Short Story: “The Beholder”

If only the first day had been the worst of it. An innocent slash atop my left index finger. A moment unremembered, a slow realization from its insistent burn as my ring slipped and slid around my finger. Aggravating the minuscule mark, angering even.

If only I hadn’t waited to treat it with the reverence it desired, for apparently the smallest of acts can become the most maddening of inconveniences.

Within a day the line became a gash, then a gape, the skin surrounding the wound puckering and pouting as it tried in vain to heal and close. Peace, resolution, forgiveness. But the gape refused, and a grim smile formed in its place.

Within 3 days the smirk became a grin, then a scream, a wordless echo overpowering my days with the pain of its greed. A hunger to be heard although it did not yet have a voice.

But to cover it would invoke its wrath. Though it did not grow in size so much as scope, an intelligence made itself known. A mind I did not recognize as my own though it was housed within me.

But I hated it so much, this presence. I did not so much mind the wound, or the steady pour of new blood to cover the old. The pain was not the worst of it. Even its appearance was somewhat beautiful in a grotesque way, a mosaic of mottled colors and jagged festering textures, never the same. It was its insistence that flogged me, thinking thoughts I myself had fought to banish before. My anger grew with it, a challenge burning hotter than any parted flesh.

Until at last a pallid eye began to poke through the skin, crusted with blood and distorted by a long sleep. Blearily it beheld the world, nerveless and noticing.

Until finally it leered at me. A dreadful stare that peered into my darkest of depths. A foreign guilt, loneliness, and neglect I held and the resentment it fostered.

This is the finger, this is the mark. And you are its target.

Forever.