Body Horror

There’s something about being with somebody new that sparks hopefulness; there’s this burning in your stomach that feels more pleasant than scary, but certainly a mixture of both. I remember the first time we met, the wind bristling through the bare tree branches. They looked like the thin, boney fingers that brushed against my own hand. Their painted fingernails matched mine, so much that it almost appeared that my own hands were laced together.

We basked in the moonlight, our boots shuffling against the dusty heart of the forest. The moon itself shone so bright that it felt like the sunlight was shooting through the thin trees. Her voice echoed in my head even though she spoke in a soft whisper; the emptiness of the world around us enveloped my heart, but it had not filled me with any sense of loneliness. They filled that hole in my heart, fitting into the crevice like a wooden beam warping itself around a forced nail. I wasn’t sure if it was right, but the feeling filled me with a rather intense excitement.

When their fingers escaped my own, I saw our future unwittingly flash before me; settling down by the seaside, unwillingly sick of the movement that wound around my stomach that tightened like ribbon around wrapped around its suffocating spool. When I looked into her eyes as they spun to face me, the colour collided with the dying green of the leaves that the branches spat onto the forest floor around us.

There was a thin smile drawn upon her lips as their eyes locked onto mine. I watched on as she dissipated into the dirt below, her pale skin replacing itself with the bark of a tree, blood seeping onto their leaves like maple escaping into the cold winter air in its season. A sense of relief bore into me when I imagined our future blowing away with the wind that blew through her newly formed branches. The scariest part was how at peace she seemed; even despite their body morphing and twisting in the most unnatural ways, she did not utter a word that would betray her pleased expression. I was finally free.