[Pride 2021 Short Story] Turning Over

There was something stuck in her throat.

She was no stranger to tonsil stones, those nasty calcified bits of food debris that get caught in her tonsils, but typically she could get them out on her own just fine. A vigorous cough here, a poke with a Q-tip there, and she was good to go. She even got so used to the process that sometimes she could dig them out with her finger, not even looking in the mirror. It was disgusting, but it worked. 

This… this felt different. 

She tried to ignore the fact that she’d had the sore throat for days with no relief, no matter what she tried. She was now on day 14 of salt water gargling, a rigorous hydration schedule, and possibly brushing her teeth a little too often. Never before had she found herself so distracted by something that was usually a non-issue. She forced herself to swallow saliva as though that would bring any relief, and tried to put it to the back of her mind. She had completely zoned out for the last 15 minutes of her meeting with the regional director, who was looking to her for an answer to a question she never heard. The pain in her throat throbbed.

That evening, she widened her mouth as much as possible and hit the usual angles with her phone flashlight so she could peer right into the crypts of her tonsils. A doctor once told her that they were “exceptionally large.” She thought it somewhat amusing that this would be the one area in her life where she could be considered “exceptional.” As she looked down her throat, she couldn’t see the whitish-yellowish lumps that she expected. In fact, for the most part, her tonsils looked normal. As she slowly moved the light to see between the fleshy crevices, something unfamiliar caught her eye. 

She almost dropped her phone. 

There, toward the back of one of her tonsils, was a dark spot. She felt like she stared at that spot for hours, but no matter how hard she looked, she was unable to identify this odd form. It definitely seemed solid, not like a scab on the surface of her tonsil. She could feel her heartbeat quicken. Fighting tears and the urge to look up “dark spot on tonsil is it cancer” on the internet, she quickly washed her hands and went straight to bed. 

After an hour of lying in the dark, she finally felt herself drifting off to sleep. She heard faint whispers of her name, which she ignored. Just like the tonsil stones, she was used to the hypnagogic hallucinations that came to her from time to time. She had experienced them for as long as she could remember, long before she even knew that they could be seen as scary by some. By the time she was old enough to have that understanding, the phantasmic visitations happened so frequently that she saw them as completely benign. They were nothing more than the brain getting its wires crossed, after all. The whispers faded to nothing as she sunk into the dark of a dreamless sleep. 

For the next few days, she tried to ignore the growing soreness in the back of her throat. She maintained her tried-and-true anti-tonsil-stone regimen, but it didn’t seem to help at all. Her sleep became more and more restless every night, and she grew exhausted from sleep deprivation. 

One night, she woke up in a panic. It was still dark outside. Her heart was racing a mile a minute, and she could see a figure standing at the foot of her bed. It was a being that appeared skeletal at first, towering above her at 6 or 7 feet tall. As she stared, she realized that it was not skeletal, but an entity that was made of twigs and sticks that appeared to be bound at the joints with twine or some other fibrous material. Its triangular head tilted down at her, with antler-like boughs jutting upwards and nearly scraping the ceiling. Its arms reached out towards her, its gnarled fingers widespread. She could hear the creaking of wood straining with movement as the being extended its limbs in her direction. A low rumble accompanied its presence, like an earthquake rattling only inside in her eardrums.

She sat up and blinked, expecting it to disappear, but the vision of the being lingered, its limbs still outstretched. After a few moments, the being and the rumble finally vanished, but she found it difficult to allow herself to breathe. “It was just another hallucination,” she told herself, attempting to soothe her nerves. But as she reoriented her body under the covers, she was afraid to turn her back to the corner where the entity stood moments ago. 

---

The next morning, the pain in her throat was agonizing. It was worse than the strep throat she remembered having as a child. She called in sick to work and stood in front of the bathroom mirror, steeling herself for what she might see. She slowly brought the flashlight to her lips, afraid to part them. She reminded herself, “Doing nothing fixes nothing,” and allowed herself one more deep breath before dropping her jaw.

The dark spot was larger. It was more solid. Dread resonated in her ribcage. Carefully, she stuck a Q-tip in her mouth to poke it. The spot was hard, but it moved. It moved like a tonsil stone. That was some small measure of relief. That meant it could come out. She took the Q-tip and gently pushed the object out toward the front of her mouth. It caught on some of her tonsil flesh as it moved, inducing a terrible coughing fit. She hoped she wouldn’t accidentally inhale the thing as she coughed violently. She managed to spit something out into the sink. Through tears, she could see the object sitting in the white porcelain. It looked like a raisin.

She picked it up to inspect it. The object unexpectedly had a very rough texture that felt somewhat familiar. As she examined it closely, she was shocked to discover that it was a piece of bark. Like, tree bark. From the outside. She dropped it in surprise, and it tumbled down the drain. She was simultaneously thankful that it was out of her sight and angry that she lost her only physical evidence of this strange situation. 

On the bright side, there didn’t seem to be anything else in her throat, aside from the slight redness from the irritation of poking at herself. She went to bed thinking that she could rest easy now that the object was gone.

She was wrong.

That night, she dreamt.

She dreamt about a forest.

It was dark. And warm. And damp. She was inside this forest. She heard shuffling in the trees around her. She moved slowly, like she was wearing heavy weights on her legs. What little dappled sunlight made it through the leaves above only made it harder to tell where she was going. She had to move forward. Deeper. She couldn’t breathe. Or she could, but these lungs were not her own. They were foreign, borrowed. Each breath felt like she was inhaling through a damp cloth, straining to fill her chest with air.

A hum rumbled in the forest around her. Deep and thrumming. She knew this noise. She knew it from a time when she was too young to know to be afraid. More moving. More shuffling. She strained against the resistance of the thick air. It was here, she could feel it. She made it to the clearing. It was waiting for her, its limbs reaching toward her, its triangular head tilted at her. The antlers appeared to grow before her, reaching higher and higher. The shuffling grew louder and louder until it crashed around her, combining with the hum that was now so rich and so heavy, creating a such clamor that it sounded like boughs breaking above her head until finally it was on top of her and it was all she could do not to—

She woke up. In her bed. Sweating. And crying. 

Her throat was dry. 

---

She forced herself to go to work every day, knowing that she didn’t have enough paid time off saved up to stay at home and rest. Her hair started falling out by the handful in her showers, and she stopped wearing makeup. Her wardrobe shifted from carefully planned outfits to barely meeting dress code as she wore the most casual and comfortable clothes she could get away with. She noticed that people stopped making small talk with her in the office. Some of them even avoided eye contact with her. She was too tired to care. 

The dream became recurring, sapping her of her rest and energy day after day. Every night she stayed up later as she dreaded returning to that clearing and hearing the droning and the crashing. Strangely, she was never afraid in the dream. It was almost like she was excited. But the terror flooded back to her bones upon waking, realizing that she did not know what was happening to her or why. 

Her skin started breaking out with what appeared to be blackheads. Not just on her face, but across her limbs and torso. There was one particular bump on her forearm that she found herself picking at often. The sensation wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t painful either. She knew she should leave the bump alone, but she couldn’t help it. 

One day, as she absentmindedly picked at the bump, she noticed that something was moving inside the enlarged pore every time she poked it. She squeezed it, and it was clear that the thing inside was much larger than the small opening. It reminded her of the videos she had seen of botfly larva, except it didn’t move on its own. She dug her nails into the flesh around the opening, coaxing the object closer to the surface. She was surprised to find something green coming out. It was still attached to the inner layers of her skin, but it was clear that whatever this was, it was rolled up in there. She grabbed some tweezers from her desk and got a firm grasp, pulling slowly and steadily. She could feel it heavily anchored inside her arm as it resisted her, but she didn’t stop. The dull pain barely registered in her mind as she concentrated on the excavation. 

Relief came through the sting as the object was freed from her flesh. She uncurled it and found that it was a leaf. She was thoroughly unsure as to whether or not she was hallucinating and found herself giggling loudly at this bizarre reveal. Her manager called her into the office and gave her information on stress-related leave, encouraging her to consider taking a break. The words bounced around meaninglessly, sounding as though they were traveling to her eardrums through water. She responded as though she was powered by a motor, going through the motions of expressing gratitude and nodding, though she felt like someone else was guiding her through it. 

She was too focused on the smell of damp moss that seemed to come from nowhere.

---

She lost track of time even more at home. She vaguely remembered a life of paperwork. Was that yesterday? Five weeks ago? She lost her phone somewhere in the apartment. The battery probably died ages ago. Who knows if anyone had been trying to reach her. She didn’t care. She was exploring her body.

Since she found the leaf, she discovered other oddities growing out of her pores. Some of them bore leaves just as the first one did. Some appeared to be the start of twigs. Those wouldn’t come out, no matter how hard she tugged on them. In fact, pulling at those seemed to make them stronger. Some of these growths started happening in impossible places. She found a thorn on one of her knuckles. Her teeth started to loosen in her gums. All of the flesh inside her mouth shifted from pink to a sort of faint shade of green. Not quite a sickly green, more like something that seemed to need sunlight to feed. 

She couldn’t remember when she stopped eating, but she kept showering. She spent more and more time showering and letting the bathroom become humid and foggy as the water ran over her. She found it nourishing. One day as she massaged her hair, she felt something come loose. She expected another clump of hair, and she was mostly right. Within the tangle, she found some kind of a vine. She smiled as she traced her fingers over it, touching the delicate leaves attached to the stem. She was delighted to find a small yellow flower near the end of the vine. 

When she wasn’t showering, she was dreaming. She returned to the clearing over and over again. Now she was earnestly trying to get close to the entity, but she was never able to reach it before the dream ended. Tears of fear upon waking were replaced with tears of sorrow. Every time she woke, she found her body to be more stiff than before. She struggled to bend her joints a little more every day. Her skin was no longer as pliable as it once was, as it slowly became a rough protective shell. She felt like her internal structure was somehow different. Were these still bones inside her? Did her heart still pump blood? Did it matter? 

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that her days of exploration were coming to a close. She knew that if she indulged too long, she would be stuck, and all of this would have been for nothing. 

---

The day she left, she didn’t bother closing the door to her apartment. She simply found her keys and walked to the car. She still had a full tank of gas. Good. She knew she was moving slowly, but she was sure that she left with plenty of time. She did not need to find her phone to use the GPS; she knew exactly where she needed to go. She drove until she met the tree line. She left the car off the side of the highway, partially covered by some brush. 

This time it was not a dream. She made her way through the plants, each one a familiar sibling to her. There was no man made path, but this did not stop her. She did not need it. She made her way, her limbs stiffening slightly more with every step. Her hands were nearly frozen in place, her fingers now no more than small branches, slightly twisted, with lively green leaves bouncing at the tips.

She tried not to rush her pace lest she break something and be unable to move entirely. She could hear her limbs groaning in protest with every movement. She willed them to keep pushing her forward. She could hear the faint droning and made her way in its direction. The shuffling, she now realized, was only her. She felt a bit silly now, looking back at her initial reaction. If only she knew, if only she could have seen back then how freeing this would be. Every step brought her closer to home. 

She approached the clearing. The entity stood there, beckoning her with its arm outstretched. As she made her way to it, ancient knowledge surfaced from the depths of her mind, delicate blooms of story and pictures that had been buried for so long. Such an understanding would have been impossible to conceive of in her lifetime before, but here and now, there was nothing but comprehension and acceptance. 

The entity guided her to a spot, her spot, there in the clearing. The remains of her feet melted away as roots quickly grew over the spots of flesh that were left. She stretched the limbs that used to be her arms upward and tilted her face to meet the sun. She could feel her roots penetrating the soil beneath her, reaching the nutrients and moisture that she craved, and she felt strong. 

An ancient song echoed in her mind, and something within her clicked into place. She made it, she was here. She settled into her spot as the song grew louder within her spirit, reverberating through her and connecting her to her surroundings.. Her body fully hardened in her position. She was comfortable and at peace. Here she could grow, and here she would be.