I am getting a lot of sores on my hands and I can’t help but pick at them. They have no discernible origin, I have never previously experienced any skin maladies, and I have not encountered any form of poisonous plants or vermin. Despite this, sores appear on my hands anyway, small flat blisters with white and green sebaceous fluid forming a subcutaneous saucer.
Warm tea bags and salves do not bring them to a head, they never come to a head, they just stay flat yet swelling my fingers, like marbles under my skin.
I’m afraid of doctors, I tell myself that it is nothing serious and the sores will go away on their own.With enough effort I can draw pus from the offending vesicles, but it is never all the pus; I either lance them with a needle or squeeze them between my fingertips until white, yellow, or green liquid oozes from my pores. This act never milks the wounds enough to grant relief though, only disgust. When the purulence does run from the sores it is sluggish. With great effort I extract tiny seed shaped globules of sebum followed by either clear or colored draining. Even after it is done draining I can still see the infection through my skin mocking me. I squeeze and squeeze the spots, but they only turn red and painful like burns, they never empty out completely.
How much potential discharge can the human body contain? I wonder as examine the product of the blisters, it is like a tiny pebble covered in slime, in the soft illumination of the bathroom light it looks a lot like a seed, or maybe an egg. There is a darkness of truth around that thought, my follicles giving birth to tiny eggs.
It does not take long for my affliction to begins to put a strain on my marriage to Annie, the first instance occurs as I am driving the two of us home from the movie theater one night. It is raining out and the street lights blur through our windows as we pass them. One particular cyst on the side of my finger is irritating me especially and my attention to picking the scab causes me to lose focus of the road.
I lose control of the vehicle briefly as the tire is pulled into the curb by a puddle of standing water.
“Watch out!” Annie says.
I regain control of my truck, and then unconsciously begin again on the sore even though it nearly caused me to wreck.
“What are you doing?” She asks, and then sees me working fervently at my finger as I attempt to extract the offending fluid from my body.
“That’s disgusting.”
We arrive at our home with no further incident, and I run hot water into a bowl and place my aching hands into it with hopes that it will provide even the smallest iota of relief. As I’m doing so I explain to my wife that no I didn't cut myself at work, and no it couldn't possibly be staph infection. While I do so I furiously scrub one hand with the other, alternating my scratching as I do so.
Annie asks to see them and I remove my hands from the water and show her; they are gnarled, swollen at the knuckles, and covered in red blotches; this is the worst they've looked yet. It seems as if the water that provided the small amount of relief had also provoked the ailment. As for my wife I can tell that she is disgusted with me, her upper lip curls up in an animal grimace like that of a chimp.
“You need to see a doctor.”
“Not yet, not yet my dear.
The platitude that time heals all wounds is as untrue as it is banal, my condition only worsens with the rotations of the clock; prior discomforts evolve into outright pain as the dermatitis continues its frenzied growth.
I must wear gloves at work all the time now, the sight of my hands causes revulsion among my coworkers, and they are afraid of contagion. I assure them that the condition is not catching, but I do not know this to be the truth because I refuse to get a diagnosis. I’m exiled from the break room during lunch time because my appearance turns my peers from their appetites.
These damnable abscesses have taken control of not only my professional life, but my home life as well, Annie doesn't let me touch her anymore, and she makes me sleep on the couch so I don’t ruin the mattress with my secretions. The only thing in my existence that has not thus far headed on the course of ruination because of my condition is my relationship with my dog, who is not startled by the way my hands look. The mindless brute even licks them in attempts to provide me comfort as I lay sleepless on my isolated resting place at night.
Not satisfied with causing me pain, and making me an unwilling celibate; my skin disease continues to aggressively consume my appendages. My wrists fall to the maddening eruption of sores as soon as my hands have become twisted and swollen to the point that there is no surface of them unblemished. My foreman sends me on unpaid sick leave, and now I must resort to what little amount of money that I have in savings.
Fever begins to weaken me, and I am using the bathroom with the door closed when I hear Annie call to me through the door. When she speaks I hear her setting down something next to her feet.
She taps lightly at the door, I can hear her clear her throat; “I saw some of those blisters on the dog’s legs just now.”
“That can’t be.” I say.
“It can be, and it is. That means whatever you have is spreading if the dog has caught it. You need to do the right thing and take him to the vet. I’m going to stay with my mother until you get better, or go to the doctor.” She says.
She then retrieves what she set down; an item which I now infer is a suit case and walks away. I hear the front door open and then close, the thudding of the portal as it shuts seem to reverberate throughout the modest house akin to the sound of a tomb being sealed.
There is a moment of silence after the percussive noise is made, and then I can hear the car start and leave the driveway.
Is it true that whatever ails me has spread to my beloved pet, a cross species germination of some form of unknown cellulitis?
I want to cry, but I cannot, what form of uncaring deity has created a world that contains diseases such as mine? How little does fate have compassion for humanity that I; a good and kind man by all accounts, should have to suffer like this? It is in the ambivalent, honest light of the fluorescent bulb overhead that I gaze in the mirror and reflect on my wretched condition. I contemplate many empty thoughts as I stare at my reflection, the face of a frowning sad man, I hold my hands next to my face and they look like decaying tree stumps oozing putrid sap. I can find no solutions; the only obvious truth of my existence is that I am marked to suffer.
I inhabit a world that rich men by no virtue of their own scheme their way into expensive cars, and as they put down the cash payment for the deposit at the dealership, innocent children die of cancer not ten miles away. I inhabit a life where my job has expelled me, my wife has abandoned me and some form of creeping, maleficent malady consumes me and no god or angel soothes me.
So swiftly that I can see it occurring, a blister rises up on my arm, translucent and proud I can see the pouch filling up with amber fluid, swirling inside of it like smoke in the crystal ball of a clairvoyant. It is then that I see inside of my flesh, but outside of it as well, I see up, and I see above myself my vision pans out and in at the same time, and it reveals to me chaos. Outside of the flickering glow of my bathroom, outside of my house, my neighborhood, is an expansive darkness, an unending midnight that is outside spontaneously generates and destroys all that exists. It is pure Chaos, and it is omniscient, this vision reveals to me that entropy is akin to a conscious entity and it is light and it is darkness at the same time. This ceaseless production and destruction is what we call god; it inhabits everything as much as it exists outside of everything; and it follows a blue print of its own design that must be executed despite the pleasures and sufferings of humans. There is no compassion for our wretched existence, events must occur in accordance with whatever plans have been laid by this mad engineer.
My gaze has not left the blister as it dances in front of me with movements of my arm, dancing back and forth like the metronome of a hypnotist, my revelry breaks when the surface of the abscess bursts and a cluster of those pod-like sebum plugs ride a thin stream of fluid down into the crook of my elbow.
Had I been flailing my arms from scratching so vehemently?
There are globs of pus clinging to the mirror, and the medicine cabinet, they look as though they had been spread out in a fan shape like the path of water from a sprinkler head. Had I been scratching so hard as to fling the sticky viscous stuff so far and wide? By the moment resembling more, and more seeds, or eggs or both, the sebum plugs cling to glass, leaving snail trails oozing behind them as they slowly slide downward. They are large, now almost the size of a pencil eraser.
I look at my hands, and arms, where the growths have ruptured and ejaculated their strange seed there are holes in my skin, pores and follicles dilated and bleeding from birthing the excretions. My dermis resembles a wasp’s nest, porous and honeycombed. As I gaze on in horror the cycle begins anew, the formation of the cysts continues upwards across destroying any skin that it has not yet tainted.
Soon I am sick, I vomit violently into the toilet, and then fling open the door and stumble out of the room. I am ready to go the doctor now; with vomit running down my chin I walk into the darkness of my house. All the lights are off and the bathroom light at my back and the moonlight through the window are the only illumination. The shadows of the venetian blinds in the windows stretch long across the floor like spider webs, and I stumble through them to get my phone. My brain must be boiling from the fever I am experiencing, for my abode has taken on a uniformly sinister atmosphere. The hall seems distorted and the walls lean inwardly as if they are reaching out to crush me. I hear a scratching and a shuffling from the living room, the sound frightens me, but I must go towards it if I am to retrieve my phone. My pace takes on a stumbling gait like that of a movie monster, there is an intense itching at the bottom of my left foot and I drag it across the floor behind me to alleviate the sensation.
After what seems like a small eternity I finally reach my living room where I know that my cell phone is on the coffee table, the scratching sounds grow louder as I do so, and I can hear the clicking of toe nails on the tile floor. From the corner of the room closest to the couch the source of the noises emerges from the shadows, it is my dog, I can see its eyes dimly reflecting in the failing light, it steps closer to me.
“Oh my poor Buddy, come closer.” I try to say, but the words are caught in the bile and other detritus lodged in my throat.
The beast seems to understand d my words and limps towards me, even in the gloom I can see that it’s features are not right, something wet is hanging from his belly and dragging along the floor as it attempts to come to me. As he continues his loping gait more of his features become visible to me and I can see that whatever malady has afflicted me has indeed worked its destructive course upon my pet. What I first noticed hanging from the dogs belly is some form of tumorous mass, a long pinkish coiling of blisters that undulates softly with the animals respiration. Covering his muzzle is a great number of the blisters like the ones that I have been plagued with, they ooze softly. The disease has also twisted my beloved pet’s hindquarters, which are so raw and covered in sores that they seem to have worked their way down to his hip bones. When his eyes reflect in the dim light I can see some form of fine mesh like substance covering his irises like cataracts.
Buddy manages to traverse the distance between me and the couch and after much apparent effort, he turns his nose to me and licks my hand, and then his sores explode. A great amount of pus and blood and is expelled from the wounds, and then something unexplainable happens. In a twisted mockery of natural birth some form of hybrid of plant and insect begins to emerge from the dog’s ruptured boils. Thin like copper wire, green and gray tendrils uncoil themselves outwards of my companion’s broken anatomy. These tendrils are similar to vines, but where leaves would be sprout instead unfold bugs that look like grass hoppers with paper wings. Now my dog, my most faithful companion falls dead at my feet, when he hits the floor his tongue rolls out and it too is giving emergence to whatever that foul life form is.
Screaming wet from my throat in awe and in agony I run to my coffee table and pick up my cell phone. Flashing from the display on the screen is a text message from Annie; “I’m scared, I have blisters now., the message reads.
Oh God! Have I damned my wife to this terrible fate as well? Even though I suspect that our healthcare system will be unable to help with whatever parasitic life form is inside of me I still attempt to dial 911. Reaching forward I press my index finger to the screen and it collapses in itself upon making contact with the surface, my fingernail sloughs off and lies across the screen and the tip of my finger folds up into the second knuckle in nothing more than a bleeding stump. Spasms wrack my hands and I drop the phone onto the floor, the creatures devouring the carcass of my dog behind me make a chattering noise like that of cicadas laughing in the night. A single thin tendril curls its way from the ruined part of my index finger.
Despite the pain and fear I am feeling, I still itch terribly, not looking at my deceased dog as I do so I turn around and stumble back to the bathroom. I know of one thing that will provide relief. Through my hallway that still tilts on it’s axis twisted at some unknown epicenter I reenter my bathroom. The bathtub sits and beckons me to enter it for relief, without removing my clothes I enter the porcelain receptacle and turn the water on. Every time my flesh contacts a surface the sores on it erupt and the tiny tendrils of alien life erupt from the abscesses. I turn on the water; my hand disintegrates into a quivering lump of organic material when I manipulate the faucet.
The water flows into the basin, and it contacts my feet, as it does so the growths on them accelerate and the pustulant seeds within hatch. Steaming water fills the tub and submerges with me, as it does so I lose my flesh to what lives within it, but it grants me relief, how it stops the pain and itching, it also stops the mournful thoughts of my dog and my wife.
A while back I watched a documentary about the tropical rain forest, during one portion of it the film they discussed a “zombie fungus” that infects ants and drives them to a habitable environment for the parasitic growth before emerging from the ants’ brain and killing it. The fungus emerges from the ant in white branching growths with the occasional head on them, the way that the fungus looked emerging from the ant reminds me of what the branching vine like growths look like emerging from my tortured body. Makes me realize that I’m not so much more than an ant.
Growing from the slurry of the hot bathwater and my corporeal essence the branching growths writhe upwards towards the ceiling of the bathroom, they have a rubbery texture, and they are pale greenish gray, but they also shine semi-translucent with some form of incandescent light.
My sight and hearing are failing, but I can see those strange creatures budding from the sebaceous vines, they bloom into being like flowers with sharp mandibles and menacing pincers that they rub together to create a chirping buzz. As I die I can understand what the buzzing noise that they are making is saying:
“I am god, we are god, I am god, we are god, you are nothing.”
Linear Mode
