SAY SOMETHING I'M GIVING UP ON YOU

The man is sick. His chest expands, collapses, and expands again with a hot and ragged breath. The spring sun comforted him when the illness began, but now his body sweats beneath it. Yet in shade he trembles. Whatever fat stores his wiry body once had are now gone. The ridges of a great spine are pressed taut against black skin. A thinned and coarse pelt is lain without loosely upon that corpse. He has isolated himself within these caves, desiring not to spread the illness. He has looked upon the face of those somber walls for so long that he believes he himself is part of that darkness and he has considered dying within that belonging. Has nearly succumbed to it. But a familiar scent causes his emaciated crown to rise, cheeks sharp against his large face and his head much too large, too heavy for his thin neck. How has she not noticed me? The query a moment of clarity in his fogged mind. Medusa? his voice hollow but just audible in the echo of their confined space. He makes an attempt to rise but his forelimbs quake. He sits up upon his shoulders instead with the rest of his body lain heavily upon the ground behind him.