Holden, 3.D.4, 200 words
He slips through the portal. Heat wrenches the room. Another man presses against Jack’s skin from inside. Though in the divine darkness just below, his form, seemingly a shy trace of Jack himself, cannot truly be defined. Such mysteries within man dwell. As complete as Jack is, so is this man. The striped upholstery scrolls. His shadows cast gestures against the wrong side of Jack’s clothes. His fingers swell and his dappled skin tightens. He finds also a small thicket of rusted pins and slender nails on the grout below the window sash. He sits on the toilet. The rhythm of days ends. He pushes the most slender pins into his perineum and the small nails into his thighs. Clotted blood collars remain bound to the lances and drip into the toilet bowl. At first marbled with immiscible clots a solid opaque form in the bowl forms that he lets grow long as it can from the rush warm beneath him, not overflowing but rising high until the apertures scab on the undersides of his thighs and testicles. Down between his gray legs reflects a black sky like half of an egg-shaped stone cleft flat by veins of night ice.