Arthur hasn't been touched in so long that he must crave only the intense and impossible. Fingers between his bones, a tongue inside his brain, a grip that burns his skin to ash.

Lack of touch makes softness hurt. A thousand white hot needles trail behind the stroke of a gentle hand. Desperation for tenderness will always transform into desperation for violence because anything else would feel like salt water after years of eating sand.

In the thickest hour of night, with his hands over his eyes and the sound of humans crawling beyond walls, Arthur lies tense with yearning. This tenseness claws him back from sleep not because his muscles are gnarled and his teeth are grinding together, but because he is on the precipice of combusting. He is growing spines inside himself and one one by one his organs will rupture and his hollow spaces will fill with gasoline and the spark of his need will send him up in flames.

Fantasies of softness become fantasies of violence become a physical realization of destruction, and it all feeds the eternal phantom terror of death.