The skin of your shoulders is a continuous burn down through your muscle to your bones, which feel small and fragile and popped. The rear of your head is wet underneath your sweating: the sticky and underhair wet of blood or some small wound. You cannot move your fingers. The palms of your hands are cramping. Your lower back and abdomen are a single hard girdle, all the small pieces of yourself through which you have force-marched this distance are fused and immobile. You will not be moving again in the same manner, not for some time at least, but you still have the majority of your ankle and toe and foot strength as a reserve.
The full wall-height of the nook’s curtain is now visible directly behind, a dull non-colour, patternless and in a single piece, attached in some manner unseen at the level of beam or lintel. You clack your teeth in triumph and try a whoop, gasping instead, some dream-paralysis moan. Assuming you are still observed, you commit it to memory for reinforcement should similar circumstances recur. You try not to think that whatever was on the table has skulked down from it and is following along silently and just beyond your ability to see. You try not to believe that he or it or they are timing their own movements against yours as though stalking or playing some game. You have the continuing expectation of imminent physical harm, a sharp and shallow headache of conflicted focus in your skull.
The nook’s entrance is oblique at this approach, a result of the detour. You may still be able to squeeze through without the expense of another turning. You heel-and-ankle against the carpet or matting or rug. It does not reach flush to the wall, does not appear to be held down by anything but long years, stuck vaguely in place against the wood by pressure and proximity only, kinking under you as you continue across it, leaving some underside of itself behind. A ridge forms, sufficient to toe-brace against, your own weight keeping the carpet from pulling away completely from underneath you.
The lower part of the curtain reaches to the floor. You creak onwards until your forehead rubs under the cool hang of it. It feels lighter and more easily moved than you were expecting, not enough to dislodge a bird after all, not one intent on your face. You keep your eyes open, furrowing your nose and brows to force a padding of skin into the air above the level of your eyelashes. Your eyes feel deep-set in your head, naturally protected, and at least you haven’t arrived here to find them all on the periphery, protruding and noticeable, easily attached-to or popped. You scrunch and continue, finding that the violence of your motion, even though small and feeble, brings the plane of your eyes against the curtain after all. The bridging of skin appears to be enough to pucker and flow the fabric around and over them with minimal ingress. The fabric is too soft and pliant for any real danger, you do not feel the blinding presence of lint.
You slide from light gradually into darkness. You smell the musty damp of the curtain as it completes its travel over your face and mouth and down onto your neck. Black darkness, but you are committed. You scissor the sides of your feet against the accumulating waves of the matting, pointing with your toes, as your right-hand shoulder, then upper arm, begins to rub against the wood of the entranceway. You try to add a kick to the left, banging against the frame with surprising force and the dull sickness of a muscle bruise. You fail to move substantially farther for some minutes. You blink in the dark. Nookside is cooler. The comparative tableside brightness eventually resolves again as a thin seam around your torso below your head, whatever fabric the curtain is made from working well as a light-damper, the high contrast of your situation just enough to stop you seeing too much of whatever else is in the new space around you. You worry that you will shunt yourself back onto something hard or edged, impale your brain on a spike. The air is definitely cooler on your face and neck than on your body. You do not feel any movement of a draft or breeze. You tilt your head to one side, keeping one eye on the light, the other closed.
You heel-and-ankle, heel-and-ankle, calf and shins on fire, hoping that your own clothing and limb-weight can overcome their frictions before you entirely lose the carpet beneath you and are forced to work with bare wood. Your arm rides slowly up the edge of the doorframe, the softness of your flesh mushrooming around the point of contact. It is edged and sharp, but you are soft and mallowy and eventually the growing pressure pushes you back towards the middle again, still at an angle.
You have stopped at a maximum of impotence and exposure, bifurcated by the curtain.