This is the conclusion to this story’s first arc. It will likely make no sense without the context of the previous stories. Start here.
Arlene’s last customer of the day is uncomfortably prickly as Arlene looks her over. She’s healing up well: the only trace of the rod’s presence is a scattering of flowers rising up from beneath her flesh, their lines sketched in blisters and bruises and knotted scars.
“What was I?” Florence asks, the question bubbling up unbidden through her seed’s vestigial throat and out past teeth already well on their way to hatching. Up in the red sky above the little patio where she keeps that memory of her lesser self her hands flutter uncertainly.
It is not what she expected to ask the shining-blazing-sharp-painspitting thing which crawled into her and took away her toys.
She wanted to threaten it.
Inside the building reeks of fresh death and fresher growth.
As Arlene creeps through it, guiding herself by apartment numbers and the scant surviving signage, she passes by windows dilated into misshapen staircases and beneath twitching masses of blue-white growths, dangling down from the high ceiling like tangled threads and greasy hair.
She sees no one, not in the oddly large lobby or the small apartment manager’s office or the little laundromat just beside it, but she feels eyes trying to pin her in place with every step.
Florence lies on her back, staring up towards the distant sky. A strand of drool drips from her slackening mouth.
Something is wrong.
She feels too much; distantly, indistinctly, like oil slowly dripping through gauze to infiltrate the wounds beneath, but FAR TOO MUCH.
A scream winds its way through the endless corridors of her throat and dies before it ever reaches her teeth—but her teeth are everywhere, aren’t they? Shot all through her body, running in tiled rings along hallways and across warm floors …
Arlene only notices the absence when she glances at her week planner a day later, but as soon as she does she feels it like an aching, toothless socket yawning open in her mind. It’s been a busy week but that’s no excuse to forget, and really, why didn’t Florence come in?
Four days since the surgery, since she implanted that horrible dangerous thing in a woman who wanted nothing more than what it could offer her …
Florence kept on looking at her arm on the drive home, glancing down or running her fingers along the carefully sutured line where Arlene had opened her up. And that place at the base of her palm, where her tendons curled into her hand—
“You doing okay, Flor?”
Thorn, sprawled out in the driver’s seat, their arm dangling out through an open window into the cool night air; body language as open as ever. A sharp contrast to the concern in their voice.
Arlene’s last customer of the day is anxious and uneasy as she sits in her chair, her arm locked into place on the worktable. Far too late to turn back, and yet—
“A-are you sure this is safe?”
She can’t help but notice the customer’s sweat, so laden with fear and guilty desire.
“Of course it is,” she replies, her voice smoothly echoing up the throat of the body she’s chosen to wear—a handsome thing, with just enough of a beard to be disarming; it dances on her strings with all the confidence it didn’t in life. “I’m a professional, miss.”