Maybe I should write horror...

I wrote this on the train, with no real purpose. I don't know where it came from, but I know it scares the crap out of me.

He didn’t even realize he was doing it. Something in the story of the boy’s captivity touched him, horrified him in a way he didn’t understand. Unconsciously as he heard the account of the boy’s years in that cellar, he rubbed his wrists, as if making sure there weren’t manacles on his own hands. Just one thumb against one wrist, then the other against the other. The rubbing persisted as the boy described the meals he’d eaten from that dull metal bowl. Canned soup, canned Spaghetti-Os. Walter kept rubbing as the boy described the damp mattress, and the single wooden chair in the room. Curls of thin, almost invisible skin were separating themselves from his flesh. He peeled them away absentmindedly, diligently. By the time the boy was speaking of those later days when part of the window covering had chipped away, revealing the 2-inch triangle of sunlight that kept him hopeful of rescue or escape, Walter had realized what he was doing to his wrists, but could not stop. He rubbed them together now, the skin raw and bloody. When the boy’s story ended, Walter looked down at his wrists, frightened but amazed. They looked like he had taken a bottle cap to them and scraped the skin away. But there was no bottle cap. There was only the boy, and the boy’s story, and something Walter could not remember.

Rob