It was the sensation of one’s skin going bitter, one’s nerves recoiling, which was most essential. The sensation of one’s fingernails on a blackboard – Anton flexes, his body dried thoroughly after a second shower taken to remove any residual greases, powdered with talc, palms of hands and soles of feet thoroughly caked in chalk. He is underneath a geometric structure of textured paper that he has been preparing for a day, having sacrificed further months towards finding the correct arrangement.
He trails a fingernail along one of the structure’s walls, echoing what he has already drawn there in jagged silverpoint: a pattern of waves and spikes and mostly verticality that does not exactly repeat, ever. He is in the basement of the house of his aunt and uncle, up in Alaska with nothing around for miles; nobody knew what happened to them, or how long they’d been gone, but Anton has some idea.
This has to be more than a coincidence. He hunches forwards and lets his fingertips sink into the diagram’s chalk lines.