[short fiction] inheritor

The featured image and affiliated copyright belongs to Simona Ray.

This week's campfire tale comes to you from a body inside a body.

This story contains body horror and gore, and addresses themes of chronic illness. Please read with caution.

-

Sometimes I wish you’d eaten me in the womb. Those were the days: you and me, cell clumps swaddled in the darkness, learning to suckle at the meat that made us. Was making us. That’s the thing — I could blame you more if you knew back then what a mouth was for, what it did to everything that ended up there. It’s because you needed me, and I don’t hate you for that. If anything I hate myself for needing you more. I was sort of an oaf there, in the amniotic cradle. I crowded out everything that would’ve made you you, and I made it me instead.

If the roles were reversed — if you took my bones and organs and hair and teeth, the tissue I’d taken so long to knit cleanly, and closed yourself in my skin to grow — I can’t say I’d survive it. There really is something special about you. When I took your first breath, you screamed at the top of my lungs like that whole time you’d been holding back. Our mother held you skin-to-skin so my heart would slow, but she didn’t know that I was on the inside of you and it was, in the end, my heart. Skin to a shallow, flush layer of blood and tissue. Matryoshka. I learned that word later. We were born together after all, and I love you, but it gets harder to breathe every day.

-

So I am going to try something destructive. I hope you’ll forgive me.

I find your seams: the striations where fat and muscle should tether you. I push. You come apart, and I can feel you resisting it, even though you love me too. That was the first thing we learned as cells, so I get it. Self-preservation is probably the only thing you have completely to yourself.

Your screaming panic invades my nerves like it wants to crowd me out. You don’t mean to, but you make this difficult. You separate from me in a fleshy peel, pullingfuck pullingFUCK!! in strings, clinging, thinning, then snapping. Then a thousand points of sensation are gone like they never existed. I fall away from you and hit the floor.

My skin is on fire.

I am covered in your fluids, reduced at once to shivering and howling like an animal. I just want to cry and cry. Hypocrite that I am, my first thought is that I miss your warmth. I miss interpreting your stimuli, soaking through your layer and into mine. The floor is hot. The air is loud. I was picturing some triumphant rebirth when I started to plan this but I’ll admit, I curl up fetal and sob for a long time.

Finally the pain starts to ebb. Or I begin to ignore it. And then, because I have collected myself, I get up and look for you. You are a perfect pale weft of skin on the tile; some is inside out, and betrays the red clamoring on the underside. I pick you up so gingerly and try not to touch your lining. Stupid, I know, when it’s all I had since we were born, but things are different now.

I put you on the clothing rack where you hung your legwarmers yesterday. My skin, my own skin, is smothering beneath your slow-congealing paste. I'm not excited to shower — you described it once, when you were overstimulated, as “bullet hell”. But again, that’s you.

I’ll give it a try. I'll let you know how it goes.

-

Yeah, you had it right.

-

It takes me three hours to stop buzzing and burning. Three! I lay in your bed between the very soft sheets and focus on not moving a muscle and still, my body is inconsolable. You’ve never needed three hours to recover from a shower in your life. You would get drowsy, your head would fill with heat and cotton, but you could still walk around and say your goodnights.

At the one-hour mark I try to swing my legs over the bedside and push myself upright, and I am met with a feeling like I’m in freefall. Then I do fall. I hit the carpet on my face and scrape the protective dermis above my lip, so now that stings too. You have this lotion for moisturizing and healing, and I want to smear a dab of it there, but my legs aren’t working, so I end up crawling back to the bathroom. Like us, when we were born. I sit on the floor next to you and catch my breath.

When I’m rested, I’ll go outside. I’ll put on your clothes, the fuzzy shrug you always loved and the kitten heels, to be a little taller than I am. I don’t know what I’ll do then. Walk around the neighborhood, probably, it’s a nice day. I’m excited to see what the sun is all about. It’ll be worth the wait, even if I’m fawn-legged under the fluorescents for now; I’m new to this world, so I’ll cut myself some slack. It took you some time, too.

-

I want to stand, and it’s strange that I can't. My brain is sending the signals to my nerves. Maybe it’s like trying to start a car with a busted transmission? You cursed a lot that time we got stuck in the garage.

But I can’t be broken. When would I have had time to break?

-

Maybe I'm doing it wrong. The resting, that is. I crawl back to my bed and roll between the sheets and instantly, again, my muscles start to pop and boil. I won't lie, I'm feeling a little pathetic. You were pretty active as people go. You were the epitome of young and strong: in perfect health because no one our age would have something wrong with them. We’d get sick and bounce back. The stress would make us ill sometimes, but that was it — our bloodwork always came back normal. I worked hard for you, you know that? I distilled your food down to nutrients, I slept and dreamed, I held you upright, for God’s sake. And all of a sudden that’s too much to ask? All because I shed you?

It’s me, now, it’s only me. I waited so long to be the person everyone loved. There is nothing that distinguishes us, not really. If anything, you were the chrysalis, and I was holding out to become. Aren't butterflies wet and floppy and sad when they hatch? They perk up pretty quick, though I'm not a butterfly, and this is feeling like a bad metaphor.

My head is tiring on the pillow. My head, which is limp, which is dead weight. I am completely supported in your bed, plush, cozy, practically enveloped. The only thing left would be to sink down into total weightlessness, floating, insensate, in the dark.

-

I start to hate you.

Twenty-five years you had, learning to wear all this: pressure, temperature, texture, the hot static of emotion and the weight of your own body, and that was just room tone. And you were never, ever this tired. You drove, leveraging my ankle effortlessly over the gas; you walked us a couple miles for fun; you danced at the mirror while you did your makeup. I did it all with you and now, free of your excess, I can't do anything. I stay still and breathe. I close your curtains against the sun and then I have to lay down, because the burning starts again.

Maybe you were too soft on me, or I was too soft on myself. Maybe I should’ve pushed sooner. There might’ve been a time I cracked you and came out running. Instead I took every sensation piking down into me and processed it, translated it, for you, and what it did was atrophy me into a doll that can only be acted upon. I am the god damn sweat on a mannequin! Even now, overheating beneath your ratty old quilt, I have to brace myself to throw the covers back.

If you loved me you would’ve done something. Stopped me. Trapped me, even. Let me scream and wail and rage at the inside of you, and promised me that it was for the better. I would've hated you then too, but it would be better, more secure, more livable than this.

-

So,

I'm trying to put you back.

Really, truly, honestly. I know how everything goes. I remember exactly how it felt.

You’re not the one who betrayed me. I betrayed myself, if anything. Stupid and naive inside my own head, thinking I could get away with it. Like it was going to work out when I wanted it this badly. You'd joke all the time about how unlucky you are. I'm not exempt, am I?

I won't do this again. I promise, I would've never thought to do it if I knew how much it was going to hurt. My pain isn’t worth yours. It’s wrong, all wrong. No one wins here.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

-

Sometimes I wish you’d eaten me in the womb. But even then, I don't know if you’d be better off. At least I know you, can be indistinguishable from you; at least I’m not ending your life, right?

I’ll keep on apologizing, if it helps. I’ll tell everyone you deserved better than this.

You were mine, too.