Ceiling Eater
Flash Fiction
The ceiling became his task. He couldn’t avoid its angles and bumps where he created constellations on the glimmers of sleep marking time. He starved for sleep, and he tossed under covers.
Worms of thought without head or tail moved through the soil of his grave under a roof of stars, filled with holes of light that leaked onto his headstone.
He had lost hearing in his right ear from all the music he played to fight the day and developed a sharp, shrill ringing that wouldn’t go away. In the shadows, he saw a memory of letting go of a balloon as a child, and the ceiling kept it safe.
The mind escaped the body, feeding itself whatever boundary it could, and suddenly, in the dead of night, on a beach, a house, sinking into the sand, and his family asking him where he had been. He danced on the walls of a hedge grove maze, seeing the center and lost all the same. His eyelids ate the ceiling, piece by piece until he fell asleep.
