I crept downstairs. The kitchen light was on, though I didn’t remember if I’d left it on. After a half glass of water and two Tylenol, I stretched and flexed my shoulders, but the pain intensified, and I worried I’d somehow injured myself more seriously. After a brief interior dialogue in which I told myself there wasn’t any reason for me to look in on Mercy, I scuttled the short walk to the TV room anyway. One of the French doors was pressed permanently shut by the television cabinet, but the other was open. I hovered in the doorway, a dead-of-night Quasimodo with no bell to ring. Silver moonlight smoked through the orderly row of windows of the back wall above the couch on which Mercy splayed. Her green blanket was rolled, twisted, and tentacled around and between her limbs and bunched on her torso. I was struck by how there wasn’t enough room on the narrow couch for her to have tossed and turned and sleep-rolled herself into such a cat’s cradle. Plus, the blue blanket I’d given her had been discarded and pooled on the floor. Wait, where did the green one come from?

Have you ever looked at someone or something in weak light, if there was such a thing, or different light, though the word “different” didn’t cover it by a long shot, perhaps ineffable was closer, or more utilitarianly as light you were not used to, or light that existed to display its own reality and you might assume the unrepeatable, sui generis wavelengths were quantum imps playing tricks on you, the unsuspecting, the unwilling, the unbelieving, and you knew all this but you still couldn’t unsee what you saw?

From my vantage within the wide doorframe boundary, my confusion at the number of blankets momentarily forgotten, Mercy’s face was not her face. My legs carried me into the room autonomically, acting as dilating pupils, bringing me physically closer to better focus the image. As I approached, I realized I was wrong; it was Mercy’s face but withered. Her cheeks had sunken into concave pits, so too her eyes, the skin stretched tight but also wrinkled at the sharpened corners. The wrinkles were not because of age; she didn’t necessarily look older, but instead was husked out, used up, dried out, corpsed. Too shocked to feel concern for her well-being (If Is she sick? and What is wrong with her? were questions I considered, they quickly sank to the bottom of my after-midnight mind), I tranced in dreamlike thrall, moving closer still, to within arm’s reach, and my initial observation of her face not being her face was both right and wrong.

Thanks, bro.