Starvation

[Quincunx]

Hours later, maybe days. His body had separated; heavy on the side facing the earth, and vaporous on the side facing the sky. His leaden eyes were still, but his ear collected the sounds of the fly, gift of the air. A thread of buzzing spilled out of the cup of his ear and ascended, and in his mind he flew with it, maybe to land on the cheek of the NGO and feel fatness, remember what fatness felt like. The thought towed him back into his body and waded through the weight, probing. No reply. Nothing but the fly, dripping more sound over his earlobe--it had returned--dropping a buzz into every fold until his ear was full and weighed down with sound. Another gift. The fly landed on the boundary of the vapor, tapped the surface of the sound with its clawed feet, generated ripples. His ear realized his own cheek as the fly rubbed its feet against the skin; the vapor did not follow the lines of the memory of fatness.

[Wyvern]

Interesting short, Quincunx. :-) Oddly, the first two times I read it, my brain somehow didn't connect the title of the work to the subject it was dealing with. I gathered that it was a person on the verge of dying, though, after which point the title suddenly registered with me. I like how you use the fly in this piece, as the way that it provided the starving man with brief moments of mental escape was an interesting concept and quite sad. One thing that threw me off when initially reading this was the "vaporous" description of the side of the man facing the sky... the imagery circulating around vapor was tougher for me to visualize, though perhaps the vaporous elements were meant to extend beyond the physical?

 

This is nicely done Quin, short as it may be. Thanks for sharing it. :-)