What I Tell You In the Dark by John Samuel

shakes her head.
    I raise myself up on watery legs. A constriction in my chest tightens my breathing then lets it go again. I hear the air rasping in my lungs.
    It is night and the room is in shadow. Swatches of streetlight stripe the carpet at my feet.
    â€˜I’m going to be sick,’ I say into the stillness of the room.
    I vomit a few chokes of nothing, bile and water. I take a few steps forward, then vomit again as I hold myself up against the doorframe.
    A low, persistent pain in my nose has been woken from its own sleep and is now establishing itself in new positions, behind my eyes and cheeks. I am burning up, the shirt on my back is wet through.
    â€˜I am planted here now.’ My voice is gasping, faraway, explaining this to me. It understands better than I do.
    I sink down to my hands and knees but even the weight of this proves too much and I roll over on to my side, legs tucked up against me, stunned as if by birth.
    She was right, He has put me in the earth.
    A spasm of panic begins in my abdomen and stabs its waythrough to the rest of me. My teeth clench shut. I grip my knees tighter and close my eyes. Animal sounds come, not from me but from within this body. Whatever was left of Will is being displaced and released as my occupation completes itself.
    â€˜There is nothing to fear,’ I tell myself in a hoarse whisper. ‘He has put me to matter.’
    Saying these words aloud gives me pause, and for a second the panic, the tension in my body, the world itself spinning on its axis, all seem to stop. This obstinate reality sits, unblinking, in my path.
    I say it again, trying to believe it this time. ‘He has put me to matter.’
    I look around me. Little seems to have changed. The colours perhaps are off, washier than before, but that may just be the lightness in my head. Inside, though, I have been transformed from the centre out. The cupped light at the heart of me has been snuffed. All connection to Him has gone dark. Signal lost. There is only this heavy coat of flesh.
    â€˜There is nothing to fear,’ I repeat.
    And I’m right about that, I know I am. It is entropy, pure and simple, an irreversible process that cannot be gainsaid – it requires only acceptance. I am a part of its governance now, slaving to it with the other beasts. I have taken my place alongside the people, the cattle, the creatures that walk and those that roam free by feather and fin. I am in the care of Nature.
    I exhale a long, whistling breath.
    â€˜I am alive in His world.’ These words settle me. My pulse begins to slow.
    All His miracles are tethered to me now. I think about the almanac of the seasons, the crops that rise and are cut, the tides that push and pull as the veiled moon slowly bares its face. I think about the violence of birth and the surrender of death. I smell rain rising from hot ground. I hear snow creaking under-foot.I think about the roosting bird that comes only because it knows it should, or the cellar spider that makes his silent dance from life to dust in the bounds of a single day.
    â€˜The bee has one sting, the primate has two thumbs, the octopus has three hearts, the dragonfly has four wings …’ I make a list of these things, softly into the carpet, on and on, until my voice becomes so heavy that I am unable to carry it, and there is no longer anything left, no thought or word, that can stop me from sinking into the black, currentless quiet of sleep.
    What follows is as intense and crippling as any illness. The sun rises and sets on two days before my fever breaks. I sleep and I dream and I wake and I sleep and I dream and I wake.
    The first time I open my eyes, it has been raining. Drops are still clinging to the window frame. They tremble there for a long time before letting themselves go. Such pressure at the surface of things, it makes me sad. Water curled in on itself. The molten earth forced into a sphere.
    Another time, I wake to find I am on