Unseaming by Mike Allen Page A

After all you’ve done?”
The temptation to hurl my tormentor off the balcony returned. I thought about how his strange flesh would feel, tearing apart underneath my grip. “You’re on thin ice. I don’t care what kind of little god you might be here. Don’t talk in circles. Tell me what this is about.”
Humpty curled his limbs into the grillwork of the rail. His smoldering eye-socket winked at me. “I should have known. Here inside your macrocosm, you’re insulated from who you are. Here, you’re what you want to be.”
“You’re full of shit.”
“No, foam.” He grinned. All his teeth were restored. “So who are you, really? And whose apartment are we in?”
I knelt down to glare at this demon from my past, eyes to eye. “My name is Michael Carver. And this is my apartment. If you weren’t in my head, I’d be looking down on Salem Boulevard right now.”
“Wrong. This is Melissa’s apartment. Or at least that’s the name she gave you. If you weren’t outside space-time, the view you’d see from here would be the view you had when you tipped her body out over the street.”
A worm slithered inside me. Humpty casually unwound one of his arms, held out a hand as if offering change to a beggar. “Would you like me to tell you what you did to her before you pitched her into the dark?”
My fingers crooked into claws. “This is a dream, and this is a lie.”
“The T-shirt you’re wearing.” His free hand tugged at my collar. “It belongs to Jerry Coolidge. You remember him?”
“My name is Michael Carver. I live here above Salem Boulevard. I fucking flip burgers for a living, stay home at night and try to write music. I’ve even sold jingles to a local auto dealership.”
“You met Jerry at…the kind of establishment you frequent, and invited him back to your domicile, which looks nothing like this. He even agreed to the handcuffs. Then you strangled him.”
I grabbed for himm—his teeth gnashed, even more of them shattering—but my fingers were suddenly on fire. When I held my hand up, the slashes across my knuckles were outlined in radioactive green. They faded as I watched, the sting that accompanied them lingering a few seconds more.
“See,” he said, “I’m more dangerous then you think. Just hear me out.”
“No. My name is Michael Carver. These calluses on my hands come from plucking guitar strings, thinking notes out loud. I would never do what you’re accusing me of.”
“But you do, all the time. You don’t flip burgers, Michael. You work in a slaughter house. You line up the necks of turkeys so that the spinning blades cut their throats. The little peeping sound they make when they die drives you absolutely ape. You couldn’t even finger the first chord on a guitar neck. Carver isn’t even your last name. It’s what you do .”
My insides writhed. “That’s not true.”
Humpty’s fiery eye-socket narrowed. “Would you like it not to be true?”
What if it wasn’t a dream? What if it wasn’t? “Yes. Okay. How?”
“We have to leave this place.”
Whether I was dreaming or truly in another universe, it made sense to me to follow this homunculus from my childhood and bring this nightmare to a quick end. And wake up to what? Fingering guitar strings above a flow of headlights, or dried blood, sweat, and a stink of death in my pores?
Strutting like a majorette, he lead me out into a featureless hallway that terminated in stairs. “They’re steep,” he remarked. “Be careful.”
The stairs plunged in a tight spiral. Their texture gradually changed, from the rugged carpeting of my apartment complex to the warped and creaking boards of my grandfather’s house, that conglomeration of peeling plaster and rotting wood where my father raised me. Humpty scurried before me on all fours.
I called down to him, “Why are you helping me? I made my father shred you into pieces.”
The glint of green that was his eye-socket paused in shadow. “There’s no more time. Even using