Exogenesis
A warmth curled up his arm and he first dreamt of a fire in his house. Engulfing his items of posession, eating them up in flame and licking across his walls. Laying in bed there he tried to get up and run but his feet and legs were jelly and his blankets felt as if they were made from several tons of lead.
Then he woke up and his arm was red and swollen with rash.
Boredom at the office that day set him about to looking for every paper clip hidden in his drawers. Each packet of paper that was clipped together would be stapled and reshuffled into static array. The clips themselves all crowded on the top of the desk, a riotous mass. He clipped them each together to form a boyant shape, that of a shark. With each clip he added from there, he created rows of violent teeth; then a wild eye; and then a small school of fish. The sound of feet came from the hallway outside and he swept the pieces of metal into his pen drawer and looked towards the door. The sound dissipated off in the other direction and he looked around his office once more, scanning the same humdrum he had organized many days before this one.
His arm began to itch and so he scratched it.
Lunch came and he left the gray dismay behind and headed over to a small sandwich shop down the road. His chest began to hurt and he felt out of shape. He struck himself against his chest a couple times and scratched his arm once again.
The next morning his arm had fallen off and the rash had spread across his chest and down his abdomen. He dreamt he was a soldier in the army and he had hurried across a bullet riddled battlefield towards a fallen friend. A cold wind knocked against him and he fell as well, the sky lighting up with a thousand flared rifles. His blood became ice and his body froze against the solid earth. Only his eyes could see and feel, and the stretcher that came took him to a small black bag and from there he awoke laying against his mailbox.
He went to work and with his last remaining hand he pulled out the paper clip shark he had manufactured. Its mouth turned up in a grin when he placed it on the table, and the fish he had constructed had gone missing. Using the last remaining paper clips from the day before, he made two new fish and placed them next to the shark.
A sharp knock came on the door and he swept the constructions back into his pen drawer. He called out to the knock, but nobody came. He called out again.
On his drive home, he spotted a crying child holding a wooden mule.
By sun up he found himself frail and confused. His back hurt and he had to work to get out of the bed. The rash had disappeared from his body and had moved to his knees. They looked spotty and red, and the bones were sunken in as if in juxtaposition of his jutting form. His dream was of a classical orchestra, and he was the conductor. Instead of music, each instrument was silent. He waved his arms in a futile attempt to coerce the pit to play, but they did nothing. A faceless man in the front row started clapping and then the congregation erupted.
At work, he picked what was left of the shark out of the drawer. A paperclip object had bitten it in half. He didn’t recognize the new object, only knew that it was.
The next morning he did not awake, but only dreamt of the cornfields and rice paddies. He dreamt of his search, and of dying before it was over. In every dream after that, he kept a close eye on his pocket watch, always waiting for the time that the pilot would fly over looking for any sign of life. And every time the plane came, his flint would not spark and his tinder would not light. So the plane kept flying low and off to the next paddy, leaving him there alone with a small wooden mule to carry his weight.