Microfiction: I Am Providence

I am Providence

For a third subsequent day, he sat down to write and ended up staring at an unfortunate, stark white, blank page. Like a vortex, it sucked at his temples as he looked at it spitefully, the clear expanse promising everything and delivering nothing. Pouring over it until his vision blurred, a trace-like state overtook him and his gaze shifted to beyond the empty, nothing world. Resolving to rise up, he pushed his heels on the floor to move the chair back, but something stopped him. Thoughtlessly, he put his head pack down to the page, reached for his pen, lifted it from the pot and began to write. He knew not where the compulsion came from, and on some level, his consciousness, aware of the strangeness of the impulse, put up barriers to the rest of his mind, lest the spell be broken. 

He wrote flawlessly, and endlessly, vaguely aware of the content and character of his work. Something tugging at his leg created a passing fancy, however the compulsion to write was intoxicating. He stared into the page as he wrote, seeing through the words, and between those dark patterns he surveyed the bottomless void, the infinitely possible, filled with inspiration, hope, dread and misery. The pulling shape travelled his leg, slithered around his torso, ending its journey, for the moment, by circling his wrist. It tightened as he wrote, the pain exquisite yet barely registering; he continued until it was time for the thing to take over. The transition was smooth, their minds melding into one, and his muscles giving over their power to it. Relief and nausea washed over him from temples to thighs as the tentacle tore across his wrist and then slid underneath the skin. Droplets of blood fell to the page and mixed with the wet ink, words smudging and then re-converging into sharp, ornate curls once again. Everything went dark.

He woke up and the thing still wrote. He felt the tightness around him, keeping his back straight, and his head still. One arm moved in perpetual motion as words spilled onto the page like slugs; the children of the tentacled one. It was wrapped around his whole self now, his eyes rolled back into his skull in ecstatic, horrendous agony. Coils of convulsing, leathery flesh tightened around his head and his mouth became wet. Another appendage inside the rest, kissed the contours of his back, and as he felt it pressed against his neck, force increasing exponentially; the anticipation filling him with agonising pleasure. It broke through the skin and he gasped through a thin gap in the mass. Voices of unknown origin whispered as it scaled his spine, reaching the back of his skull, and tracing the inside of it. With a final, crescendoing, powerful spasm, the thing burst through him, soaking the pages with his total self. 

Completely spent, it read its work, admiring, analysing, probing. Finally satisfied, It closed the book gently and slithered back down into the totality of absence that it had been born of. 

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