The Fading by Christopher Ransom

slope of her shiny black hair. It was so straight and perfect, all he could think to do was settle his moist palm over
     the back of her skull and gently let it slide down, drawing the heat from beneath the silken layers, knowing that when his
     hand got to the end of the hair he would be a failure, the boy who didn’t kiss her when he had the chance. Already sinking
     in regret, he tried to make it last, wanting nothing more than to feel her pampered strands gliding at his wrist for an hour.
     But too soon he had reached the bottom and his hand fell to the back of her neck, corded and hot as pavement, and it was the
     end of something that could never be gotten back and he felt a piece of his life fading away, going with time, vanishing for
     good.
    ‘What are you thinking about?’ Julie said into his shirt. She shifted her weight and hugged him again.
    Noel breathed in her citrus hairspray and the faint catch of natural oil beneath that, and looked up again to the tapestry.
     He was about to ask what The Smiths meant when the man in the poster turned his head and looked directly at Noel. His pouting
     lips spread into a smile and his puppy dog eyes widened in recognition. His entire lean frame slithered from the barstool
     as he stepped down, out of the black-and-white poster and onto Julie’s bed. His body and clothes and high forehead retained
     their granulated black-and-whiteness as he entered the three-dimensional world of color. He reached back into the smooth plane
     of art and, withimpossibly long maestro fingers, retrieved a burning cigarette from the bar. He took a drag, squinting, and held the cigarette
     out to Noel, clamped between his thumb and first finger, the nails of which were painted fuzzy newsprint black.
    Smoke and its raw sick tint roiled at Noel, the snaking tendrils swirling in the space between them. He lost whatever inertia
     he had gathered from Julie, slumping as he watched the smoke curl and settle into a gray reef roaring with the silence of
     hallucination, revealing black holes and edge-scapes dense with dark amoebic life forms, glass fish and electric eels that
     darted and burrowed in knots of darkness.
    ‘Don’t you think it’s time we show her? I do,’ the man said, his gray sickle moon face rising through the smoke reef. His
     voice was nasal and British, swerving from falsetto to baritone with the stilted affect of lounge singer lyrics. ‘I think
     she can handle this, I think she can handle every little fish, boy-o, how about yooooooouuuu?’
    ‘No,’ he managed, barely audible. ‘Please …’
    ‘What’s wrong?’ Julie said, releasing him. ‘Did I do something wrong?’
    ‘No.’
    Julie followed his eyes to the wall, the bed. ‘What are you staring at?’
    The man twigged to the sound of her voice, springing from the bed with a cold sharp laugh. Of course Julie couldn’t see him,
     the old Him who kept changing disguises. He floated for a moment, hanging in the air, his battered brown boots above the white
     carpet, and thenhis heels landed without a sound and he loomed with a hysterical grin right up in Noel’s face.
    ‘I know, I know, it’s seriiiii-eeee-oooouuusssss,’ he sang, and Noel’s teeth clicked on the edge of his tongue, drawing blood.
    Backing away from him, looking over her shoulder, Julie said, ‘Hey, what? What was … where did you go?’
    The Smiths man was humming deliriously, and Julie’s words scared him more than if she had started screaming bloody murder.
    ‘Noel? Seriously, this isn’t funny. You’re scaring me.’
    Noel closed his eyes but it did no good. He could see through the lids, through the hands he covered them with, through the
     bones and flesh of his windmilling panic, and he had no choice but to witness all that followed.

10
    He didn’t know if it was the sound of his footsteps or his breathing that alerted Julie to the impossible fact that he was
     still here but no longer visible. He hadn’t dropped in so long, he