#closedpost

He tried to work, or to at least keep his hands busy, but his joints ached and he felt more fatigued than he rightly should. Shock, he reminded himself, that's all. His ear throbbed with pain, the stitches itched beneath the bandage. He sipped from a flask to quiet it and uselessly fidgeted with wires and cogs for perhaps an hour more. At length he gave up, and decided to get some sleep.

That night the sirens came back. They wailed in starts and stops until half past midnight, then didn't start again. Twice he thought he heard gunfire. More times he heard screams.

He couldn't sleep, even when the noises from outside quieted. His bandaged ear itched and burned, and that strange not-hunger gnawed at him. He kept looking at the clock on the wall but he couldn't make sense of the numbers on its face. His throat had run dry, his mouth felt cottony, and he wasn't sure how long it had been that way. Cursing, he pushed himself up from the bed and immediately staggered to keep his balance. He felt dizzy, lightheaded, he felt like...

(like when he was a child and he'd had a bad fever. He couldn't walk because the floor kept tilting under his feet. Mamma sounded so worried, but he couldn't understand the words she said. He was freezing, but she put him in a tub of cold water. The butcher from down the street came, the butcher had ice from the meat locker. It was so cold, he thought he was going to die. He'd had such strange dreams--)

He grabbed onto the bookcase and righted himself. He shuffled to the bathroom and rifled through the medicine cabinet. He didn't turn on the light, he had such a headache already. That damn ear. He knocked over half the cabinet's contents before he found the bottle he was looking for, labelled 'Laudanum.' He uncorked it and took a generous swig. Soon the lightheaded dizziness felt a little more pleasant. He stumbled back to his room and collapsed in bed, quickly pulled under into sleep.

----

His sleep was fitful and restless. He dreamed he was drowning in the mud of a lonely foxhole, trying in vain to light a fuse that wouldn't catch.  He felt flies and many legged bugs flitting at his mouth and eyes, and he couldn't swat them away. It was dark, he was sinking, and he was so very hungry. It was unbearable, that hunger was eating him alive. He felt weak, anemic; the bugs swarmed in a dense cloud and he couldn't breathe. If only he could eat, if only he could have something to eat--

          He woke and at first couldn't comprehend where he was. He was standing in the dark, and his legs and hands felt sort of numb, like the feeling after a long day outside in the winter. He blinked and began to recognize his kitchen in the gloom. To his left, the icebox door was hanging open. The stale water smell of the icebox was tinged with something sharper, metallic. He was holding something in his hands, something cold and wet. With one hand he groped for the light switch and flicked it on.

His hands were red and now that red was smeared on the light switch. He looked at the thing still held in his hand. It was the veal sirloin he'd bought at the butcher yesterday, still raw, with chunks missing from it. The taste of meat and metallic blood sang on his tongue. He wanted to vomit. He dropped the raw meat and stumbled out of the kitchen in horror.