body horror

"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.

"Not until you're older, dear heart."

"But why? I'm a big girl now!"

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—

As she stumbles to her feet she wishes once again that the pain would remain in her bed, like it did for so many years. If only the hint of motion was enough to scare it off, to ward it away—but all motion does is coax out the painful needles of her slowly waking extremities.

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.

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.

The call's coming from beneath her skin. It's not yet ready to be dead, not ready to be buried and forgotten, grave bell ringing with wild abandon. Louder with each heartbeat, louder with each breath, an electric shriek filling the too-still air—!

She was walking through a park when it began, big and open and public, and now she's cowering in a public restroom: single-occupancy, filthy, soggy paper ringing a piss-streaked toilet. Something's waiting inside the rim, something that stinks like death and gurgles like an empty stomach longing to be filled.

Doll has always hated the subway. Each time she descends into those fetid, intestinal depths her skin prickles and her stomach roils; something deep in her unbeating heart recoils from the trains' steady rhythm.

But it's raining today, so she has to.

"Stop touching that!"

"But missssss, it's so much fun, all nice and smooth with those jagged edges, and it's oozing! Look at it ooze!"

"That's fucking gross."

"You're just jealous that no one wants to break your arm!"

"Why would I—ugh, dolls …"

"Hey, do you have anything for stomach aches?"

Doll, sitting behind the counter, doesn't glance up from her sketchbook. She's been doodling in it for hours, painting with the blood that still hasn't stopped dripping from her gums. She's having fun!

"Try aisle 3. Uh, the one with the big light-up skull. Don't listen to it, it's lying."

Doll rinses and spits just like she's always been told to. Not too aggressively, not enough to drain her mouth of the taste of cold mint; just enough for comfort. Comfortingly routine.

But (of course there's a but) the sink growls at her as she spits.

For a long moment she doesn't realize that she's heard it. Her mind is so far away, yet not far enough to catch her eyes and hold them fast; her gaze sinks down as inevitably as any sunset.

You are dreaming.

The oddity of recognizing this does not impede your progress forward into the dining hall's elegant vastness. Nor does it permit you to deviate from the path the dreaming part of you—the part that weaves the world—has chosen for you.

"Oh, you're finally here!"