Unseaming by Mike Allen Page B

the shortcut of your macrocosm, I nearly found you too late.” He continued his descent. “Right now, within the bounds of normal space-time, the police are on their way to your flat. And they’re going to find the things you have stuffed under your bed. And they’ll find what you have soaking in your bathtub.”
“I told you I haven’t done anything.”
“Once they find those things, once you’re caught, it’s all over. Too many other time-streams mingled with yours. It won’t be possible to fix what your father did.”
We emerged from a portal, began a hike across the convoluted terrain of sheets and blankets. Cresting a fold, I beheld the remains of my childhood. The body I wore in infancy, a boneless shell, a shriveled egg case. Empty eyeholes stared in wildly different directions from my collapsed, deflated face.
“He’s in there,” Humpty said. Your father.”
* * *
     
We ascended the spongy slope of a boneless cheek, lowered ourselves into the fleshy cavern of an empty eye. “He lives here now,” said Humpty. “If you want to save yourself, you’ll have to evict him.”
“How?” No answer came. Humpty had vanished, swallowed up, it seemed, in the folds of my childhood’s hollowed-out husk. This abandonment brought only a moment’s panic, quickly replaced by relief. That creature was no source of nostalgia; I was glad he’d left me.
I continued the descent, intent on bringing this ordeal to its conclusion. I clambered down through the optic nerve channel, through a heavy wooden trapdoor, into a space I assumed to be my own skull cavity. But it was my father’s cluttered study, a room I’d only seen via forbidden glimpses through a keyhole while my father was still alive. The same room where he’d finally had his heart attack.
He was seated at his desk, digging a fountain pen into a cut on his hand, using the blood to write in a book. All at once he started, looked up at me and bellowed, “What the hell are you doing in here?”
“This is my universe,” I said. “You don’t belong in it.”
“The hell I don’t. I created everything here, including you.” He stood up.
“You scooped this out of me. You stole the life that belonged to me.” I could feel the blue aura building inside me that I’d been helpless to use as a child, that I never had learned to use.
“Shut up!” Fire erupted from his mouth. Suddenly I was blind. I stumbled over something and fell, my face a mask of pain. My vision returned, blurred with agony. He stood over me, smoke streaming from his eyes, mouth radiating red from the magma heat inside him.
Blue light reflected from the polished floor, that glow coming out of me, and I was helpless, unable to strike with it, unable to comprehend how. My frustration imploded into the purest rage I’ve ever felt. I came roaring up, seizing the leg of the lamp table as I rose. The lamp shattered on the floor as I swung the table at my father’s head. The blow connected, the impact jarring my elbow, wrenching my shoulder; then the table exploded in a burst of fire.
The force threw me against a wall. I felt a hundred splinters embed themselves. I screamed. A stack of storage crates collapsed on top of me, their weight crushing the air out of my lungs. Humpty’s idiot smile leered at me, his torn-up remains spilled from one of the boxes.
I grasped one of his long cloth arms.
My father loomed over me, grinning, gloating. He opened his mouth to breathe. I hooked his ankle with mine, and sent him sprawling. He grunted like a boar when he landed. I sprang on him before he could recover, and wrapped Humpty’s arm around his throat.
He drew in breath to blast me, but I twisted my arm-tourniquet tighter. He thrashed, his face purpling. The smoke from his eyes fizzled to nothing, leaving empty sockets.
Humpty’s arm twitched in my grip.
I cried out, jumped back. Instead of releasing, the arm began to tighten of its own accord.
My father’s face withered like paper set aflame. First