He took as deep a breath as he could hold, as deep and sound as ever, it seemed, and shone the penlight into the hole again.
Holding his side with a splayed hand, stretching the skin from the edges of the hole – it didn’t seem to continue on inside, diving down the quarter-sized passage between his ribs, but simply stopped there, solid, bloodless, sealed down, leaving the hole black and unobstructed as deep as he could see.
Even with the light. He flicked it at the walls of the hole, and no blood or viscera glinted back. In the mirror, he could see the light’s fine finger not stopping against anything, no flat circle against a back wall of skin, but tapering to a point as deep as it could reach in deeper, hollow darkness.
His forehead chilled with sweat. The light above the mirror throbbed its fluorescent prognosis into his skull.
His fingers twitched with the next obvious step. He hadn’t touched it yet.
If he did, he would throw up or shut down. He knew it as surely as he knew his torso had been whole and ordinary when he had left the house that morning.
There had been no pain. No shortness of breath to interrupt his day. If it had happened at night, he’d at least have had sleep as half an explanation for how. As it was…
He closed his eyes. Felt across clammy skin, easier that way, if he couldn’t see. His finger curled over the edge.
He moaned, the sobbing sound of a fever dream, but his empty stomach didn’t seize and his mind didn’t throw its breaker switch. It seemed he didn’t know much of anything, after all.
No skin inside the hole, as it had seemed. No wet shying of organs away from his touch, either. Whatever his chest now led to, it was hard and smooth, and cooler than his body’s heat should have let it be. He ran his fingertip in a circle around it, shuddered for how he should have been able to feel it, but didn’t. The hard and smooth and cool was numb as well – he confirmed it with a cramped tap-tap of his fingernail against its side, and listened with far more clarity than he would have liked- let him faint, please- as the echo seemed to escape miles away.
