Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #13 April 2015 | Page 160

Her sobs subsided to a whimper, which dwindled into
silence.
***
Finally quietening down, she drops her hands and
opens her sore eyes. The outermost layer of the sealing ice is still there, a little whiter from the extra freezing time. In that same instant, she sees other layers,
one inside the other, the clear shrink-wrap sheet, his
blue silk, his skin and finally his layer of subcutaneous
fat. At their core are his organs, his empty stomach,
his smooth healthy liver, his immobile heart, and his
lungs filled with his blood from a spike wound.
A scream of horror almost escapes her. The sight she
was cursed with from birth is back. It lets her see behind and into things. It comes and goes of its own accord. Years of spite from other children had forced her
to learn the difference between her beyond sight and
normal sight. They were years of suspicion of being
a cheat or worse, a nutcase. She learned to keep quiet
about it. After years of mistrust, she was grudgingly
accepted as normal. Then she met Raoul. Her beyond
sightings stopped, vanishing into happiness.
Raoul. She can still see him beneath the ice, and under
his skin to his very heart. Two tubes of red arteries
exit from it and branch out into smaller tubes, then
lines and on, outward to a fine lace matting going into
the flesh, the skin, the organs, even some looping back
into the heart muscles. Blue threads form from everywhere in his body to coalesce into lines, which amalgamate into tubes until they converge into two singl