I used to fuck faceless 4-hour women on a bare mattress. I used to haunt the wall chiller aisle of the Family Convenience. I used to pick penis envy out of a transparent rubbermaid in my garage.

Gods, it's screaming again.

When I was a child, and an adolescent, and an adult, I dreamed of an opportunity to escape the mundanity of my life. This was never what I had in mind.

I looked down at the hand in my hand and wondered where my life went so wrong. What I did to deserve this.

When I was a child, I accidentally dislocated my sister's arm from its socket at her shoulder. I had pulled on it too suddenly and too hard and it came right out. Had I felt bad at the time? I certainly do now.

The queen was sitting on her king. I tried to pry the cards apart and they became like impossibly sharp knives. My skin spread across their faces like hummus to a wafer and the flesh of my index finger chunked off in stringy bits.

When I was a child, I remember eating ribs at Swiss Chalet just before Christmas. I remember how perfectly cooked they were. The way the meat fell off the bone in my mouth. How sweet and savoury the taste.

Then the screaming became too much. I wiggled my legs in the boots I didn't take off anymore. I believed, almost religiously, that they held the soup of my feet together. Even behind these fortified walls my telomeres had evaporated. My DNA readily shredded, I imagined, as if it never enjoyed being a part of me in the first place. It was as if someone had yanked a screwdriver out from between two half spheres of beryllium in every household across the world.

Having given up on my game of solitaire, I lifted myself to a stand and crossed the room. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. My soles on the smooth concrete. I approached a yellow and purple mound, dead leaves and litter stuck to it in places. It sported bony appendages and a bloody orifice from which came a wet and grating cry. The sound was not human. Fitting for something that could not be recognized as such. Whoever this had been, it was far removed from them now. This was nothing more than a suffering blob. Some form of life that existed on the knife’s edge of death and only knew the stimuli of pain. It likely couldn’t even hear itself scream.

Maybe, I thought, that’s why it fucking screamed so much.

This morning I woke up to having lost most of the power in my legs overnight. Now, then, I grabbed a hold of a square-edged shovel and tried once again to beat the bruised and bloodied mound to death. It was solid like gelatin long gone stale. My arms were weak. I wasn’t sure if it was finally dead, but at least now it was quiet.

I bent over to get a better look at the hole. Vaguely familiar as a mouth, but it could have just as easily been a tumour from which sprouted remnant instructions for teeth, eyelashes and fingernails. In the first few days, before I decided to kill it, I fed it leftovers. The wilted greens and gristly meat disappeared into the fleshy depths, but I would be surprised if any of it had actually been digested. Mouth. Pit. Garbage disposal. Then a sound: like the end of a spinning record; a needle on uninspired vinyl. Musicless whistling and so, so faint.

I placed my hands on the mound. It was warm, based on the parts of my hands I could still feel. The ends of most of my fingers were black from frostbite and long numb. I lowered my ear to the hole and listened. The smallest puff of humid breath caressed the side of my face, accompanying the staggered hissing. No words could be discerned from the noise.

At night I dreamt I was ripping pages out of a book. It was a history textbook and I was trying to undo all our mistakes. But the pages were too thick and my hands and arms too weak.

In the morning I ate unevenly thawed chicken, the elderly radiator my only appliance. My meal was ruined by a new stench, the source of which I discovered to be the mound. It had not started screaming again today. I wondered if it was decaying. I wondered if I should haul it outside into the snow to preserve it. I lowered my ear to the hole again to listen for the whistling, and instead heard humming. Mmmmmmm, said the mound. Mmmmm, lipless, like a microwave. Then, iiiiiiiiiii, then oooooooooo. Mmmmm-iiiiii-ooooo. And it stunk like sweet landfill and sulphur.

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At the height of the day I walked through the polar night and deep snow to the neighbouring complex. I stole crackers and non-perishables from residents who watched me from their rotting recliners, slack-jawed and wide-eyed and unmoving. I said, you ought to fix that broken window so the snow stops piling up. I said, the roof would be leaking if it wasn’t all frozen. To each their own, I said on my way out. Thoughtlessly, a broken mirror still hung in the foyer. I saw thinning grey hair and blistered skin and red eyes through it before I looked away.

You cheating whore, I screamed sometime in the early evening, you right bastard. The hand was once again unwinnable. I pushed all the ruined cards back into a deck. Now that I’ve decided not to kill you, I said, now that I’ve given up on killing you, it’s safe to become acquainted. Mmmm-iiiiii-ooooo the mound hummed. Mio, then.

When the sun dropped the Search always began. This was when curfew came into full effect. I always liked to start curfew a little earlier though, just so I knew I wouldn’t be caught. This wasn’t cheating, it was just called being safer than sorrier. I preferred to be asleep during the Search. The lights and noise made it hard to sleep if you weren’t already. I got lucky tonight.

I dreamt Mio grabbed me by the arm and stuck my hand in its hole. It felt like wet velvet and smelled like salty sweat. When I pulled it out my fingers were pink and whole again. I said, I was never a religious man.

*

Ever since the first dream, I woke up in a mess. Unclean thoughts plagued my unconscious and turned my body against me in the hours of the night. Every morning I fled the apartment to exorcise myself of the Want. The want to be held. To know another intimately. I tried to picture someone like me but I didn’t know what I looked like. I knew I didn’t look like Mio, but that was it.

Mirror, Mio said. This morning it said the full word. Mirror.

There was a full-body mirror against the patterned wall. It had, at some point, acquired a sheet overtop of it. I could have put the sheet on it. I didn’t like the mirror.

Mirror, Mio said.

No, I shouted. Mirrors lie!

I will tell you if the mirror lies. I can see you so I will know. Mio scrambled over to the mirror in a flurry of clicking joints and scraping digits. With one spindly hand, it yanked the sheet down.

The mirror was dusty. I approached, slowly, and dragged my palm across the surface. The dirt and grime scraped away to reveal my image.

Sunken eyes. Bloodshot with one black dot. Crooked jaw. Frayed hair. Decrepit and as if struck by lightning. No inch of skin was the right colour, and it often gave way to open wounds. Festering sick bubbled under the thin surface of my neck. Wiry grey hair stood straight out of my scalp in the few places it still sprouted. My skin hung off my skull below the eyes. I was supposed to be thirty-one. I think.

I took off my shirt.

White to yellow to purple to green to black faded across my chest and abdomen in random gradients of injury, disease, and rot. Fingers long devoid of any feeling, I ran my wrist across my prominent ribs and felt the bumps of osteosarcoma all over.

I was a million different degrees of terminal. A hundred different stages of dying to dead. I always knew it. Now I saw it.

But I also saw Mio, and now I knew something else. Mio was pink and fleshy; soft and sturdy. Mio was healthy, adapted to our new home. And when I would finally crumble into flakes of dead skin, Mio would remain.

I started to cry.

But I still want to live, I said. I still want to be desirable. I still want to be loved. I’m supposed to die soon, but what am I supposed to do until then? I wondered, should I still eat? Piss? Masturbate? What would it all be for? Look at where we live, Mio, I said. Look at the conditions. It’s all so strange, and soon I’ll be dead, yet I have to keep doing these mundane little things until then.

That is the human condition, Mio said. You were always going to die.

That night I regretted cursing the hunger pains. What a gift to feel something, I thought. I want to keep hurting. I want to keep being hungry. There is so much contentment in death. All your motives change and you become uninterpretable to the living. There was something nice about being easy. About people being right about you. There was a community there.

Though it was dark in the room, I watched the outline of Mio shuffle back to its stain on the cement floor. My only community left.

I closed my eyes. Floodlights filtered through the curtains and my eyelids. I hadn’t fallen asleep in time tonight. The shrieking outdoors, ringing crisp through the cold night, penetrated the walls of the apartment block. The Search had commenced.

I lifted myself back up to look again at Mio and coughed when I went for a breath. Liquid. Liquid in my lungs. Water? Blood? I couldn’t breathe. Every gasp devolved into hacking, choking, gurgling. I panicked. I writhed on the floor with my hands on my neck. I flopped on the cold concrete like a fish out of water. I screamed some desperate primordial cry.

In the midst of it all I saw Mio standing in front of me. Upright on two spindly legs. It was holding the square-edged shovel.