The door is open. I am lying on the floor, and the world above me is spinning in circles. Pain. There is blood all over the floor, sticky and lukewarm, crusting against my bare body, and cool air raises bumps on my pale skin. Were they always there, waiting to stir, to become erect with the chill breeze of fall? My limbs are going numb, cut off from my body, and my stomach is swirling, angry at me. I close my eyes, rest for a second, and when I open them again the world is still. Though my secrets have flown out the door, there was no one outside to receive them. The blood is gone, and my body has fully awakened.

Time passes, but I don’t move, I can’t move. The world blinks, and my head pounds over and over again, a steady rhythm, thick blood pulsing through my veins, corrupted with dried ink that I wouldn’t let flow.

By the time I can sit up again, the sun is low in the sky, and I see a fire outside my window, a delight to my broken eyes. Someone is knocking on my open door, and I see a form moving past the opening. A soft, low voice calls my name, but I stay sitting on the floor, cross-legged, trying to hear what the wind outside is whispering to me. He comes in even though I haven’t given him permission. Maggots, eating at his insides, occasionally eat through his skin and peek out into the light of day. I stare at them and not at his face, but he comes closer still, close enough so that a few of his worms fall around me, wriggling on the floor in their ugly struggle, and I look up at him to glare.

The maggots disappear when I see his face. This is not the man I thought it would be, he is instead my present interest, and his face shines with the evening light streaming in through the window. Concern crosses his face as he sees the state I’m in, but I grin at him with my dazzling white teeth and he smiles back softly, relieved.

“Can you do something for me?” I ask. My voice echoes softly, as if it is a long way off, and his concern returns as he screws up his face. I ignore him.

He makes a quick jerking moment of his head, and then, hesitantly, “What do I do?”

“Fuck me,” I say, and he takes a step back, studying me, but I go on. “Fuck me so hard that the room spins and then stops spinning forever. So hard that I can feel something again, but what I feel is you inside me. So hard that I pass out, that the blackness overwhelms so that the nightmares don’t come. So hard that all I can scream out is your name but I can’t even remember my own.”

He takes a step forward, but hesitates again. Frogs crawl on the ceiling, their red tongues darting out of their warted bodies to catch invisible flies. Millipedes crawl past my feet, running from the coming storm. He watches me very closely.

“You sure? Is that what you want?” He wants to make sure. He doesn’t want to rape me, but hell, this is far from our first time. A bird lands on my shoulder, but it sings one note before dropping like a stone, dead-weight, stiffly, from my arm.

Is this what I want? Millions of people crawl on the floor around me, whispering words of caution, if only I could hear them, if only he could see them.

“Yeah. It’s what I want.” I grin again. “Let’s go.”

We strip each other’s clothes as we move towards the bed, locked in an embrace, his lips pressed to mine. His shirt pulls off easy, and we only break away for one second before re-attaching. I struggle with the button on his pants, and he finally undoes them for me and steps out of them. We fall onto the bed, me under him, a change that I like, our tongues tasting the boundaries of each other’s mouths. Stars fall around us as he unbuttons my shirt, button by button, sucking on my nipples, but I make no sound. I make strange, jerking movements, but I let him have all the control, and I don’t speak a word, and he begins to like it.

Soon he is fucking me, panting but unrelenting, and I am stretched wider than I have ever been before. I see mountains rise up around me, and water flows in streams from their peaks, washing me in wetness.

I don’t ever pass out. I imagine that I am flying, that we are dragons and we soar into the air, then latch on to each other, where he penetrates me, and we fall together, climaxing just before we hit the ground, pulling out painfully soon to fly upwards again.

I do scream his name. I have forgotten my own.

I don’t feel him inside of me. All I feel is this numbness, and a sense of being opened. I am still spilling secrets, but he is receiving them. I don’t like it at all.

I make some excuse to send him away after we’re done, and I lie down on the floor.

The sky is dark with little specks of light that are suns. Blood begins to, once again, flow from my opened veins and pool around my body. A few stray magots still squirm near my head, but I ignore them. I breathe out a sigh that turns into fresh air and flows out my window to join the others. I remain grounded, tired and sore and in the same place I was before he fucked me. The door is open.