Else

"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.

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.

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.

Arlene only notices the absence when she glances at her weekplanner 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.

"Just try your best, okay dear? It's fine if it takes a few tries."

Abigail's eyes jump between the cleaver Cloth Mother has just wrapped her fingers around and the too-small body spread out on the table. Outside the pool of light, Wire Mother grins and blows smoke into the air.

"Don't waste time, dear." Wire Mother draws the word out, makes it into an insult as it hisses between its glass-shard teeth. "It needs to die."

Every so often a fuss is made about folk dolls, those odd little half-living homunculi; beings of distilled purpose and steady decay, straw and sticks and hollow gourds.

People rediscover them, and wonder why they're not in wider use.

Listen for a moment and I'll tell you 🧵

Once, long before, you wondered why the witch–your witch, now–was always covered in bruises, why her skin was forever a tapestry of slowly fading marks, all those purples and yellows hiding the warmth of her skin.

Once, you wondered why.

But then you died.

It always sounds the same, that echoing chant, those pounding feet and snarling faces; look, look! See what you have done, see the crimes you have committed against Decency, against the People, against everyone who sought you out to ask for what you offered.

How horrid, how criminal! How dare you.