Beneath my surface, she lingered like a tumor, crawling on bruised knees along bones and ligaments. I threw myself down the stairs to dislodge her. Now she emerges – a tiny pink girl whose neck is purpling, swathed round with her own hair like an umbilical cord.
As I write this, bracing my arms on my desk, the little strangled thing pulls herself from my bloodstream. She falls out onto the bedroom floor, her placenta rupturing and soaking the carpet. Scraping the membrane from her head, she reveals a smooth face puckered with mouths, and mouths only.
When she stands, she is two feet tall, with arms nearly as long as her body. She is naked and hairless. Spiderwebs of pulsing veins cross her chest and abdomen, traveling like bulging tubes across her wide ribcage and through her pudgy legs. Her neck seems to barely support her large head, which rolls on layers of fat.
Though this is simply how she is, it’s like looking at a gruesomely injured child – a mutilated civilian war victim or an abused kid pulled from the wreckage of a home by the police. A part of me, the human in me, wishes I could help her.
Her saliva-streaked lips curl into grimaces as if she is trying to smile.
“Stay with me.”
Her voice is like the wings of an insect whirring.
“Nurture me.”
Her head is going red as if from asphyxiation. She’s blushing, of course. They always do when they are born. It’s a natural instinct – a way to appear less intimidating and more like the harmless thing that they are supposed to be. It works on those of us who have lost more of ourselves. I’ve seen it before.
When I was a freshman in high school, I went to summer camp with a girl who is now like a ghost in my mind. She was addicted to cutting herself. While she was at the camp, she didn’t have access to her razorblade. You couldn’t bring anything that was like a weapon with you to the cabins. She told me so, staring into a bonfire and scratching at her scabby wrists. She also told me about how she hated herself and the life she was forced to live.
I slept in the same cabin as her. In the middle of the night, I watched it emerge. She vomited it off the side of her bunk bed. It fell to the pinewood floorboards with a splat. Coughing and choking, she had to pull its long swathe of hair out of her throat just so she could breathe. When she finally spat out the last slimy strands, she sat up and looked over the edge of the mattress at it. It was much like the one who has emerged from me, clearly grotesque even in the darkness of the cabin.
“I know you want to,” it said. “You have nowhere else to go.”
She seemed to listen to its raspy voice like a lullaby, lying back down and drifting off to its murmuring.
The next day, at the hottest point of the afternoon, she snuck off into the woods to find sticks. She sharpened them into points with stones and used them to tear open her wrists. The camp counselors found her sitting on the ground in a glade of aspens with fresh blood on her t-shirt, but they could never know why she did it.
I did.
The last time I saw her was as I passed by the nurse’s office on my way to the cafeteria. She was sitting in a plastic lawn chair with her gauze-wrapped arms lying limply outstretched in her lap, apparently dazed. Standing in front of her was another creature. It was reaching up towards her arms and whispering things I couldn’t hear.
I will never forget how red it turned as it spoke to her and how its lips curled with glee as it unraveled her bandages.
My creature wrings her hands and cracks her puffy knuckles. They pop like miniature gunshots. Her mouths begin to foam, opening wide like baby bird beaks. So, it begins.
“I am lonely, oh so lonely,” she whimpers.
I train my eyes on the notebook in front of me, gripping the pen, and reply, “Then find some company.”
She steps closer. “I’m hungry.”
She cranes her neck back, listlessly tilting her head. I see her lips begin to tremble from the corner of my eye when I don’t reply and refuse to look at her.
“Please, don’t banish me. I’m your baby,” she whines. “Don’t send me like a herd of pigs hurtling off a cliff into the sea.”
It’s disgusting, the way these things speak to me. The way they know me. It’s frightening, but it is best to remain cool and collected in the face of danger. I learned this quickly when they started visiting me.
I was an overwhelmed junior in high school when the first one ripped itself out of me. I had started believing that perhaps my summer camp acquaintance was right about things – perhaps it was right to hate oneself and the life we must live. I remembered how she dealt with it.
It was afternoon and I was in bed. The creature stood next to the bed, and I watched her over the edge of the mattress, my eyes widening. She started blushing just like I remembered the other one doing.
“Don’t worry, I can help you,” she whispered in a voice that rattled. “Just feed me.”
I was working on an art project at the time and had bought an Exacto blade to help me with it. It was laying out on my desk. She pointed at it.
When I slashed my wrists, she grabbed my arm with a shocking strength and licked the blood from my wounds, pressing her mouths like suction cups all up my arms. Her lips were cold and wet, yet somehow it made me feel as if I had released something from within me. The sensation didn’t last for long, it never does, yet I continued to return to it for some time.
Now I feel something cold and wet again. She raises an emaciated arm, which seems to grow and extend, to clasp a hand around the back of my neck. I feel the urge to shrink away but remain still. I can’t show a sign of weakness.
Her face, which was a swollen balloon of flesh before, has popped. It’s caving in, becoming nothing but a void of open mouths.
With one hand still on my neck, she points a twitching finger at the razorblade in my open desk drawer and laughs. It’s the chortling of an infant.
I opened the drawer before she emerged. I regret it now. Maybe she wouldn’t have come if I didn’t open it. It’s too late now.
The pen shakes in my trembling hand. I start to write again.
A cattail sliced open, spilling a white ooze of seeds which extend and grow, multiplying and reproducing, birthing new galaxies of tight-knit brown buds nodding on stalks, which in turn will be split and spilt.
Gripping the pen tighter, I begin to laugh too. These words, these thoughts, don’t come from me. It’s just a part of the delusion these creatures inflict.
We both laugh and she points and points at the razorblade. The glint against her fangs matches that of the blade. The lint spilling from her open mouths, grated to shreds, is familiar.
I have been here before, and I will be here again, but I will not be tempted by the satisfaction of splitting cattails. I will not bend to her bloodlust as I have too many times before.
Our laughter reaches a manic pitch. She knows I want to.
I rise, pushing my desk chair back across the carpet, unable to sit still next to this mangled creature any longer. She rubs her hands together. Her teeth are morphing into thousands of metallic fangs.
“From dust we come, to dust we shall return!” she shrieks. “From seeds we spring, for seeds we shall be buried–”
I kick her, hooking my foot under her ribs. She rolls a couple feet, slamming against the closet doors with a sickening crunch. Our laughing abruptly halts. She curls up like a stomped-on centipede, rocking and clutching her stomach.
Then, she turns her head back to me and sneers, “You’ll be so lonely without me! You are empty and need to be inhabited – satiated!”
She pulls herself across the floor, digging her soft white fingernails into the carpet. I stand still, clenching my fists, watching her.
Why, even now, do I have the urge to turn to her? To help her?
She stumbles to her feet, her ankles twisting under her weight. She reaches up as far as she can and clings to my clothes as she sinks again to the floor.
She starts to whisper about profane things, plants growing from no source and cattails with an endless abundance of new life to swallow. Through gnashing sets of fangs, she begins her wild laugh again.
I don’t join in this time.
Contorting and distorting on my floor, she becomes what she always has been. The seed which was entombed in my body has grown up and died. She is my offspring, a past which I continue to abort. She is an urge that always rises from the dead.
Even now, she grins up at me and watches me write. She is still laughing because she knows I have nowhere else to go. I can fight, but she’ll always return. My own words taunt me from the page.