The first sign wasn’t pain. It was sound.
A wet pop in my shoulder while I reached for the cereal box. Not a joint cracking, something softer, damper. When I pressed at the ache later, my fingers sank deeper than they should have, as if my flesh had turned to warm clay.
By night, the skin there was purpled, bubbling with little blisters. When I lanced one with a pin, a spray of thin red fluid hissed out, smelling metallic and sour, like pennies dissolved in vinegar. I should’ve gone to the hospital. Instead, I pressed a towel to it and whispered, please stop.
The wound pulsed in reply.
Day Two: The Bloom
I woke to find the sheets stuck to my arm. Not with blood—something thicker, clear and tacky, like egg white. The skin underneath had split open while I slept. It wasn’t a cut. Cuts are clean. This was jagged, torn from the inside out. I pried the edges apart with trembling fingers and saw something shifting beneath. Not tendon. Not muscle. Something pale and knotted, like roots forced to grow too close together.
When I touched it, it curled toward my finger, eager.
I vomited into the trash can until my throat burned raw.
The vomit wasn’t just bile. It was black. Sludgy, tar-like ropes of it, sliding out of me in long strings. When I tried to wipe my mouth, the sludge clung, stretching like melted cheese until I clawed it off with shaking nails.
The taste stayed. Copper and rot.
Day Four: Shedding
The blisters spread. Not just on my arm, but across my chest, my thighs, the tender slope of my stomach. Each one swelled until the skin was paper-thin, then split with a wet tear.
Every tear revealed more of the white latticework. Roots. Tendrils. Veins that weren’t mine. They writhed in the air like worms desperate for soil. I bandaged them, duct-taped my own body shut. But at night, the tape peeled itself free. I’d wake up to find strips of adhesive stuck to the walls, the tendrils exposed, twitching in the moonlight like they were tasting it. When I screamed at them to stop, they all froze. Then, slowly, they writhed in unison. A shiver of acknowledgment. Like an audience applauding.
Day Seven: The Feast
The hunger started as a gnawing ache, but by the seventh day it was unbearable. My stomach felt hollow, my ribs bowing inward like rotten wood. No food helped. Not bread. Not meat. Not even water. Everything slid down and came back up, coated in black slime.
That night, I woke with my hands buried in my own leg. Not scratching—digging. The flesh came away too easily, shredding like wet paper. Beneath it, the tendrils shivered and coiled around my fingers, dragging them deeper, urging me on. I pulled free a chunk of myself, muscle and fat clinging to the cords, and before I could think, I shoved it into my mouth.
It tasted like salt and iron and home.
The hunger quieted.
I wept while chewing.
Day Ten: The Mouths
The tendrils stopped hiding. They pushed through my skin openly, splitting seams across my arms, my neck, my ribs. Some tapered to points, hard and sharp like teeth. Others swelled at the ends, opening into wet red petals lined with little glassy nodules.
Mouths.
They whispered when I tried to sleep. Not words, just wet sounds, like meat being chewed too close to my ear. When I fed them—slivers of myself, shreds bitten from my thighs—the whispering grew softer. Pleasured. Grateful.
I started to feel less alone.
Day Fifteen: The Rupture
I can’t move without tearing now. My body is a sack too small for what it carries.
Last night, my abdomen split from sternum to navel with a sound like fabric ripping. I should have died. Instead, I watched as coils of slick, pale rope pushed free, dragging something heavier with them. A lump, the size of a fist at first, then growing, swelling, unfolding into something like a heart but studded with teeth.
It pulsed in the open air. The mouths on my body moaned in unison.
I blacked out.
When I woke, I was on the floor, surrounded by pieces of myself. Ribs like snapped ivory. Skin draped over furniture. My body was tearing itself apart, piece by piece, and feeding it to what lived inside.
And I let it. Because the hunger wasn’t mine anymore—it was ours.
Day Twenty: The New Shape
There isn’t much of me left. My face has collapsed inward; the jaw split days ago, each half dangling like loose doors. The mouths on my neck do most of the chewing now.
I can feel my eyes softening, sloshing in their sockets. Soon they’ll burst, and the tendrils will have more holes to crawl from.
The seed inside—no, not seed, core—is nearly ready. I can hear it beating louder than my own ruined heart, commanding the chorus of mouths.
When I stand in front of the mirror, I don’t see a man. I see a bouquet of wet red flowers, blooming from a husk that used to be human.
And I am beautiful.
Tonight, the core split my spine open. Something huge is unfolding, pushing me aside like shed bark.
I am not afraid.
Because the hunger is full at last.
And tomorrow, it will want more
Stay Weird. Love you. Mean it.
—No Apologies, Just Stories
Cool, cool cool cool. I never want to read it again, which I think means it did its job. Well done!
Hi Rebecca !
Great piece, I thought it was going in one direction and you flipped the script !!!! great