Garret stared at the night sky and prayed for death. His head felt heavy, almost a burden to lift, the pain in his temples coming in spasmic contractions. His mind was weary and fuzzy; his thoughts formed, then tumbled into oblivion. When he tried to remember what had happened to him, that weird tingling would start behind his eyes. Like something inside his head. Something talking inside his head.

No need to fuss about that, Garrett. All is well.

With difficulty, he looked to the right, toward where he had heard the voice only a moment ago. This voice had been a real one, made from someone other than whatever was living inside his head. It was getting dark, the twilight gloom thickening, which made seeing difficult. But someone was near.

He rolled his head back to its prone position and concentrated once again on the stars, nestled in the fabric of deep blue sky, high above the orange and purple hues near the horizon. It was a perfectly clear evening, the kind where it almost seemed plausible to reach your hand out and pluck one of the twinkling orbs right out of space. It was a childlike vision, but he held fast to it, didn’t want it to drift away like his memories.

When he attempted to raise his arm, Garret frowned at the strain. He was stiff, as though he had been in the same position for an extended time. Again, he tried but his arm fell back at his side with a soft pat.

Wait, no…that wasn’t right.

Remember, you don’t have arms any longer.

Oh, right. No arms, at least not in the traditional sense. It just felt like they were still there, like they used to be. Technically, they were there, just different. Longer, broader. Better, he supposed.

As his swollen tongue moved across cracked lips, Garret realized the severity of his dehydration. His throat felt as if he had been gargling with sand. When he coughed, tiny, sharp fragments embedded themselves into the walls of his esophagus and the roof of his mouth. Garret winced. Must’ve come from his lungs, but they felt like thorns.

He pondered over this troubling thought. Are there thorns in my lungs?

Garrett inspected the fragments with his tongue and the resulting contact produced a grating noise, as though the surface of the malleable muscle was coated with coarse fibers of its own. He tested this assumption by pressing this bizarre, new tongue against his palate and grumbled when the firm bristles dug into flesh.

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Tasting blood, Garret raised his head, allowing gravity to assist in his swallowing. When he did this, he became aware of a peculiar sensation in the rear of his scalp; he could feel something attached to it. It moved with his head. A part of it. For a moment, he wished his arms and hands were like before, so he could reach up and feel around his scalp. Craning his neck produced tension against the restraint fixed to his skull and for the first time, Garret heard the creaking sound of stress applied to the mysterious tether. From this sound, he discerned that it must be…woody in nature. Some sort of tough vine, perhaps? That didn’t seem to make sense, but that’s what it sounded like. He lurched forward and a shockwave of pain erupted from where the thing was secured to his head. He immediately loosened the slack and the discomfort subsided.

“What is this?” Garret mumbled to himself.

What had happened? Why was he so different than he’d been? Even his voice, with its gruff nature, was altered. Then again, his recollection of what his voice had been like was misty at best. When he attempted to hone in on this memory of his former self, it, like the others, fell away into nothingness.

Garret again sought the stars for comfort and found them in the night sky. Yet he only now realized the irregular perspective from which he viewed the nocturnal heavens. He became aware of the angle that gravity tugged at him and found that he was not lying on the ground as he had thought. Instead, he was upright, his back against a wall, staring through a massive cavity in what was once the interior of a house, but was now a mangled mess.

All but a portion of the roof was gone. Broken rafters hung like thick, black splinters. A deformed brick chimney jutted into the sky like the headless spine of some prehistoric beast. There was a small table in the room, just ahead of him. To the left stood a refrigerator and across from that, an oven.

The kitchen, he thought. My kitchen.

Behind Garret was a solid wall. If he fidgeted too much, tiny bits of drywall fell to the floor. This concerned him and he figured he had better remain still. Too much movement might cause the entire wall to collapse and then the approaching voice would have no one to visit.

The voice…who did it belong to? It sounded so familiar. He listened again, more intently this time. The lone voice became two, then five…then a dozen or more. Focusing, Garrett could almost feel the voices. They were many…far off but approaching.

A multitude.

The thought was forgotten, and Garrett’s head became heavy again, causing him to drop it, at least as far as the tether would allow. He saw that his legs were restrained by something, but because the vine on his head limited mobility, he was unable to lower his vision enough to see the limbs. When he tried to move them, the legs refused. It was as if they had been rendered completely useless. He tried again and as he thrust his hips forward, trying to force the limbs from their stationary state, more drywall crumbled to the floor.

The legs would not budge.

A crippling sense of claustrophobia seized the man and a panicked cry escaped him. Trembling, his heart pounding out powerful beats, Garret realized that he wasn’t merely secured to the wall. He was one with it.