Part of me is a gargoyle on Eddie’s chest; a squat, hunched figure of molten stone pinning him to the mattress. His mouth opens and closes, and for once, nothing comes out. There’s a distant clang from the garage but I ignore what it might mean. I am so close, but I strain to withhold for one more aching moment to savor the vista, the yawning chasm of hunger about to be fulfilled. I could live here forever and forget everything else and be nothing else other than the vessel. But no, I’m greedy and I’m a monster and I want more. I send tendrils and protuberances to pry open Eddie’s eyelids. He will see this, and I will see him see this. The cold shock of me touching his skin wakes him. He grunts and flops under my weight and I make myself heavier. His animal eyes turn and wheel and focus. I wonder what he sees, what he can possibly see, until I see it; the widening of the eyes (which stay open on their own now), then within his mind-blanking terror, a brief, twitching relaxation of the lids before the brows arch. Recognition. I try to speak, to say, “Hello, Eddie,” but I cannot. My mouth fishes open and closed, and my lips undulate but no sound comes out as I spout a lifetime’s litany of grudges and disappointments and how they are rooted in and represented by Eddie and all the other Eddies of the world, which, even now, I know isn’t wholly true. Doubt and anger begin to shrink me, as they always have, and in this same room in another universe I allow this part of me to recede away to nothing. But here, now, I don’t, and I hover my terrible face (an amalgam of all my terrible faces) a whisker’s length from the unfogged window glass of Eddie, and I will steal his breath and I will eat his withered, tainted, unsure heart, and I will feed until there’s nothing left of him but clay and dust. And oh, I feed. And it feels like floating.

The pain in my chest mercifully ebbs, though I can’t tell if that’s because my heart has given up. I’m afraid to listen and feel for it. With my right hand clutching my chest, holding it together, I mount my feet, shuffle across the garage’s back wall, and enter Eddie’s house. I follow the trail that has been left. The trip to Eddie’s bedroom is a journey across the desert of me and it takes decades, all my previous decades, to traverse. I see everything I’ve done and been and forgotten. If I was never quite happy and if I didn’t know who I was and if I was never able to identify the formless yearning for something unattainable, there’s solace in who I am not and there’s solace in my continuously and infinitely halving the distance toward a bittersweet, wondrously, longingly inexplicable truth. Gabba gabba hey, right?