As you die, the thing sneers. Its greasy blare hums inside you as if it is fire, curdling and dripping and far too alive. It is mocking, because it knows you, drowning six feet deep in self-loathing, are pounding on the metal grille.

            Once, back when you had arms that glinted unscarred from sunlight to starlight, he had held you like you were an overfilled glass of chardonnay, sweet, sparkling, but bleeding inside. And maybe that’s why his love shattered—because his heart, too, was made of glass. But this was not the glass you reveled in; this was an opaque glass, a glass that reflected the love-steeped hate and broken beauty that stained your walls at 2:00 AM with the “why?” that bled the anger which finally shook tears from your unblinking eyes. They should have made you feel, if only temporarily, but you dug emotion’s grave along with his.

            The night he left you, he also left behind six things: “Someday you’ll run out of words.” Right then, he stole something from you, leaving only a hollowness that glowed when acknowledged, an aching that demanded to be felt.

            Later, when you returned to your night classes, the thing had spread. You tried to use words to disguise the emptiness in your letter writing elective, but you failed to even fool your instructor, an ancient man who had clearly struggled to freeze his youth. Watching him swagger around the cold linoleum lecture hall was like looking through a carelessly fashioned kaleidoscope; before long, he always clashed into himself in an eruption of forced, mismatched color.

            When the professor arranged to meet with you before class one day, he ended up shoving a stack of coffee-stained papers towards you. His mouth creaked open, and he inquired about your preference, no, your obsession for addressing all your letters to the thing. You told him that it simply had to be this way, but he refused to listen and instead demanded that you write to a variety of subjects if you ever wished to pass the class.

            Early the next morning, he was under you, squirming and writhing. Boiled butter had replaced blood, because he was burning backwards, burning uncontrolled. You had been surprised at the old man’s resistance, futile, of course, but nonetheless impassioned. It vaguely reminded you of the time you had sprinted on your treadmill knowing you would reach nowhere, but still running, always running.

            Within minutes, the professor slumped on the rusty sofa bed, dead. There was something restless about his expression that gasped its way into your heart. The thing caressed you the same way the pocketknife had when you sculpted your skin, and it felt beautiful, because you were making art. But the thing also mocked you and told you that their blood would never fill you, would never make you whole. Despite your infuriation, you wondered for the briefest of moments whether the thing was right.

            Silently, you gathered two milliliters of blood, then left.

            The grocer at Stew Leonard’s came next, followed by the biology major, the postman, and the teenager who worked part-time at the slaughterhouse. The last one had screamed the loudest, so you’d filled five milliliters of him into the vial.

            Eventually, when the vial reached its maximum at twenty-two, the thing gave you your last dare, to run to the treadmill’s end. After you peeled yourself open and poured the vial’s contents, oozing and smiling, into the place that was once yours, the thing, too, upturned its lips and smirked.

            And when you die, you have never been more alive. Neither has the thing.