Originally posted to Twitter on August 13, 2022 , and a week earlier on Patreon .
content notes: child viewpoint, cults, grooming, gaslighting, vague body horror, self-harm as worship.
“Mommy!” You cry as she’s just about to walk out the door, “I want to go worship with you!”
Her scarred flesh wrinkles into a smile as she laboriously reaches down to ruffle your hair.
Originally posted to Twitter on August 7, 2022 .
Pain attends her even in her dreams, a writhing tapestry thrown all across her dreamscape—buried in scraps of imagery, hidden in the shattered rooms of her failing dreams, and nestled all about her not-body. Stranger than in her waking hours, both more and less urgent—
But when dreams end the pain remains.
She groans as she wakes, feeling the knots curling through her back and the bundles of unoiled needles flexing in her joints; her elbows burn and her knees scream and hungry-mouthed snakes curl in her thighs and all through her belly—
Originally posted to Twitter on August 13, 2022 .
The devil is not so crass as to wait outside your door. She leaves a calling card pinned to it and is gone before the doorbell’s chime fades into the city’s rumbling heartbeat—disappearing into a cab, or behind a truck; denying you any glimpse of her.
The card is heavy in your hand; thick paper, expensively printed. Embossed with a curving floral pattern that doesn’t pretend to match the elegant red ink.
Originally posted to Twitter on July 21, 2022 .
When investigators finally broke into Fran’s apartment, they found little of note. A fridge empty save for a bowl of wrinkled grapes, a collection of unused hair care products, and a bed that hadn’t been made or cleaned in months.
They also found a collection of eight polaroids.
The first photograph is of Fran standing in front of an exhibit at the Wasp Museum; a corpse infested by the ghosts of countless beehives. She’s smiling, obviously having a great time, but the spotlights illuminating the hive cast a strange pallor over her skin.
Originally posted to Twitter on July 13, 2022 .
There’s a doll in the alley behind your apartment building. It’s an old thing, limbs and mask shaped in a style that’s almost old enough to be retro; in another few years it will probably be fashionable again.
It’s been there for years and years, just as long as you have.
Mostly it spends its days curled up next to the dumpster.
“Are you sure this is okay, Miss?”
“Of course it is. Get that lock open.”
Doll’s fingers, long and fine as needles, dip inside the keyhole once again. She fancies that she can hear the house shudder as she massages its pins, and it’s hardly a moment before the door clicks open. Behind her she feels her witch’s smile: a vast gash cut into the night’s fabric, teeth dripping with the moon’s pale blood. Its empty eyes gaze hungrily past her from the sleepy suburban street’s every shadow, and Doll thanks her lucky stars that no one’s awake to see it.
This story has content warnings for: gore, corruption, sex with a chair, probably rape, not that gross but also sort of gross. Please take care.
Contamination begins gently. A pinprick hole in the hazmat suit’s thick composite where she stumbles and falls against a forest of needles growing from one of the site’s walls.
Most break.
One finds the perfect angle.
She doesn’t feel its touch on her sweaty skin.