Starving

 The hunger had long since ceased to be an ache; it was a cathedral of exquisite, interior ruin. Elias was no longer a man, but a reliquary for his own expiration, a hollowed vessel where the soul had been crowded out by the vast, echoing geography of his own starving entrails.

He lay amidst the velvet ruins of the parlor, listening to the house digest itself. The manor was a sentient parasite, its dry rot inhaling the stale air, its floorboards shivering with a hunger that mirrored his own. He was becoming the house, and the house was becoming his tomb. His skin, translucent and mapped with the blue, stagnant ink of failing circulation, clung to his skeletal frame like damp tissue paper left out in the rain.

He saw the rats. They did not fear him; why should they fear a corpse that still drew breath? They emerged from the wainscotting, their movements slick and fluid, their eyes tiny, wet coals of obsidian. They skittered across his chest, their claws dragging over his ribs like violin bows on brittle glass. He could smell them—the musk of their fur, the scent of the filth they thrived upon—and a primitive, sickening vibration shuddered through his wasted nerves.

He realized then that the hunger had evolved. It was no longer a craving for bread or meat. It was a hunger for the cessation of the agonizing, rhythmic *thump* behind his sternum.

He hallucinated the wallpaper peeling back in long, wet strips of skin. He heard the voices of ancestors buried beneath the floorboards, their teeth chattering in a cacophony of eternal starvation, beckoning him to join them in the dark, pressed-earth silence. They promised that the feast below was endless, provided one was willing to be the main course.

A madness blossomed behind his eyes—a dark, floral decay. He reached out with fingers that felt like charred twigs, trying to catch a shadow, trying to cram the darkness into his mouth to fill the yawning abyss where his stomach once rested. He wept, but there was no moisture left in him; his tear ducts were clogged with grit, and his eyes merely burned with the dry, searing heat of a kiln.

The last thing he felt was not pain, but a cold, wet sensation at his throat. The house was finally leaning in, pressing its rotting architecture against his skin, closing the distance. As the light in his mind flickered and died, he understood, with a final, jagged clarity, that he was not dying alone. He was being absorbed. He was sustenance.

He did not pass away; he was simply unmade, layer by layer, until the house was full again, and the silence in the room was absolute, satisfied, and profoundly heavy with the flavor of his undoing.

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