A (very) short story by Paul D robertson.

Please feel free to print and read at your liesure.

So I am standing on a bridge in the middle of a railway station - there is rust all over the girders and the wind blows tangy in my face.
My hands are stretched out and clutching the splintered grey rails of the bridge and there is a feeling to them that will not pass. They are swollen and full of blood, but it is not the swelling that is placing sticky feet in the back of my mind and curling around my vision so that it is drawn to them continuously. They feel that they are breaking apart - not breaking, but tearing in an organic flesh rendered sense. They have their tremor and their strength, but these things are real and matter to me as little as the wind blowing my hair soft around my face or the gulls crying pale and grey.
Each moment I feel them less and less though my mind is nowhere but inside their flesh.
They clutch, and I know that they clutch. There is the feel of the wood beneath my fingers, the detail of the dry skin paint and turpentine burned. There is the wood, there is its dryness and age, its count of human touches and memory. But the sensation is of itself so different and it fills me with fear that I can feel stretching the muscles in my face and neck and working its way up into my neck and temples, my hind brain sick and full and swollen too with the fear. Stuttering and annulling its functions, my heart skips, breath rasps though the air is sea pure and good.
It is their coming apart that I feel. I have had this feeling before, and I lived, I lived that time and my hands are still useful to me and will grab and touch and hold. I have used them since then to touch a woman's face and to raise their soft edges to the wet corners of my eyes.
They tear, yes they tear. My senses lie, they LIE. It is my vision that lies. I know in my twitching and unfaithful heart that what I feel is real and what I see is not, though in my mind I know that there is no way that what my senses tell me can possibly conflict and dispute with each other in this way. And in my mind I know, I know somewhere that my vision is right and my touch has betrayed me. But it is the heart, bloody and old, that tells us secrets that we will believe.
Yes.
And my hands rip, silently, they come to pieces.
It is some thaumaturgy. Some trick, I have seen the demon. I have seen its face.
Pieces, oh pieces of my fingers have rebelled against their shape and form odd turning drops too large and red for rain that fall to the sand beneath the creaking bridge. Though I grip and I grip the wood I know it I can feel it it is grain and it is real and it is hard.
I squeeze my eyes shut force them as hard as I hold the rail beneath my traitorous hands. It is they and it is my teeth that I squeeze though I know that my mind is commanding my hands to hold the wood so hard, just as hard.
My eyes open I cannot keep them shut, not for any longer than this, and in that moment the fear blooms like blood in water in my heart. What I see will be a torn red explosion of flesh as my will degrades and I am no longer capable of holding the tendons and covering skin from their atrophy, from their destruction.
A gull cries, it wheels in the air. Its ignorance is staggering. I track its arc with my mind.
There is blood running from the wood beneath my fingers. It is thick. There is sand within its thickness, red now.
But the path is small, too small for the wounds I feel. My eyes will not lie to me as my palms lie. My knuckles are whole, my metacarpals intact, fiercely real in the afternoon sun.
I have cut my skin on the rusted steel supporting the rail of the bridge. The pain is small, but it focuses my dark pulsing touch into something approaching something else that is real.
I hear the bones of my fingers click as I force them apart and away from their ugly desperate perch.
I lift my hand, tremor and unreality, before my eyes.
I move it, obeying me, to my mouth. I kiss the wound, with all the tender gentleness that I can find.
My lips feel the flesh and the wet return kiss of the blood.
This is real.
Accept this kiss as real.