Unseaming by Mike Allen

started to wail; I hadn’t yet learned not to. This only egged my father on. He was panting through his teeth, the rush of the kill taking over.
Humpty’s oval body split at the seams, and I thought I saw a yellow vapor pour out from the wound, pour into my father through his mouth, eyes, ears. A final roar of effort from my father’s throat, and Humpty’s white innards sprayed everywhere. I screamed.
“Won’t hurt you now, will he?”
I looked up into my father’s lunatic eyes. This time, he reached for me.
* * *
     
Humpty’s teeth shattered against my skin. As wicked as they looked, they were fragile as eggshells. My hand closed on something , stuffing, intestines, a tongue. I sprang from the bed and pushed open the sliding doors. He’d been able to climb back over the rails of my crib; but a fall from a fifth-story balcony into the traffic of Salem Boulevard, still busy even at this time of night, would present a more formidable challenge. Not to mention the wind that blows so cold and hard at this height, a wind that would sweep my tiny friend into God-knew-what predicament.
But only silence and darkness greeted me beyond the balcony. Empty heat stifled the air. No half-shaded windows ogled me sleepily from across the street, no bloodstream flow of headlights washed the boulevard. I’d walked out onto a perch offering a view of a vast, empty stage. What was worse, the structure housing my apartment continued down into darkness, a featureless pillar, no other balconies or lights adorning it.
The piece of Humpty in my grip squirmed. I tossed him aside with a yell. He propped himself up on all fours in his spiderlike manner, his face oriented topside. His mouth opened and closed, his gums flexing like a shark’s, new teeth popping in to replace the broken ones.
“Explain this,” I demanded, grateful my voice didn’t shake.
“I was trying to when you attacked me.” He used the balcony grillwork to pull himself upright. “You are in metareality. The auxiliary macrocosm of the timestream you inhabit. Connected events that you would normally experience as single points along the long straight line of your existence are directly linked here, grouped into wholes through the grace of a higher dimension. We’re at the heart of everything, here. And everything here, is you .”
I barely heard him. A pall of familiarity had settled over this strange new landscape. The mottled plain I perceived far below might be nothing more than a mite’s-eye view of carpet. The pillar we looked out from, and the identical ones looming to either side, nothing more than bars of a crib.
An evil shape, unimaginably huge, approached through the greater darkness, its titanic footfalls muffled by the stagnant air. Amorphous, mottled with shifting light and shadow, it towered into the gray sky. I backed away, meaning to hide, but Humpty whispered, “No! Stay. Watch.”
From behind us, a burst of blue light suddenly cast the shifting form into full relief—my father, his broad bare chest, his thin sinewy arms, bulbous belly, the malformed moon of his face. He opened his mouth and an orange jack-o’-lantern glow gushed in a stream from his throat. Behind us, a horrible scream rose, as my father’s ectoplasmic vomitus bored through a sudden blue light, and I screamed too, in recognition.
* * *
     
It felt like a tongue, a sandpapery cat’s tongue, scouring me out from the inside.
Hollowing me out…
My father’s demon visage hovered over me, his skull outlined in flame beneath his skin, a monstrous sun over the well of my crib. That stream of yellow spiraling out of his mouth, burrowing into me. I knew the blue shining out of me was my defense, my only way to fend him off, but I didn’t know how to use it. I didn’t know how.
* * *
     
“Good,” Humpty whispered. “You remember. But do you understand?”
The stage was empty again; my father had vanished.
“Understand what? What was he doing to me?”
“You don’t know, Michael?