Adrian lurched awake, breathing in
as if submerged underwater for the last minute. He reached up to touch his
face, small beads of sweat collecting and melting against his fingertips. Why
was this happening now? Why after so long? He moved to get out of bed, his hand
coming down on brown, crusted sheets. Strings of pus and sticky orange jelly
trailed against the backs of his legs as he swung them free, placing his feet
firmly on the ground. Heavy, warm breath licked the back of his neck, but he
did not turn around. Instead he looked down to see that his carpet had been
replaced with a writhing mass of spider and centipede legs. He closed his eyes
and took a slow breath out. The tip of a cold nose traced his spine from the
base of his neck to his hairline.
“I thought we were done with this,”
he said aloud. He stood, doing his best not to shake or tremble. The little
legs tickled beneath his feet and between his toes and he shuffled through them
to reach the bathroom. He flipped on the light and grabbed either side of his
sink, staring at his reflection in the mirror. The black marble was cool
between his hands, and he tried to focus all of his attention on the sensation.
He suddenly felt a firm, uniform pressure in both of his arms as if someone
were blowing them up with a bicycle pump. “I’m not doing this,” he said,
maintaining eye contact with himself. “Goddamn it, I’m not doing it.” He felt
small incisions being made on his ankles. Many of the legs on the floor had
found their bodies, and they were making cuts in his ankles so they could crawl
up just beneath the surface of his skin. He felt lumps of various sizes making
their way up towards his knees. Gritting his teeth, he looked down. The sink
drain was open, and fingers were inching out like cockroaches fleeing the
sewer. Gripping the edge of the sink harder, the pressure in his arms continued
to increase.
How long until sunrise? Looking
through the mirror, he saw the reverse image of 3:26 on his bedside table. Only
a couple of hours. The two green dots winked at him, knowing.
Little Henry Warner sat on a stool
out by the shed,
He melted Mama’s clock,
Watching it all day, listening to
“tick-tock, tock-tick”
Of cogs and wheels, chalky with dust
And Mama’s powdered face.
His
arms had swollen to the point that every pore had a puffy ring around it, each
one butting up against the next, their centers starting to dilate. He put his
elbows on the cool, black marble and clutched his temples between his hands. There
was now no place on his legs that something was not crawling under with
tittering, rhythmic footsteps. He raised his head, meeting his own gaze with
wide, angry eyes. He saw in the mirror that white, fleshy heads were crowning
in the center of the swollen circles all over his arms: maggots. Wriggling in
reaching, twitching motions, first one then the next freed itself from his
pores as if they had gnawed themselves into the open air from some central nest
within him. He may have been screaming as his fist flew at the mirror before
him, shattering both his knuckles and the glass in a mess of shards and blood,
but within the dark halls of his empty Wisconsin home, certainly no one else would
have been aware of it.
