Timothy Day

The Human-Shaped Hole

 
          The house was run down, likely full of mold, and the nights would be freezing. But I’d been on foot for days, how many I couldn’t say, and it was a place to sleep. There was almost nothing else around, just a lot of weeds and dirt and a convenience store a ways down the road that was, by all appearances, out of business. The sky was heavy gray, an enveloping gray, just as it had been the whole time I was walking. It seemed likely that it would soon begin to snow.
          The front door was padlocked. I circled the house, tugging on the boards nailed over the windows to see if I could find a loose one. They all held firm, but in back of the house I came upon an oddly shaped opening, almost human-shaped, as if someone had run straight through the wall. Dried blood was smeared around the edges. I mirrored the outline of the hole with my body and found that I would fit perfectly. I pushed my bag through the stomach-part of the hole, onto the human-shaped pool of light on the floor, then stepped inside myself and rummaged around for my flashlight. Locating it, I clicked it on and saw that I was standing in a modest-sized bedroom, empty save for a couple of matching armchairs sitting across from one another, engaged in a never-ending staring contest.
          I ventured into the hallway. It branched off into a bathroom, a closet, and another bedroom, eventually opening onto a living room and kitchen. But where was the front door? I tried to think about where it would be inside the house, given my place of entrance, and concluded that it should have been on the north wall of the living room. But it wasn’t. There was nothing on the north wall of the living room, or any of the other walls, for that matter.
          I went upstairs to explore the rest of the house. The windows up there too were boarded up, so I couldn’t see out to where the front door may have been. All the rooms were empty except for one, where there was a mattress on the floor and a television with unusually long antenna. Someone had been here, was maybe still here. I wondered if they had figured out the front door.

~

   I sat on the bed and tried calling Kristen. My phone battery was low and it would probably be my last call for a while.
          “Please stop calling,” she answered. The connection was poor and I could just make out her voice through the static.
          I ignored her. “How are you?”
          Kristen sighed, causing a noisy electrical wheeze.
          “Can I talk to Tracy?” I asked.
          “No, you can’t.”
          I paused. “I’m not using anymore.”
          “Don’t call again.”
          My phone died. I couldn’t be sure if Kristen had hung up a second before it did, but probably she had, or was at least about to. I went back to the room with the human-sized hole in it and squeezed myself out. The jagged edges cut into me, tearing my shirt. It had seemed much easier coming in.
          I shivered and rubbed my arms as I wandered up the deserted street. The sky seemed coated in ash. Surprisingly, there was a light on in the convenience store, and I thought I would see about getting some cigarettes. A bell announced my entrance, but nobody came to the counter. In the back room I could see someone’s leg sticking out from behind the door. It was bobbing a little up and down.
          “Excuse me?” I called.
          The leg went still.
          “I’d like to buy some cigarettes,” I said. The leg didn’t move. I thought about going into the back room, but some part of me was afraid of it. On the counter before me was a television that looked exactly like the one in the house. Those freakishly long antennae, like some sort of giant bug. On the screen a black-and-white view of the road outside popped and fizzled. I hadn’t noticed a surveillance camera coming in, but there must have been one somewhere. A truck went by on the screen, but I didn’t hear any sound of it passing outside. Shouldn’t I have heard something? It was dead quiet in the store.
          “Excuse me?” I called again. The leg still didn’t move. Finally I went behind the counter myself and picked out a pack, leaving a few dollars by the register. I’d only taken a little money from Kristen’s purse and I needed to make it last, so it would have been unwise to pay in full if I didn’t have to. Once outside I peered through a window into the back room. There were a lot of old TV’s piled on top of each other, crowding the room like teeth. I couldn’t see whom the leg had belonged to.                                                               

~

 Back at the house I went around to the human-shaped hole and forced my way through. The edges cut me again, worse than the last time. It was as if the opening had somehow gotten smaller, the shape becoming that of a slightly skinnier person. I turned my flashlight on and went upstairs, trying to get as far from the hole as possible in hopes of keeping warm. There still didn’t seem to be anyone in the house, but in the room with the bed I found a syringe on the pillow that I was sure hadn’t been there before. I went through the other rooms. In the bathroom I found a lighter, cotton-ball, and spoon, forming a sad family around the sink. Whoever had left it would probably be back before too long for their next hit. I returned to the bedroom and tried turning on the TV. No reception (lot of good those long antennae were). I set the flashlight upright on the floor and lit a cigarette, reclining on the bed. Wind moaned against the house. Smoke from the cigarette curled up to the ceiling, sogged into the plaster.
          Tomorrow I would find food and a payphone. Maybe Tracy would pick up when I called. She used to do that sometimes if Kristen and I were in another room. She liked answering the phone.

 ~

            I couldn’t tell what time it was when I woke up. The boarded-up window that I was sure had been there earlier, right there on the wall beside the bed, was gone. In its place was simply solid wall. I got up and went around the rest of the house with my flashlight. All of the windows had performed the same disappearing act. How was this possible? Had I imagined them in the first place, my assumption of their presence somehow manifesting them in my vision? No, I was sure they had been there.
            I went to the room with the human-shaped hole. The opening was still there, but I could see plainly this time that it had grown smaller. It now resembled the form of a severely malnourished individual, just a little wider than a stick-figure. It would be impossible for me to squeeze through it at this point.
          Through the shrunken hole I could see it was still dark outside, likely sometime in the middle of the night. I needed to find something in the house I could use to chip away at the wall, to make the opening into the shape of a healthy human once again. I made a thorough sweep of the kitchen, checking all the drawers and cabinets, but there was nothing useful, only a half-finished, long-expired bag of Cheetos, along with a few wads of heroin.
          The first floor was intolerably cold now and I couldn’t keep myself from shivering. My other movements had begun to blur and get away from me, as if I wasn’t totally in control of them. I half-walked, half-crawled upstairs, exhaustion flooding through me. My forehead, I realized, was slick with sweat. My whole body was slick with sweat. I struggled back to the room with the bed and collapsed onto it. One of my hands, or perhaps my teeth, pulled over the covers bundled at the side of the mattress. I wrapped myself tightly beneath them, curling onto my side. It took me several minutes to stop shivering. I knew this wasn’t a productive use of time, but I felt that if I attempted to stand back up I would faint. No, I would have to sleep more before I could do anything about the hole downstairs. It would be easier to work at it in the light of day, besides. Everything would be fine.

~

            In my dream I was in the same room upstairs, only the television was working. On screen was a black-and-white view of the back of the house. The image was static for a while, nothing going on, but then a figure entered the shot and approached the human-shaped hole. The camera zoomed in.
          The man on the screen looked a lot like me, but wasn’t quite me. There was something different to his eyes, something glassy and remote, as if there would be no give if you pressed on them, and even if there was he wouldn’t feel it. His skin, too, seemed to possess an unnatural sheen, like a doll just removed from the box. And yet he was clearly supposed to be me. It was perhaps because of his superior qualities that I felt no desire to act when a toolkit manifested beside him and he began to patch the wall. I thought he would do better out there in the world than me, as me. I would simply stay here, make a home, think about all the good that fake-me was doing.

  ​~

          I woke with a pounding headache. The TV, to my relief, was off, and still didn’t work when I tried to turn it on. I managed to get up and drag myself downstairs. Another relief: the human-shaped hole had not shrunken further. It remained far too skinny for me to squeeze through, but had undergone no additional repair. My dream had been just that. Still, I had no idea how to make the hole bigger so I could get out. The front door remained elusive, my phone dead and useless. On top of all this, I suddenly realized that my entire body itched intensely, and when I looked at my skin I found that it was heavily scratched already, streaks of red all over, as if I’d been clawing at it through the night.
          I approached what was left of the human-shaped hole and peered outside. I was fairly sure there was nothing but the convenience store around for miles. Whoever was there would not hear me hollering, and even if they did, I had a sick feeling that they would not come, my shouts received like the distant buzzing of a fly.
          I wished Tracy were here. She would probably be able to fit through the hole, if she went sideways. But once she got in, she still wouldn’t be able to help me get out.

​​~

          I spent the day wandering the house with the flashlight, checking the rooms over and over, hoping each time that I would spot another door or window I’d somehow missed previously. I felt along the floors and squinted at the ceilings, in case there was some sort of hatch to a basement or attic. Nothing.
          The light faded outside the human-shaped hole. In the kitchen, I ate the rest of the expired Cheetos, bringing the bag to my mouth and tilting it up to get the dust at the bottom. I remembered there being four wads of heroin on the counter the night before, but now there were only three. Someone had come inside, someone skeletal, probably while I was sleeping. I decided to stay in the kitchen in case they came back, slumping down against the cabinets. A few minutes went by, then time seemed to blur and I wasn’t sure if ten more minutes or several hours had passed. I was shivering again, the night air spreading through the house. I couldn’t stay in the kitchen. When I turned my flashlight back on, the glow was weaker than before. The batteries were dying.
          Feeling stupid but desperate, I broke the bathroom mirror with the butt end of my flashlight and picked up a piece of glass, holding it with the wadded fabric of my shirt. I went to the human-shaped hole and pressed the glass against the rim of the head-shaped portion, gently rubbing up and down. The wall did not give, and in my frustration I applied enough pressure so that the glass was pushed back through my shirt and into my hand.
          It was at this same moment, pain spiking in my palm, that the dying glow of my flashlight caught a flicker of movement from outside the hole. I moved the beam around until it was on him completely: the man from the TV, who was me and not me, standing at some distance from the house. We stared at each other. Even far away the man was just as glossy as he’d been in my dream, like a manufactured person. At his side he held a toolkit, and I realized that this would be my last chance. I imagined Tracy’s hand in mine, small and scabbed from tripping over exposed roots that time we went hiking.
          I stepped back across the room and leaned forward, prepared to charge.
​

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Timothy Day poses as an adult in Los Angeles. His fiction has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barren Magazine, Bad Pony, and elsewhere.