Friday Night Kiernan
A man sits alone in a room and scratches his arm. The details of the room are not important to this story, and you may imagine them as you please. Sufficient to say that it was a familiar room to the man, and his presence was nothing but ordinary. The marks on his arm are red and raw. His fine black hairs are stark against the livid flesh. He does not bleed, but the growing trail of petechiae tell that it won’t be long. He does not itch. No itch would compel a man to claw as he does now. Now the inquiring reader asks, “Why?” Perhaps idle curiosity prompts the question. Perhaps nagging impatience. After all, what more can a faceless man in a nondescript room be than a trite morality tale? (For that matter, with all these digressions, what can a story even be other than a self-indulgent commentary? But let’s not lose ourselves here.) So he sits and stares and scratches and what runs through his head as he rakes his nails is not a coherent thought but an awareness of the pain that i...