The last thing I want right now is to see something so alive.

I roll onto my side, not my stomach. If I lie on my stomach, it means I’d have to lie on my chest, and something aches in there, far too much to put even the slightest pressure on it.

I can still see the shadows, dancing across the corner of my eye.

I wish I could pull the blankets over my head. They may not even be thick enough to spare my eyes the sight of this light, but they might.

I make no move to adjust the sheets or the quilt. The quilt’s warm but it’s small. A reminder of the childhood I would now readily embrace. The sheets, worn flannel, lie across my body, a smothering cocoon that ends at my shoulder.

The sheets are big enough to cover me from head to toe, but they remain where they are. If I pull them over my head, they’ll push and pull and weigh down those parts that I want to forget I have.

I can never forget.

The feel of the fabric clinging to them, forming their outline, easily visible to anyone who opens the door - unbearable.

Lying here, their hideous, sinful mark is visible, obvious and huge, naked and illuminated by the night sky.

I shiver and my body tightens by itself. It wants to be a ball. My knees come up, fitting snugly, perfectly, beneath my chin, and one arm wraps around them. The other creeps up, wanting to pillow my head, move it closer, rest it alongside my knees, my nose tucked against the little dip on the side.

The inside of my elbow, pallid, naked flesh, brushes against an ear.

Fiercely, I jerk my limbs back into position, straight as a lute string and twice as tense.

With every passing day it seems like the demon inside me, long only visible to my own eyes, is trying to make itself more and more tangible to the real world outside my mind, take over my body piece by piece, crying out my secret shame and it’s wild, unholy delight.

Those lights are so annoying. Frustrating, intrusive, bubbly things. Even if the core of my soul weren’t being plagued with how alive they are, I should still find them disruptive. I usually do. Nothing so jarring would disturb my nights as a child, before I came here.

I came here, thinking myself full grown, ready to face life without the gentle, guiding voice of my mother, and the stern, occasionally sharp hand of my father.

It wasn’t until the demon made itself known that I realized my life until then had been the life of a child.

I miss that life.

Sensibly, rationally, logically, I know all I need to do is get out of bed and cross the room to the window, drawing the curtains. Those heavy, moth-eaten things could block the light from an explosion of the sun. But to bring myself so close to the window, I would invariably see the sky. Not in the sparkling, darting shadows it’s creating on my ceiling, but the real thing - huge, overwhelming, bursting with life and colour. Too much, hurting my eyes and my heart.

The part of me that can hear the demon points out that I could easily get to the window without even looking. All I would have to do is get up and shut my eyes, and the demon would guide me there.

I refuse to depend on the demon for anything it isn’t already forcing me to with circumstances beyond my control, beyond my comprehension.

I wish Rin were here.

If Rin were here, he would close the drapes for me, although he wouldn’t understand why I would make such an odd request in the middle of the night. He’d do it just the same, though, with more teasing than strictly necessary.

If Rin were here, he’d be just through the side door, sleeping, maybe. I could get out of bed and open the door, then give the bed a kick to wake him up. Just a little kick, maybe. Then I could ask him to draw the curtains, or to come and play me something on his lute.

Rin doesn’t play the lute very well at all.

Normally, Rin’s lute just sits around, collecting dust and being eaten away by the unmentionable bugs that litter this land. Sometimes, when he’s suffering severely from a case of love, he’ll dust it out and try to compose love songs for the girl of the hour.

While it’s awful, I like listening to it. It’s familiar. It sounds the same as it did when Rin abandoned learning the lute about ten years ago. It’s still the same, slightly off-key, almost melodic, heavy, rough plunking sound that makes me forget about everything.

If I could hear that lute, I could ignore the dancing shadows, ignore the demon, ignore everything, and finally get to sleep.

Rin’s not here.

I can’t ask him to draw the curtains or play his horrible lute.

Rin left, early in the evening, for some kind of party down in the city. He was going with some of the other boys, his current lady love, but not me.

He asked me. He always does. He smiles and jokes, like he used to before the demon took hold of me, and invited me to join them down in the city, drinking, laughing, dancing. His lips said one thing, but I haven’t known him all our lives to be able to tell when his eyes say something else.

He didn’t want me there.

He didn’t want me to be seen by the people frequenting whatever louse-filled tavern they were all going to.

He didn’t want himself to be seen with me.

Around here, it’s all right. Most people can remember how I was before the change. Some people even try to treat me like a normal person, the way Rin does.

Out, down there, in the city, no one knows me. No one knew me when I first came to this foreign land with Rin, his quiet, secretly smiling shadow, easy to laugh, slow to anger, and apt to become so absorbed in my work that I’d lose all track of time.

All the people down in the city would see would be those parts of me the demon now controls. How could anyone not notice them?

I think Rin’s new beloved is from the city.

May God forgive me for potentially tarnishing Rin in the sight of some chit that he’ll forget the name of in a week anyway, simply by being of his blood and possessed by some demon creature.

Sometimes Rin won’t even speak out for me anymore. I’m sure he wants to. He loves me. We’re siblings, he and I, and we both understand that.

All I need think of, though, is the sight of Rin’s head tilting slightly so he can’t see me, pretending to focus on his work, becoming far more intent upon it than he could ever possibly be. When he works like that, he doesn’t have to watch as the older ones, who remember me before my change, tug at the hateful demon appendages, or casually shake their pens, getting ink all over their painful, unignorable brightness.

I’d like to leave them like that, dark and ink smeared, perhaps slightly less noticeable. Every time it happens, I think it will. But the ink makes them itch, makes me itch, and before long, I have to go and wash it off.

I lock myself in the bath house outside and strip down so I stand, shivering and pale. I pump in water, but don’t very much. It’s cold, as cold as the snow, and not even that clean.

Then I cringe in shame as I wash the demon’s parts, first with the water, and then crouched down on the floor, with one leg tucked beneath me and the other pulled up so my cheek can rest on it. One hand is splayed on the floor, near my tucked leg, and the other is used to wash the warped pieces that belong to the demon like some sort of animal.

I can’t control myself.

The demon knows I’ve washed these parts of its body in unclean water and its demands are fierce, overpowering, and I obey it every time, breaking before its power like a twig, letting myself be an animal in its power, licking my palm and fingers,