November 27, 2024

There’s a hole in my bedroom.

I woke up this morning vomiting my insides out. Over and over again, I sat on the toilet: bucket in my lap, a fountain of ichor streaming from both ends like I was the stone visage of the unlovable older brother of the Little Pissing Man in Brussels. People at least go to see him, and even take pictures of his proud eternal act of waste disposal, sending those pictures across the globe to people who undoubtedly are happy to see those pictures, mostly because they miss them. The fridge is empty and the ashtray is full. I think it’s Wednesday. I remember being proud of seeing the number on that scale go down, but now I don’t even want to write that number down. Truth be told, I haven’t really eaten in three days, and I’m not even hungry; I’m mostly just afraid to keep anything in there. Not that I could hold in anything to begin with.

As I’m writing this I realize: It’s actually pretty funny. Guy wakes up, says “Oh fuck…”, making this guttural groan with mostly his stomach belching through his throat, nearly tripping over himself as he lurches into the bathroom and drops on all fours, spewing everything he has down the drain with all the other bile and shit from the suburbs rushing beneath the streets of downtown Little Rock in a circulatory system of sewer veins, before returning to the bed: dripping, aching, moaning, crashing into a wet pile of sheets, only for it to all start again an hour later.

The clouds outside hung unusually low for my 4PM morning cigarette, choking out the sun completely and casting the world in monochrome. I pulled myself out the front door for some company from the neighborhood cats, themselves not terribly social today and skittering away the moment they saw me. As they ran I looked past them toward the hillside, and cried at the sight of smoke climbing out of a distant chimney. I could almost smell the burning logs as I held in my last drag: savoring every last drop of humidity peppering my lungs, remembering how beautiful Christmas used to be, the reflection of the tree lights on a new stack of DVDs, all of us crowded around the TV in our pajamas, not because we wanted to watch Elf for the 50th time, but because we wanted to be together around a fireplace, and then I too exhaled into the sky.

As the sun set, my neighbor watched me through her kitchen window. Normally I’d cower away, but this time, I sat there and looked back. She loomed in the frame, both her arms craned, carefully peeling the blinds apart, herself a marionette silhouetted in the pale pilot light. We just sat there a while, looking at each-other beneath the stars.

“Are you well, my child?”, she wondered, and I smiled. Not necessarily, but I appreciate the thought. I wished that I could give her a hug, but I worry she might stab me with her kitchen knife, even though that would be okay. It’s just self-defense, after all.

“Don’t worry, Eloise. I’m going somewhere special.”, I whispered in her ear as my blood warmed her trembling hand. I couldn’t see her face as the light faded and I hit the floor, but I could tell she was smiling over me.

The hole is approx. 10 mm in diameter, barely bigger than just a pencil. I found it this morning when I knocked over (and then broke) the floor lamp tumbling back into bed.

[picture of hole]

At first I stepped on it, thinking it to be some kind of spider, and was startled by my first discovery: the warmth of it. Not warm enough to be hot, but warm enough to shock me. The only other feeling akin to that is stepping on the heater barefoot after stepping in from the snow. At first, this was easily dismissed to a number of factors: myself still being a drunk idiot, a rapidly deteriorating fundamental grasp of reality (and not enough medication to counter that deficit), and the fact that holes just sometimes are there. I slept it off, my mind far more focused on ignoring the taste of vomit in my mouth than a minor peculiarity, a pretty mild hallucination, if that. It wasn’t until I had smoked my last cigarette outside with Eloise that I had even remembered this strange anomaly, and went back to check. Sure enough, there it was: 10 mm in diameter, and 86°F in temperature (if my home thermometer is to be believed).

[video of pencil drop]

I’m not really sure what else to say about this right now, the only course of action I really plan to take at all is just to document this, whatever it is. I can’t really tell you what I’m feeling now either, other than that I still feel sick to my stomach, and that the only thing that feels good to do is to take measurements, and any future developments, and record whatever those might be here on this blog.