Free Hold the Light by Ryan Sherwood

sheer thought of her with that venomous, thieving creature kept him from standing all day. He imagined the perverse pleasures the demon would wipe all over her body if he were to die. As the vivid visions of the gift inside him drove him towards death, thoughts of Veronica drove him toward life, but those red eyes, so deep and evil and devastating and bloody - that red could transcend his colorblindness. Red had always been able.

    So he sat for a month.

    Standing only when his stomach cried out for food, he would venture to the kitchen for some scraps, and hurry back to the chair to stay safe. The convulsions came with great frequency, bearing down like lightning - sharp and painful. On rare occasions, Mural would grow more used to the convulsions and attempt to walk around his house, trying to wean himself into old patterns, but the old whispers never came back and he felt alien in his own life. The gift eclipsed everything.

    Time crawled. Thirty days had passed more like years.

    Melancholy took him and, ironically, gave him his first familiar notion. Mural knew how he dealt with that before. And as soon as he thought it he found himself at a wash basin. Leaning over slowly he picked up a shaving blade and looked into the mirror at his shaggy face. His eyes were glazed and dull like a cows. His beard was thick and tangled. With trembling hands the blade pierced the tuft of curly brown hair that covered the point where his jaw line met his neck. The razor indented his skin and he thought, with trembling longing, of opening his throat and finishing what he started but stopped those short years ago on the hill. Yet, almost against his every urge, he slowly cut away his ragged beard. After shaving most his facial hair off, a convulsion took him. His hand shook the blade against his sandpaper cheek. The straight razor pressed against his jugular as the convulsions grew worse and blood ran along the blade's edge. His control diminished but his mind tried to lurch back to the day he sat on the hill, blade to his throat, ready to end it all over Veronica. But now, his wife was the safe driving force pushing in the opposite direction.

    He had to live on to find Veronica. And that was that.

    "God I wish I could see her."

    Chapter 11

    But it grew worse before it got better. Before Mural learned to adapt his life around his impairments, as long lasting men do, he was at their mercy.

    Mural had deciphered the patterns of the gift winding around inside, predicting the times when he'd start convulsing by the amount of cold beneath this skin. As soon as goosebumps rose on his neck and arms, he visibly braced for the shakes. The physical effects could be handled easily enough; it was the other effects, the mental occurrences that gave him the worst troubles. It was the memories that rattled in his mind, ones that he swore were untrue, perhaps lived by the intrusive force within, that threatened his sanity and livelihood. The thin line between himself and the light he swallowed proved nearly nonexistent over these next thirty days. As did his identity. Mural felt, no knew he was an apparition of what he once was, slipping ever so slowly and easily into the daily routine the gift inside gave him - which was nothing more than eating some scraps, sparsely sleeping and enduring hours of indiscernible yet horribly haunting thoughts that latched onto and fed off his genuine memories like parasites.

    Slumped in a chair that used to melt away his pains and worries, Mural sat on what felt like razors, staring into the fireplace, stirring no more than the layers of dust coating his entire house. He never wondered why his once great girth, now dangerously emaciated, had never perished. He should have rotted after two months and how great a release that would have been, yet, it seemed, he had forgotten how to die. His flesh and bone would have none of it. But, oh God, if he could only do so, oh how he wished he could, then the death in his head