Flash Fiction: Letting go

Climbing on the clouds like floating ladder leveled mattresses trying to catch up with the bastard that stole him from me—I’m holding onto his skull because it’s all I have left, but it’s slipping away fast between my fingers—not slipping down, no, being dragged. Pried from my fingers by the same force that stole him from me to begin with. My biggest concern are the eyes—the windows to his soul. But the shadow bodied thief grabs at them as I climb, pushing off the hard fluff, a layer at a time. The flesh is gone from Scott’s face, and muscles too. It looks nothing like him, and the eyes are terrifying. Bulging from their sockets, staring in every direction at once. But I can’t bear to let go.

                A voice, its pitch both unfathomable and indistinguishable.

I can hear, but not understand, and as I pull myself to the next level of cloud mass, now extended past the boundaries of the earth’s atmospheric protection, the eyes are stolen from me. Their slimy surface wrenched from between my struggling fingers.

Reversal.

I chase the shadow, grabbing at its ends as if they’re coat tails. The clouds are now gone, and I claw at the thinning air. I’m gasping for breath, suffocating in the vacuum that is rapidly taking over the sky. The stars are bright, but not bright enough, and all I can do is keep chasing the eyeballs. Trying to get them back. Trying to hold onto the only real part of him that’s left to me.

Even though I know he’s gone.

I push off of the little air that’s left, like a swimmer pushing off the edge of a lap pool, and make a dash for the eyes. The shadow reels. Showing a terrifying, unexpected face, with gnashing teeth and piercing eyes. Yellow to the depths of my stomach. Grabs the skull from beneath my left arm where it was cradled. The voice again.

It is only bone. Nothing to me. Do you want to lose it too?

                No, I cry. I’ll take it.

                It laughs. Tosses it like a ball to a small child.

                I hold it in my arms. Tears trickle like the last drops after a storm. The shadow is gone in the distance, and all I can do is retreat.

                I awake cradling the pillow.