Writing Prompt Response: Unstitched

Another week, another

Anomie

prompt! You are all missing out if you don’t subscribe to her.

This week’s prompt:

A hidden fear: imagine a fear you have isn’t just in your mind but has taken on a physical form, like a small quiet creature that follows you around. Describe what it looks like and how it behaves. What would you say to it, if you could converse with it?

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I tried something a little different with this prompt. Let me know what you think—and what the fear might be. Because I’m not spelling it out for you. (Pun intended.)

Unstitched

It started last month. I woke up on a calm, Saturday morning. The light felt wrong. Thin, like it had been stretched too far. It cascaded through the blinds and curtains in my bedroom, a dim reminder the sun was still there. Somewhere.

The first thing I noticed was a high, needling whine, like a blade dragged across glass. Too deliberate to be random, too sharp to ignore.

I assumed my life as a musician was catching up with my hearing. Years of 140 decibel stage presence without ear protection. Over-the-ear headphones at loud volumes. Ritualistic abuse of the auditory senses. Now I pay my penance.

By the time I was downstairs and had made my morning coffee, the sound had slipped away. Not gone, only hiding, replaced with the usual light banter my wife and I exchanged while caffeinating.

I told her about the sound, she dismissed it. “Maybe you’ve got another infection,” she suggested, and offered me some leftover antibiotics out of the medicine cabinet. She hands me the pills. I take them out of an abundance of caution.

The next morning, it’s back. Not when I woke, not over breakfast. Only when I sat down with the guitar. Only when I put my fingers on the black and white keys of my keyboard. The sound crawled up my spine, hissed into my skull, it threatened to smother me.

By the next week, it followed me to the desk. I unlocked my workstation, started to write, and the words dissolved from my inner monologue before I can finish the sentence. The whistle pushed them out of my mind, breaking the chain of thought-to-paper.

The sound grew sharper. Louder. It drilled into bone. A piercing spike hammered behind the eyes, until every thought throbbed. Headaches. Nausea. A skull set alight.

I went to the experts. They ran their tests. They told me I was healthy. Nothing wrong at all, except the whine in my skull that scraped like glass.

A week later, it began invading my thoughts. The moment the idea of a story flickered, the sound surged. Notes were gone before I touched a string. Sentences dead before the keys were struck.

I learned to control it. When I felt something creative, I pushed it away. I stopped writing. I stopped making music. I stopped being what made me feel whole. It left a hollow shell. Quiet. Observant. But devoid of thought. Devoid of my soul.

That seemed to make it worse. It invaded my dreams. I didn’t drift into fantastical places, or watch in wonder while my subconscious guided me to the next story. I dreamed only of the whistle. A single note stretched across the night, threads pulled until the canvas tore inside my skull. The pain worse than waking. Enough to make me fear sleep itself.

Now, my wife notices. The sunken eyes, the seams beneath them deepening. A short fuse, temper fraying at the edges. She knows the doctors won’t help; they found nothing wrong.

I try to laugh it off. To make some sarcastic remark.

The scream splits me open.

I open my mouth, but no words come. Only the scream. She stares at me, horrified, because she hears it too.

The words I mean to say rise out as smoke, curling like ash from a fire. They drift across the room, pulled toward the dark corner. Every noun. Every verb. Adjectives, too. Spelled out for her to see, letters unwinding in the air before vanishing into the dark.

The dark bends wrong. A shape peeling loose from the corner.

It steps forward on wasted limbs, skin stretched thin as parchment. Veins crawl beneath, but not blood—ink, black and restless. Letters scurry through them like insects. My words. Sentences I once wrote, stuttering under its skin as though desperate to escape.

Its jaw splits wide, tearing too far, lips shredding at the corners. The teeth—unnaturally white, dulled by their feast—catch the lamplight and glimmer. From that maw pours the scream—my scream—an unbroken note that rattles the glass, shudders the floorboards.

The body is built of everything I ever tried to create.

Kindergarten fingerpaints smeared into sinew. The clay pot I made for my mother in third grade, warped into a ribcage. That essay on Roughing It from high school, torn and stretched into skin. A collage of the photographs I took on vacation last year worn like vambraces.

Margins for skin, red ink slashed into veins. Revisions stitched over muscle, whole pages torn into ligaments. Staves of my music warped into bone. Adjectives blistering across its chest, verbs twitching along its arms. My language, my music, stolen and rewoven into a banshee of sound.

It doesn’t lunge. It doesn’t claw. It only stares. Eyes wet. Hollow. Mouth screaming, as more words strip themselves from my throat and drift to join its festering flesh.

She sees the hollowing, my soul coming unstitched. She puts a hand on my withering arm and says, maybe you should take a break.

And when I have nothing left to give, with the ink fading, the last embers failing, I open my mouth to tell it no, but nothing comes. The silence isn’t mine anymore.