opened full and wide - and let it come - home.