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 is not pain.

It hurts and tingles and burns and there’s a whispery rasp as the keratin of his nail plate scrapes another epidermal layer but it’s not what he feels or hears, no, it’s that he feels. He feels exquisitely. In that moment, he is nothing but sense inchoate.

His fingers reach the crook of his elbow and he pauses, breathes, takes stock. Dilated pupils perform a grim accounting of one arm, his own, lightly flayed. A shaky breath.

There’s guilt, too. Not enough to overwhelm the melange of feeling as he begins again, from the wrist, and not even close to enough to do anything about it, or this would be a different story, and we’d have to find a different faceless man to observe. 

And he scratches.

We have come to the end of our not-morality tale. There is no lesson to be learned from the scratching man, no fate to be divined from the marks on his arm. But think of him, reader. Let him live inside your mind, decorated as you please, and scratch. For at the moment, that is all he desires.