Excerpt from "Under a Black Rainbow" (Fiction / Short Story)

(Photography by Logan Zillmer)

There is a long and quiet period where he sits on the edge of the bed in the dim light of the bedside lamp. A knife, gilded in tarnished silver and dirtied bronze, sits beside him on the comforter. Starlight outside has flickered on, blinked into existence slowly in the hours since he put the dinner dishes away. Now, the insects have come to make noise outside his windows until their voices suddenly stop, most likely finding themselves in the jaws of an airborne predator. This will continue all night; it's not the noise, but the sudden silence, that bothers him.

Every night, before he falls deep into sleep, he will undress. He'll remove his shirt first, slipping it up and over his shoulders and head, tossing it into the laundry basket hidden behind his closet door. The clink of an unbuckled belt comes next, the swish of it sliding out from belt loops before being coiled up in his hands and put back into the dresser. He will unclasp his slacks, unzip them, slide them to the floor and kick them toward the closet. Each sock will get removed and tossed onto the crumpled pants nearby. Dress shirt and underwear come last; this is the process. This is the nightly ritual. The stripping off of clothing is the stripping off of the day, a necessary removal before allowing the next day to take over.

He will spend an hour standing before the bedroom mirror examining the litany of scars he has acquired over the years. He will run his fingers over those that seem to have changed in the last day, though his rational brain knows that none of them have. They have all remained the same since the day they stopped their scarring. There are those that pockmark his chest and those that line the atrophying musculature of his arms, the tough, red tissue like warning signs scattered across his dermis.

'Don't touch.'
'No entry.'
'Stop.'

There is the wilting of powerful legs into stems full of wobble and shake, though they continue to keep him upright. There are fewer scars here, fewer visible marks to point to and say 'this happened where; that happened when.' His legs hide more than they reveal and, for that, he is grateful, though he can still, with disturbing accuracy, pinpoint every injury his legs have endured since birth--even if their presence is more invisible than not.

Once he's taken the time to drink in the visage that is him in total, he sits on the edge of his bed. He will stare down at the Y-shaped stitching that marks his thoracic area and begin unlacing the stitches from the bottom up, piling up the threading in a neat, glistening pile on the bed beside him. His skin will begin to noticeably sag for the lack of structure and support; one side may briefly flop open and reveal the pulsing organs beneath. Were he not alone, this might be cause for concern; most nights, it is not.

Once all the threading has been unstitched, each hole freed and empty, he gently opens up his chest, spreads wide the rib cage (hinged now for ease), and carves off a tiny slivered piece of his beating heart. The knife causes no small amount of pain, but he's used to it now, having done this every night for several decades. It is an ache he's come to expect (and relish?), so the sensory experience has become folded into his nightly ceremony; if the pain does not come, he cannot sleep. If he cannot sleep, he will lie awake, one side of his face buried in the pillow as he stares at one wall or another until he becomes tired of being tired, stands up, and goes through his morning routine several hours early. Deviation brings disappointment and a discombobulation to the day that's hard to shake until he goes through it all again before bedtime.

Tonight, the heart-sliver clings to the quivering blade as he lays both on the nightstand before him. The heart will bleed a little extra, but soon he is sitting and the rib cage is clasped together again, the stitching in his chest sewn back down from top to bottom in a laborious process more akin to religious rite than chore. But he has done this so many nights so many times that it's nearly second-nature to watch his own fingers thread the needle and send it swimming through each tiny hole down his chest until each is filled, tightened appropriately, threaded so that his insides cannot possibly find their way out. His fingers have become nimble over the years, his stitching a near work of art in its clarity, its clean lines, its ability to almost hide the knife work delineating the Y-shaped incision bisecting the upper half of his body. He neither understands nor questions how the skin holes have not decayed with use or weakened over the years; each threading pulled tight as the night before that and the night before that, so on.

He will rise from the bed and apply lotion to the re-threading; the holes from which it appears and disappears may chafe in the night and awaken him from the quiet nightmares, but he'd prefer to sleep through the night rather than face the prospect of lying in bed, vividly remembering the nightmares as only someone who knows the heart of their bedroom in the pitch black possibly can.

The heart-sliver will be deposited in the tiny, varnished jewelry box, only to be gone the next morning. He no longer checks to see if this is true, simply knowing after all this time that it simply is. The jewelry box is made of birdseye maple and is lined entirely in soft, royal blue felt. There are no inscriptions on the box, no mentions of names or places or deities, only the soft pattern of the birdseye maple beneath the varnish and the simple decorative border delineating the lid from the rest of the box.

Despite the number of heart-slivers placed inside it over the years, the jewelry box seems devoid of smell, is amazingly devoid of stain. The box itself needs no dusting or polishing as it seems to naturally repel any kind of substance that might block or mar its natural beauty in any way. There are no symbols or writing lining the inside, no inscriptions that might give a stranger’s eye any clue to as to the box’s secrets.

As far as he knows, the box will hold heart-slivers and nothing else. A gift from his uncle, the decorative box once held a prized watch for moments before the watch appeared back on the dresser’s surface beside it in its normal place. The box had rejected the watch as occupant. There was nothing in the note from his uncle that explained this phenomenon, only that, when he knew for sure that he could, he was to slowly whittle away at the beating beneath the surface of his chest and leave bits and pieces of it inside while he slept.

No reason was given then, no explanation made clear. He had read the note and shook his head in disbelief, chortling at the absurdity and the absolute impossibility of the idea. He was young and stupid then. He does not laugh now.