"The Companion" by Winona Morris

The Companion

by Winona Morris

I wake up in the mud this time. The air smells like rain and iron, and I know without looking that the slick and tacky mess I feel all over my skin isn’t all from the muck I woke up in.

It is dark, and I am covered in mud, but it’s quiet, and for one glorious, aching second I think I’m alone.

Then I hear the panting. Fast and heavy, and with my eyes closed, I can envision the animal it belongs to. Red tongue lolling between ragged teeth, the smell of fresh blood and old rot rushing out with every exhale.

I stay still, letting the ground swallow my legs, letting my arms float atop the shallow muck. I keep my eyes closed, counting the beats between pants. I try to breathe in rhythm with it, to give myself the illusion that there is only one of us. Sometimes this trick works. Not always. Not this time.

I open my eyes.

Nothing is there. Nothing is always there. 

It shifts beside me, stirring the surface of the muck I’m lying in.  I feel the weight of its gaze, and the heat of its breath.

It’s strange how something invisible can take up so much space.

The rain comes again, stirring the scrim of dirty water around me.

The rain doesn’t cleanse as much as it erases. It drags the mud from my skin in gray ribbons, thins the blood until it looks like rust, until it is just a fragment of a memory of a nightmare. It fills all the hollows in my body. Some drops trace the paths of the veins under my skin, a lover’s caress. Other drops bite cold, carrying pieces of me into the earth until I can’t tell where I end and the dirt begins.

Still, the panting beside me, louder, closer.

It wants me to acknowledge it. To speak its name out loud.

There are rules even for things like this. You don’t feed what follows you. You don’t call it what it wants to be called.

“Please,” I whisper, “no more.”

The panting slows to a stop

For a heartbeat, I almost believe it’s gone.

The silence thickens. Like a living thing, it presses against my ribs like a held breath. In the quiet, I can feel nothing there, waiting for me to move first. 

It always waits.

It’s patient, my nothing. It waits while I crawl from the ground, while I wash my hands in the rain, while I try to remember who I was before it found me.

Sometimes, I try to remember the first time I woke up like this. How did I first react the moment I realized the blood wasn’t mine? I pretend to remember running through trees that seemed to close around me like ribs around a beating heart. Did I think that if I could make it to light, any light at all, it would fade? No blood, no nothing, just nightmares. 

I really only remember that when I stopped to breathe, I first heard it, panting in the dark, already beside me. Always beside me, never really panting, but laughing the way animals and beasts of the night laugh.

Nothing never leaves, and realization comes with the rain.

I’ve not been running away all this time.

I’ve been running towards it.

The memory rises like something dredged from the bottom of a river. There was a flash of fur in the headlights, the scream that wasn’t an animal’s, the warmth spilling over my hands. The dark shape in the road and the hair that wasn’t fur at all, and my nothing birthed itself from the sob that broke out of me, all blunt edges and sharp angles, all horror, grief, fear.

No, that was wrong.

It had been the other way around.

It was me caught in the headlights, frozen in place until being struck, tossed to the cold edge of the road. Nobody stopped. Nobody cried for me. Nobody told me they were sorry, or begged me not to leave.

Nobody but nothing kneeling beside the remains of me, panting me back to some kind of life.

I don’t know which came first, the accident or the nothing, but I remember kneeling beside it (it kneeling beside me) and whispering to it. Telling it I was sorry. Asking it not to leave.

And it didn’t.

The rain beats harder. The soil churns as if something beneath the surface is breathing.

“Stop,” I say. My voice sounds small, swallowed by the storm. “Please. I didn’t mean—”

But the thought never finishes. The air beside me exhales, the pressure in my ribs relieved. 

I close my eyes again and feel it step beside me. The heat of nothing seeps through the chill, and I hold out my hand, watching rainwater drip off the tips of my fingers. Longing for something to touch me, a head nudging into the cup of my palm, or invisible fingers interlocking with my empty ones.

“Just a little longer,” I whisper.

Tomorrow, I’ll wake up somewhere new. Maybe it will be dark, maybe it will be daylight. I might find myself in grass, gravel, or once again on the edge of a road.  

I’ll wake up outside, covered in blood, and I’ll think, for one glorious, aching second, that I’m alone.