Long dark. Little pricks of light appear and go. Like fireworks, but very slow. Like fireworks becoming smoke. What light the smoke holds, after.
A series. A bridge. Joints, edges. The small span from steel to hand. Hum in the articulated knuckle. Chill at the tip. The vertiginous notion of the rest of a hand and a body held behind. The press of that gravity on this meat. The way the skin stretches over it, a tender wrapper. The delicate pulse of capillaries, nerves. A clot, a maze. Press of weight through gaps of atoms. Slow time. Press of a moment. The refuge of flesh.
The finger traces plastic, taps the cold steel underneath, the connection unbroken. Close to the body. They still feel its gravity. But this is not the body. This is not their hand.
Cold earth. The hand moves away. They rise like spores, disperse like spores. Disconnected from the body, in the air. Like dust motes hanging in a cube of light.
Another body breathes them. In its elseness, numb-limbed, they get a glimpse of warm being, thick-blooded, humming. They kindle, and wink out.
Then another.
At once, too many at once: hunger somewhere and pain elsewhere and feeling. A hurt in the soles of some feet and the chemical prickle in an eye and pain, everywhere pain. The finger calluses at plastic, grips at zip. The pain of others. And where becomes whose whose are they in or not are they this isn’t right the wrist a tight band a watch they don’t know it the sleeve tight on the skin white they don’t know it the turn towards a form on a bench there lift the cover just slight wrist creaks touches the eyelash of the body they can see. The face. Cold sleep. Cold fury.
They want their body back.