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clamp of skull-bones.
        'My vitals! All my organs, let them be, for God's sake! Stay away from my heart!' His heart seemed to cringe from the fanning nearness of his ribs. Ribs like pale spiders crouched and fiddling with their prey.
        Drenched with sweat, he lay upon the bed one night while Clarisse was out attending a Red Cross meeting. He tried to gather his wits again, and always the conflict of his disorderly exterior and this cool calciumed thing inside him with all its exact symmetry.
        His complexion: wasn't it oily and lined with worry?
        Observe the flawless, snow-white perfection of the skull .
        His nose: wasn't it too large?
        Then observe the small tiny bones of the skull's nose before that monstrous nasal cartilage begins forming Harris's lopsided proboscis .
        His body: wasn't it a bit plump?
        Well, then, consider the skeleton; so slender, so svelte, so economical of line and contour. Like exquisitely carved oriental ivory it is, perfected and thin as a reed .
        His eyes: weren't they protuberant and ordinary and numb-looking?
        Be so kind as to note the eye-sockets of the skeleton's skull; so deep and rounded, sombre, quiet, dark pools, all knowing, eternal. Gaze deeply into skull sockets and you never touch the bottom of their dark understanding with any plumb line. All irony, all sadism, all life, all everything is there in the cupped darkness .
        Compare. Compare. Compare.
        He raged for hours, glib and explosive. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solemn philosopher, quietly hung inside of Harris, saying not a word, quietly suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.
       
        Then it came to Harris.
        'Wait a minute. Hold on a minute,' he exclaimed. 'You're helpless, too. I've got you, too. I can make you do anything I want you to! And you can't prevent it! I say put up your carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges and — sswtt — up they go, as I wave to someone!' He giggled.
        'I order the fibula and femur to locomote and Hunn two three four, Hunn two three four — we walk around the block. There.'
        Harris grinned.
        'It's a fifty-fifty fight. Even steven. And we'll fight it out, we two, we shall. After all, I'm the part that thinks! ' That was good, it was a triumph, he'd remember that. 'Yes, by God, yes. I'm the part that thinks. If I didn't have you, even then I could still think!'
        Instantly, he felt a pain strike his head. His cranium, crowding in slowly, began giving him some of his own treatment back.
       
        At the end of the week he had postponed the Phoenix trip because of his health. Weighing himself on a penny scales he saw the slow glide of the red arrow as it pointed to: 164.
        He groaned. 'Why, I've weighed 175 for ten years. I can't have lost ten pounds.' He examined his cheeks in the fly-dotted mirror. Cold primitive fear rushed over him in odd little shivers. 'Hold on! I know what you're about, you .'
        He shook his finger at his bony face, particularly addressing his remarks to his superior maxillary, his inferior maxillary, to his cranium and to his cervical vertebrae.
        'You rum thing, you. Think you can starve me off, make me lose weight, eh? A victory for you, is that it? Peel the flesh off, leave nothing but skin on bone. Trying to ditch me, so you can be supreme, ah? No, no!'
        He fled into a cafeteria.
        Ordering turkey, dressing, creamed potatoes, four vegetables, three desserts, he soon found he could not eat it, he was sick to his stomach. He forced himself. His teeth began to ache. 'Bad teeth, is it?' he wanted to know, angrily. 'I'll eat in spite of every tooth clanging and banging and rattling so they fall in my gravy.'
        His head ached, his breathing came hard from a constricted chest, his teeth pulsed with pain, but he had one small victory. He was about to drink milk when he stopped and poured it into a vase of