I Owe the Stars a Body

They sit in the dark, sleepless and exhausted. Their mind is slow and heavy this night, feeling as if the space between their brain and skull is filled with tar and gravel. Their limbs are no better, anchored to black holes, and their heart—erratic and arrhythmic—might as well be pierced with actual nails, for there is literal difference in the pain the imagined ones inflict. Their lungs expand under the weight of the ocean, and each breath exhaled is like a desert wind across a dry ocean bed. There is no sound, and yet, neither is there silence. A constant ringing fills their mind; a persistent and unpleasant note with an imperfect pitch, echoing eternally inside the tunnels of their ears. Present since birth, such is its nature that it bothers them little, and they notice it little in day-to-day life.

That is, except in moments like these. Except in the sleepless nights—the many, uncountable nights without rest or reprieve—where their mind and body seem sapped of all energy and will; in the dark before sleep, or the liminal shade between places in waking reality. The biting note, sour and endless, is always there. Were it a night like any other, it might have been the most maddening problem, sometimes even moreso than the pain.

But for Verika, this would be a night unlike any other.

The stars have dimmed.

From where Verika sits—propped up in the corner of their bed—the lone window in their room provides them a clear view of the stars. Verika's home sits in orbit above Earth, one of many colonies hanging above the blue marble, where they are afforded the grace of the stars' audience, even as the stars themselves remain oblivious to Verika. A normal restless night would at least give them the satisfaction of contrast, of juxtaposition in the stars. To Verika the stars would seem bright, more full of life, light, and color. They would be as torches to shadows, or as a fire to snow. But now the stars are little more than afterthoughts of themselves, barely perceptible specks of light against a canvas that seem eager to swallow them. If they look closely, Verika imagines a pulsing in the starlight, a kind breathing that—with each breath that passes—takes a bit more of light from the stars.

But that would be madness.

It is the sleep deprivation taking hold. Six weeks, each of them with less sleep than the last, causing their mind to fabricate such things. Desperate for rest—desperate to perhaps dream, even if it was a nightmare—Verika's mind is simply conjuring fantastical things.

They wonder then, if it is also conjuring the visitor.

Verika notices them, but only just. In the far corner of the room, they stand in the shadows. A human-shaped thing and yet, somehow, they know distinctly—absolutely—that the visitor is not human. It is strange to Verika just as Verika is strange to it. They turn their gaze, hoping to see more detail in their periphery, of which they are sure will reveal itself to be something innocuous. A pile of clothes draped over a chair or, perhaps more likely, simply a collection of shadows from the dim starlight suggesting the shape of human-shaped things, where in fact there is only the nothing-shaped shadows. But Verika sees only the same thing: an ambiguous, humanoid collection of darkness.

The visitor grows each time Verika blinks.

It is imperceptible at first, only discernible when they blink several times in quick succession to clear their blurry eyes that they see the visitor's expansion. It grows limbs, or things like limbs. Arms like vines; vines that twist together like stands of DNA that form thick trunks. Trunks that press themselves into the spaces of Verika's room, taking root where a foundation for such things should not be possible. Verika thinks the only thing their foggy and sleep-deprived mind can conjure up: Turn on the light. Light is safety from the dark, as it has been for all of time and all of humanity's collective existence. It is both the beacon that guides and the roof that shelters, and it is less a thought than a reflex for Verika when she reaches over and flicks on the light.