Seven Horror Flashes
cw warnings: gore, sexual references, body horror
I walk up to the woman with teeth in her hair and she does not look at me, instead she just bends over, mumbling words I cannot make out, and then she takes a long slick blade out from a hidden place in her boot and she glides it across her stomach, warmth spilling out from the slit like birthing fluid. With cracked hands, she then reaches up inside of herself, doubling over from the pain. With what I imagine to be gaunt, pale fingers, she roots around for what she is looking for. And she rips it out.
The brick clatters to the ground with a wet thud. Its reddened surface is obfuscated by the blood and the flesh and the bile stuck to it, and then the woman takes it, places it gently at the base of her feet, and begins to build herself a house.
It is a very lovely house, and when she is finished it starts to breathe.
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Zane is in box office and he is pulling fingernails out of the ticket machine, inspecting them briefly, tossing them aside. There is a very long line in front of him. There is a very long line behind him. When he sees you, he smiles, warmly and wetly, and you smile back.
“Come here, babe.”
You come here. You crawl into his lap, which is filled with sour candies, and you curl up so tight into a ball that you become a pill bug. Zane always said that you would be prettier as an insect. This is you trying to make him happy.
Zane calls you a good girl. It makes your little bug body shudder. The customer in front of him cannot look away — refuses to look away. Zane smiles, reaches down, picks you up, and gently places you between his many rows of teeth. There is an ocean of saliva and then he swallows you like the little thing you are.
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The smell of sweat and grass hangs heavy in the air, and Erica is in the third row of the stadium; she is watching the men play soccer below her. She thinks, very briefly, that the metal bleachers are like fingers, stretched thin and parallel atop each other. On the field below, a man feigns an injury, his face twisting into pain. It’s clearly a flop, but he does it to buy some time for his team to regroup. Erica wishes that it was real though, something inside of her wants to see him bend beneath the pressure of his pain, wants to see his ankle snap in half and shatter backwards, wants to see bones and bugs crawl from the wound.
Erica, ever resourceful, gathers some native flowers and some beeswax and casts a spell on the man. His lips nearly split from the howling, and when the medics come onto the field with a stretcher, the ground opens beneath them and they fall, fall, fall into the open throat of the chasm.
The man who was flopping is melted into plastic. His face sets into his final expression — his tongue coiled, and his body twisted — and then Erica places him into her bag, content with the prize of his pain.
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I am reading “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” by Isobel Falls. I am inside of a cave, naked, machine guns sewn into my breasts. When I exhale, they fire, ricocheting from the slick walls, painting my profile in sparking light. The story is longer than I can pay attention for. I don’t know that I fully understand it, or what people are saying about it.
Later, a few hours later, a woman comes up to me with a needle/thread and affixes my wrists to each other, binding me tight. I let her do it because I like her, because I like the gift of her violence, her weathered hands, her cruel creativity. I continue reading the story and I decide that I don’t think I like its execution. I see people writing vile things online and I feel sick, but the woman comes back, and she relieves me of my sickness. She cuts two slits into my back and pushes her hands into me, grabbing ahold of my ribs, prying them apart from the surrounding flesh with her fingers. Once she has a good grip she slings me over her head, setting me into place on her back. I am her backpack. She has made me her backpack. She places things inside of me and my purpose is fulfilled; I am wet with joy.
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There is something in the sky that is churning. It is looming closer. It is a planet, fast approaching. You think, briefly, that this is just like that one manga you read once. With a sudden violence, a tongue erupts from the surface of the planet, coiling down through the atmosphere, flesh burning up from the heat. The whole air smells like sizzling skin. When it touches down, red roiling and aflame, the axis of the Earth is thrown off by a thousand degrees and you lose your traction on the ground and are flung into the stars.
In the air, in space, you watch this other planet eat the Earth, just like in that one manga you read. You remember the name now. Hellstar Remina by Junji Ito. You close your eyes and think it all over, but you realize that you can breathe this other air; you are not suffocating. Nor is the cold killing you. You are alive.
Floating beside you through the starscape, you notice a little pill bug. It is slick with stomach acid, clearly vomited from the mouth of something. The bug extends itself, unfurls, and then you are hand in hand with a woman, her neat work uniform hiding her tender flesh. You grab ahold of her, take her right there, in the zero gravity. She lets you have her, she lets herself unspool further, she lets the quivering flesh sleeping in her stomach explode outwards, painting you in gore. The two of you laugh and laugh and laugh as your drift through the stars, as the final chunk of the Earth is consumed by the hunger behind you.
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Erica places Zane beside the man from the soccer field. She sets them up in her doll house, plays pretend with them. In this little world, they are married, and Zane is an architect. The soccer man is a stay-at-home father who loves to exercise. They are gay icons. They go to pride parades. They vote for Joe Biden. They support our troops. One day, Zane comes home to see his husband with another man (Erica found him floating in the ocean one day). In Zane’s fury, his little plastic arms fling a lamp across the room, and Erica, puppeting from above, cackles as it collides with the soccer man’s forehead, shattering into a thousand ceramic pieces. In the toy hospital, Zane has to beg for forgiveness.
“I am so sorry, husband, I love you so much. You are my world, my sun my moon and my stars.”
The husband smiles from behind the bandages.
“Soon there won’t be anymore stars. Soon this whole earth will be consumed. But I forgive you my husband. I forgive you.”
Erica puts her hand over her mouth. These words, she did not make the soccer man say these words. She does not know where they came from.
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A woman with a backpack travels a very long way. She crosses rivers, mountains, howling cities. She keeps bones inside of her backpack, and she listens to the way it breathes against her spine, always shuddering with pleasure.
Eventually, she makes her way to a small house. It is a beautiful scene. A small garden grows in the front, and the forest behind it sways in uniform rhythm, and there is something large approaching on the horizon above her. The red bricks of the house are wet, churning, bending back and forth. This woman slings her backpack off her muscular shoulders, pulls open its mouth, and searches inside of it for the thing she brought with her.
The resident of this house, an old, old woman with teeth in her hair comes out just in time to see this smiling stranger pull a flamethrower from strange backpack, ignite it, and turn its fury onto the house. The thing goes up in roaring flames, its walls searing and crackling and rendering like fat. When it is all over, there is nothing but a burned patch in the grass, a small pile of charred bones, and a single brick, wet and slick with blood. The destroying woman picks it up, opens me up (I was the backpack all along), and places the brick inside me. It is a fitting ending to a terrible story, and when I wake up, I have windows for eyes and a great oak door for a mouth. The woman is living inside of me and I am of use to her. When the other planet comes and eats us all up, I am happy because I was of use to her, even here, even now, and she makes me hers forever in this molten stomach, beneath these strappled skies.
end.