Not only was she broke, she was also hungry and half dead from exhaustion. Life wasn’t treating her fairly. The one and only apartment she could ever afford was tinier than a closet. With the damp wallpaper curling off the walls like decayed skin and an AC unit that rattled in the corner like a dying fox. The air smelled faintly of mold and something coppery, like dried blood that refused to leave no matter what. When the wind howled through the cracked window frame, it sounded as though the building itself was whispering to her.
On one random night, the AC coughed and dripped, a wet, mucous drip hit the floor.
“Goddamn piece of shit,” she groaned, dragging herself from the mattress that sagged like a corpse’s chest. She grabbed the shaky ladder, cursing under her breath. “If you die on me tonight, I swear I’ll rip your – ”
The metal trembled under her weight, every creak screaming in her ears. Then it hit her. Her skin prickled. Goosebumps rose up across her arms, neck and legs, as if icy nails scraped her flesh. The air thickened, she stopped halfway when she felt every hair on her body stood up as if something had just leaned in close, like it was waiting patiently for her. Slowly, she turned her head toward the dark slit behind the AC. And there it was, a pair of swollen and wet eyes. It was twitching like an insect trapped under glass. Definitely not human and a hundred percent not kind.
Her throat went dry. “What the fuck –”
Her body jerked back in panic. The ladder buckled and slipped.
“Shit shit shit!” she cried out before gravity slammed her down.
For a while, she was floating in the air like time had stopped, her breath stuck in her throat, too shocked to think, then the world snapped. And suddenly gravity dragged her down, her skull slammed into the floor with a sickening crack, like a watermelon split half open. Warm blood spread in a sticky halo around her head.
It knew that humans thought the goal of anything dangerous was to kill them. Humans reacted to this perceived danger the same way. It knew the responses by heart, repeated them a million times to itself. First, a strange pickling sensation. Bumps on the skin that were visually similar to a thousand ticks buried underneath flesh. Secondly, the hair froze upright. There’s also the things that humans seem unaware of. The gleam of adrenaline in their veins, the firing of neurons in their amygdala, that entrancing sound when the heart begins to beat uncontrollably…there was nothing quite like it. Even apes ceased to match up against the indulgence of humans. It loved their panic the most. It had only ever looked at humans with adoration, but the humans always misunderstood it as malice. They’d run away on their stubby little legs, like headless chickens. Well, except with the head intact. It would never hurt them like that.
This was the first time, however, one had fallen down. It crawled closer and stared at it. It didn’t run, scream, or die. It just lay there, as docile as a lamb and breathing just as sweetly as one. Its heart was still merrily beating away. Blood flowed from the arteries to the heart, from the heart through veins. Spine, long and untouched, was wrapped in nerve bundles both fragile and elongated. Yet-
Its skull had fractured. That stirred up a feeling of pity in its heart. Blood had been spilt, and if left unattended, unhealed, and unfixed, would quickly be consumed by bacteria. It would turn from flesh, bone, skin, to just rot. An idea struck it. Humans were slow to stir. At least, slow compared to it. It had just enough time to make its wish come true. Its deepest desire and obsession. Driven by that primal want and admiration for the human body, it gently pried its claw past bloody flesh to feel the fracture on the human’s skull. It changed its claw to a more suitable substance. Now, for the rest of the body.
“For fuck sake…” she groaned weakly, jaw twitching out of her control.
Darkness rushed in, thick and suffocating, but it wasn’t empty, it wasn’t quiet, it followed her and into her. Something slick slithered inside her thoracic cavity, pulling itself under her skin, threading into her veins like ink spilled in water. Her body arched, and was dragged like a puppet on unseen strings. Red bubbles from her mouth started to froth down her chin, as if her lungs were drowning in their own juices. She vomited a gush of red, her voice mangled into a guttural growl. Her eyes snapped open, pupils stretched impossibly wide, while the veins burst across the whites.
She clawed at her own arms, ripping open skin, shrieking, “OUT! GET THE FUCK OUT!” Her nails split, bone scraping floorboards, blood dripping in frantic trails. But it was only a waste of effort.
Yet the monster’s efforts were not. On the contrary, it savoured the experience. It didn’t mind the fighting. It was the nervous system’s natural reaction, which it catalogued down gleefully. There was a freeing feeling in merging into cells, binding to them the way carbon monoxide binds to red blood cells. The tension of tendons snapping before remolding, the clearing of fat in the aorta for replacement, and the pushing out of blood from lungs so it could take over the capillaries- it was all indescribable. The body wouldn’t have to be alone anymore, not when it was there. If it could, it would have murmured soothing words to the human, although it doubted the human could hear it over the screaming.
It didn’t catalog the amount of time it took for the screaming to stop, but it knew it was a fairly short amount of time. It likely stopped first from blocking the trachea. The attempts at self-mutilation stopped after the monster painstakingly paused muscle contraction in the arms which reduced it to a more sensible finger twitching. It sighed with her lungs when it fully settled into the numerous cells of the chest. She was such a fun word, one that it picked up from the brain as it seeped deeper within it. The eyes were still running wildly, which might put a strain on the vision.
Fortunately, that could be solved with the brain. It didn’t know why she resisted so much against it. After all, didn’t humans invent their own form of lobotomisation? Maybe the human’s methods were faster than their infestation. Either way, both seemed equally effective, and her fingers twitched one last time before going limp.
It sat back up. It? No, it was she now. She stared at her hands in amazement- two small, delicate hands, 5 fingers on each one. So many different hormones flowing through her system, trying to recover from the stress it just endured. Her existence before now seemed so dull compared to this, like it was dormant. With the human’s heart, brain, and nerves, she could rely on all that to bring her this joy. Only inside a living human, could she be truly alive.
By Ee Shuen and Hoe Yan
