Hunched in the corner of the room, his bony ribs scrape against his legs; sticks which fold awkwardly into grooves across his chest. He is a thin man. His grey skin stretches taunt across his bones, too small for his delicate frame. Straining at the corners.
But for the frenzied darting of his jaundice pupils, Cupid is completely still. His eyes roll around in their sockets, flinging themselves across the derelict room.
Before him, countless pieces of string stretch across the hall. The threads snake across the landscape, weaving in and around each other; a thick mesh of grey wire which smothers the splintered, wooden floor and cobwebs up into the dark air.
Cupid has come to a decision.
His pupils dilate and he snaps his head up from his chest. The laboured breathing which crawls out from under his brown, chapped lips begins to quicken and, slowly, ever so slowly, he begins to uncurl his delicate frame.
A thin, toothless smile crawls across his scabbed face.
Darting across the floor on his hands and knees, Cupid silently scuttles over the wires that blanket the world. As he bounds across the great hall, a billion threads sway in the rotten gulps of air bleeding from his mouth.
Later, when he has found the particular wire he needs, Cupid snatches a pair of rusted scissors from the frayed leather belt hanging from his hips. He snarls as he cuts the thread in two.
Slipping the tool back into his belt, Cupid grips the frayed piece of cotton with a rotten claw, before scuttling off into the darkness, dragging the string behind him.
The joints in his grey fingers crack as he knots the thread to another wire further down the hall.
Somewhere, someone’s heart skips a beat.
Cupid grunts in satisfaction, rises to his feet and slouches back into the darkness of a billion loves.
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