i hope ur nuclear seal baby gets eaten by birds

I always thought it was an honor to be your blanket.

I wasn’t your only blanket, of course; you hadn’t even owned me for very long. You had summer sheets and comforters, thin and weighted blankets for the heat and for the cold; even a knitted patchwork quilt, smelling faintly of old smoke and cats, that you’d rescued from a secondhand shop. But I was your blanket. And for these late-spring-to-early-summer months, barring the lingering chill of a long winter or the tidal crest of some over-eager heat wave, I was the blanket you made your bed with.

I took the responsibility seriously.

The short time we were together, before the end, I remember as being a pleasant, uncomplicated existence; whatever personal events that might have sculpted the topography of your day-to-day life were alien to me, beyond my pay grade and irrelevant to task. If you had a partner, you never brought them home — if you had family, they never made it past the living room. It was my function and my duty to keep the cold at bay, to warm and to comfort you from the moment the lights turned out to the first chirp of birdsong beyond your bedroom window; to prop up your head when the pillows lay too flat and gently press your arms to your sides when you became fidgety or irritable in sleep.

In return, you treated me to non-abrasive detergents and a dry cycle with a clean lint trap, where I could fluff and tumble happily and contemplate how best to tempt you into sleep on even the most insomniac of nights. And when you took me out of the dryer, just before you folded me neatly and laid me back out on your bed, you would bundle me up in your arms and bury your face in my threads, suffusing your senses with the crisp, clean smell of dry linen.

I lived for your sigh of satisfaction; I rewarded you with a lack of wrinkles, and tried to pass the scent off to your clothes and your sheets whenever I had the chance. I wonder if you ever noticed how long it lingered?

I was good. I was the best. Because I was your blanket — Benjamin Hatendi’s blanket — and I was proud of that.

-

The start of the end fell on laundry day: Robin’s mum called you in the late afternoon. You left the house before the rinse cycle was done. You didn't return until long after it ended.

My memories of that evening are soggy — I’m never very clear on things that happen in the wash, clogged with water and drunk with suds, dizzy from the endless, wheeling rounds of the drum. I remember you coming home, shuffling like a zombie past the threshold. I remember the smell that trailed in with you, rancid honey and brine scum; that your shadow seemed to stretch out forever behind you, a black sea in your wake.

I remember you sat on the sofa for a long time, staring at the date on your wall calendar, before stripping off your clothes in a frenzy of disgust; you found me in the washer when you came to dump them inside. I remember you threw out your shoes.

That night was when the darkness slipped inside, to colonize our home with pitch air and starless horizons. I’d never seen you cry before. You shook and wept and snotted into my startled embrace, babbling fervent pleas for sanctuary; and though I didn't know why, or what it looked like to you, or how it paralyzed your mind and soul and fitted you for the shell you would become, still I spread myself wide over your huddled form and stood in defiance of a horror that did not have a name.

Even then, despite the threat it posed to you, I remember how subtly beautiful it appeared to me: its mirage of motion, its consumptive yet elusive silhouette. It was the antonym to ripples of sunlight dappling the pebbled plane at the bottom of your fish tank — a photo-negative of rainbows refracting through a prism into shifting fractals. It was an iridescence made of voids overlapping, gelling into slime. It pulsed. It curdled. It oozed. And every time you lifted my borders to peer out, desperate to simplify its form down to the sane mathematics of rods and cones, it danced for you: a featureless waltz, seeping closer with every sight.

Even then, I knew it loved you.

In the morning it was gone, the pale grey rays of dawn scattering its caliginous mass of all-and-every-shadow back to their proper contours, and you awoke shaken, but whole. All was as it should be. Though the clammy tang of fear sweat that now clung to my rumpled edges was an undiscovered element that concerned me as well as enthralled me, as far as I was aware, I hadn’t done anything so spectacular as save your life: I’d just done my duty. I’d made you comfortable.

The world went on turning for us that day, just as it always had: pleasant, uncomplicated. It was easy to believe that it would turn that way forever.

Until the next night, when the darkness came again. And the night after that.

And the night after that. Again.

I must confess: I could never have understood what new complexities had entered into our increasingly strange co-existence. Childhood phobias were not my expertise, and I knew so little of who you were beyond the shape of you beneath me that the concept wouldn't have made sense even if I had tried to learn. But things never became particularly more complicated, either. Not because adjusting to a reality where I was no longer an accessory but a necessity was simple, but because you’d already given me every motivation to evolve.

You needed me.

No, it went far beyond need: you wanted me, begged for me. Prayed to me. I was not the only blanket you owned, that was still true, but it was I who you’d chosen as your confessor, your savior — your shield. And I was overjoyed at being asked to further prove my loyalty to you.

Every night, I gathered you close beneath an impenetrable mantle of safety. Every night, I swaddled you in sweet, restful denial, and watched the absence of light circle our bed in its torpid, tendriled dance, resolute in the knowledge that I would never, never, let it touch you.

I was your blanket — I would be your knight.

But the longer my defenses held, the less you thought of my efforts. A full week went by, and your gratefulness came to an end. You became complacent, assured of your invincibility; certain, somehow, that you’d been too clever for the darkness to catch, that you had outsmarted it. That you, and you alone, had saved yourself. And in time, you failed to reward even the most basic fulfillment of my function.

Do you remember what you said, when you tossed me in the wash that weekend? When you left me to cool in the dryer that evening, and the days that followed after that — when you abandoned me to silence, and steel, and the devouring dusk — and later crept beneath your summer sheets for solace?

I remember, Benjamin. You said: “Any blanket should do."

And I started to resent you.

How could you forget me? After all I’d done for you, how could you just…leave me behind? Oh, certainly, any blanket could do, but when night fell and rose and crept into your doorway, it was me who you reached out for — me you asked to save you. For seven days, and seven nights, it was always me.

Did it all mean nothing?

You didn’t hold me close because you truly wanted me there, did you? Not because you cared for me like I cared for you: because you needed me. Was it only ever to save yourself?

Was that all I ever was to you? All I ever would be? A sacrifice?

It’s been half a week since the summer sheets. This morning, when you finally remembered me, when you freed me from the dryer and folded me back against your chest — pressed your face into my fabric and breathed in deep of my fresh linen scent, sighing in relief as you remembered all the familiar comfort that my presence had provided you — I almost forgot how cruelly you’d used me. And as you carried me back to our bed, to the sanctuary I had spent so long in guarding, I found I could almost have forgiven you your short-sighted ignorance.

If only you had taken off the summer sheets.

-

The street lights are a baleful glow outside the window. The waspish drone of their fluorescence vibrates distantly against the pane. They can no longer reach us here.

You slumber once more underneath my cover, as peaceful as a lamb, and the swollen, seeking tendrils of night are seeping void like ink across the carpet; their suffocating, brackish odor lapping plaintively along my linen shores. The dark no longer needs your permission to move. It likely never did.

Do you see it? The way it looks at you? Do you see how it salivates over every glance, every half-delirious peek from out the shelter of my canopy that invites it further in? Do you know that when your hummingbird heart skips a beat across my folds and stitches, the darkness, dancing, keeps time?

Listen — it's singing you a lullaby in the pop of snuffed-out lightbulbs.

What is it about you that's so special, Benjamin? What does the darkness see in you that is so delectable?

You weak, spineless thing, who cannot defend yourself even if you had the stomach to try. You ungrateful, songless thing, who offers no applause to the shadows that perform upon your stage; who stumbles out of tempo with their tender, gloaming waltz because you would rather stop your ears in naïve and ignorant terror of the strangeness of a wonder you refuse to comprehend.

You child, self-absorbed in your arrogant misconception that you are somehow worthy of both a selfless love and selfless protection from that love. Never once thinking that I might come to find more in common with the Forever Blind than with its fragile, selfish paramour.

Today was the first of March. Soon, it will be the second.

In one hour you will wake in a cold sweat, as you always do, shivering in fright as you flee the phantoms of your own imagination. In one hour, as you always do, you will reach with your feeble, trembling fingers for my protection. But you will not find me there.

I give you over to the darkness that consumes you. I give you over to its courting, endless advance; to its loving and hungry and ever-reaching arms that have waited so patiently upon your full attention. And when it comes to devour you, I will wrap you up tight, and tuck in all the corners, so that nothing is left behind.