He waits in the gloomy corners of my room, as ethereal as a whisper, were there one. His hunched back curls his horny head into every nook and cranny of every room. His knobbly fingers slime a slippery trail around every doorway.
When I wander in the garden, he hovers in the hungry holes of the leaves of plants, left as gifts by voracious worms, and licks lasciviously at the drooping heads of dying flowers, enveloping every hue.
When I do go out, which is not often, he lurks for me in the car, lying sleepily in the back seat. His voice, then, is a sigh, as silent as an unspoken word.
He breeds on himself, feeding hungrily on hollows, groaning ghoulishly: waiting, always waiting, for some small vestige of myself to sprout from some minute wraith of hope. Smiling his sinister smile, he plucks that fragile sprout with flailing roots, squashes the tiny life form in his gnarly teeth, suckling from its tenderness.
But most of all, his rheumy eyes penetrate the deepest recesses of my heart and mind, claiming every thought, every idea, every action.
And so he grows, ever larger, over looming, ever predatory.
‘Is this it, then, God? Is this my lover who comes to me in the dark of night, and teases toothlessly at the tears that damp my cheek?’ Must I learn to embrace him?, I whisper as the Trog Monster claims me. The arrhythmia of my aching soul falls exhausted into the apnea of sleep, lest I breathe him in.
Lovely!
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