Mercy twitched her left arm over her head, landing it on the couch’s armrest. At her movement imagine me as a cartoon cat frightened out of eight of his nine lives. Mercy remained asleep or whatever state she was in. Coiled around her wrist and elbow, the blanket rippled as though caught in a breeze. There was no fucking breeze. The blanket pulsed like exposed musculature made of a glistening, convoluted network of connective and vascular tissues. And it flexed and it squeezed, fluidly readjusting its hold and position. Mercy gasped, releasing a quick, high-pressure tire leak of air, and I froze, a mantid fiend curled above her. I tried whispering her name but only pushed up dust. The bulk of the blanket remained bunched on her chest. Swirled within the mass of this impossible external heart (I don’t know how else to better describe it), there was a human face. I can’t state the following strongly enough. This was not a case of seeing something that wasn’t there; not a magic-eye poster trick, not an optical-illusion face Freuded onto clouds or tree bark or wheat fields or rock piles or the leering shadow on your bedroom wall or your divinely inspired morning piece of browned toast. Perhaps what I saw was closer to the fake faces of skate fish and stingrays, where on their underbellies their aquatic mouths and black-dot nares created their uncannily emotionless smiley faces. I make no claims that the thing ensnaring Mercy’s limbs and rooted on her chest was human, only that it exhibited a human face. Ageless and, somehow, clearly adult, its eyes had lids and its eyes were eyes (iris, pupil, sclera), and it had defined cheeks and brows. A nose shark-finned above a small, partially opened slit of a mouth. And it looked at me with an expression so matter-of-fact, so ho-hum in its indifference as to be the most malign, baleful look I’d ever received. Were this face to pop up in the middle of a nightmare, say, inside a hole in a wall of a neglected old house you’d never been to but in the dream it was your house, your home, you would be frightened beyond reason or measure, and the worst part would be knowing you would see it again in the next nightmare and in all the ones after that and then finally in the interior eternity before you closed your eyes for the final time.