you made hell feel like home; any

[rapt]

there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail ------ the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream ------------ but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever The shift is subtle, at first, the way one does not recall the exact moment of slipping from wakefulness into sleep. The world blurs and reshapes, just slightly, everything off-kilter in a way he does not consciously recognize, not yet. He is focused on her, on the way her eyes are glazed in galaxies, on the promises she makes. Trust me, she says. And he – no stranger to blind faith – does. He looks down. To the earth. The sand? And back up. The sun burns hotter on his back than it had before. The trees are gone, if they were ever there, and they are back in the desert. She is smiling. Her fangs gleam. Had she always had fangs? He can’t recall. She’s close. Touching him like he belongs to her (maybe he does, or maybe he will – oh, how he likes to belong!). He can feel the cool press of fangs when she does. Close enough to bite. To tear and rend. She whispers, instead. Soft as anything. Do you see? He looks where she does. He sees. The sand shifts and humps and rises, a living, organic thing. The sand falls away from It – from him - and the monster is there, goat horns curling, smile curling like smoke on those poisonous lips. He is trembling, or maybe the ground is moving again. “I see,” he says, and his voice is oh-so-quiet, reverent, “you brought him here.” rapt caius x else