I had ten fingers, but I needed more. You see a window, I saw a door. Neither opened, what a pane. So I tongued the glass until it wept. Through its tears, myself, out it kept. I began carving tunnels in my head. The first hole hissed; a silence fell in. It stayed, for it was a loss and a win. A portal is anything: space between nothing. My eleventh finger crawled out of my navel, clutching a spool of smoke. It spun and said, “Remember?” I don’t. The twelfth gripped a mirror, held it to the back of my skull. The image blinked, then spoke: “You are not the first to vanish here.” The thirteenth was a tongue—mine? someone else's? It licked the pulp inside. A brain? Or was it a moon, flowing like tide? My thoughts were Swissed, pocked with echo-holes. Each memory whistled through them like wind. The fourteenth knuckled the dark and pulled up a fish made entirely of questions. The fifteenth came blindfolded in fog, dragging a bell with no clapper. It rang nothing. I listened. My head was now a cathedral of portals. The pews cried rust. The stained-glass refused to depict me. Then something stirred. Not thought. Not pain. An absence that grinned. And I, with my sixteenth finger, threaded it into the last hole until the skull creaked open like a sky unzipping. Inside? Only space. And I was free.
