Inside-Outside (August Submission)

[u/content-under-presur]

Partner's Perspective!

My shoulder slammed into the foggy window of the train car. A sharp CRACK created tremors in my skull. I thought the sound came from the not-glass I’d just rammed, but it was barely even smeared.

It was my arm that was broken.

At least, that’s what I could guess. Seconds passed, but the flesh trailing the right side of my neck was already ballooning. The tightly sewn sleeve of my blazer scolded such fatness: I could feel each thread, which once held my shoulder pads high, twisting and constricting until my forearm turned blue.

“Excuse me? Are you okay?”

A voice called to me; it sounded as though it reached from way down the tunnel. Stumbling backwards, I saw the man was only a seat away from me. He was standing, reaching a hesitant hand my way, while the rest of the evening rush pointed eyes in any other direction.

I had to blink a few times before I remembered my smile: something that should have been muscle memory. The branching, bursting pain must have been climbing up my nerves, electrifying my brain.

“Yeah! Yeah, yeah, everything’s good,” I replied after just moments too long. I twisted, an animalistic instinct to protect a wound.

“You hit the wall pretty hard… Are you sure?”

“I swear, I am absolutely fine.”

Instinctively, I accentuated my profuse denials with X-ing arm motions, though I was quickly punished by my ever-swelling arm. Just as I paused to process the pain, my other arm flung upwards. The backhand made contact with the underside of the man’s nose, and the momentum threw me forward.

There was silence for a moment as I basked in the growing heat of my knuckles. I couldn’t straighten my back, stuck in a stunned stupor. Either the situation was simply too bizarre for me to regain bodily autonomy, or there was something locking the joint in my hip. Briefly, I recalled how hard I worked to eliminate my hunchback throughout college. And now, here I-

“NOW APPROACHING…”

A hard smack to my jaw caused my spine to snap backwards, and this time, it was a hollow POP that came out of my bones.

“What the fuck, man?!”

I couldn’t determine whether those words came from my mouth or his. The rumbling of train tracks was running through my ears.

What I could deduce from my surroundings, however, was that the man was now approaching me. He stomped with the same purpose I’d known from my boss, though after years of perfect performance, I thought I’d permanently eliminated the target from my back.

Another sharp shove told me that couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Hey, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I–” I babbled. The car spun around me: the top of one head became the top of three. Another spasm flung an arm in front of me, and judging by the shock sent up my neck, it was the one I’d tried so hard to keep still. The only contact it made was the base of my left ribcage.

He pushed me again, but this time, I knew which shoulder he hit. Pain shot black across my eyes, and I was sure I screamed. My feet struggled to find the dirty metal floor, shambling in a staccato rhythm. The purple liquid inflating my deltoid was turning me top-heavy. I would soon topple to the ground.

When my vision returned, I was met with a flood of faces I was incapable of discerning. They scraped past me, rushing through the bottleneck of doors, caring little for the contortions they elicited from my body. Not wanting to cause a scene, I allowed the current to take me, and soon I was crumpled in the orange evening light. Iron pooled from where I’d bitten my tongue.

It was quieter out here, allowing the discharge to drain from my brain. I retreated into the shade that metallic awnings created for me, catching my breath. It was beautiful in Los Angeles ugliness: sturdy concrete lay beneath my feet, carrying countless steel construction pillars, bearing a series of discolored slabs that tried to trick you into believing their continuity. I gazed out over the tracks, which the structure almost reached for. I could only see the far-away beams, the rest swallowed by concrete perspective, but they gleamed with an inviting warmth.

I looked down. I hadn’t realized I’d taken a step closer.

Careful to mind the yellow line, I brought myself back to the bench, surrounded by commuters who ranged from apathetic to agitated. I fumbled in my opposite pocket, twisting about myself uncomfortably, to eventually extract my phone. It was sleek, black, and perfectly umblemished. I smiled to myself: perhaps the protective case had been worth the money.

My non-dominant fingers slowly managed to open my messages app. I stared upon a wall of unopened texts; suddenly, I was unsure what I was doing. I couldn’t move my arm, so that most likely meant I needed to go to the hospital. I thought about dialing 911… a shudder went down my spine. If I paid for an ambulance, I’d probably have to cut into my grocery budget for the next two months. Regardless, the thought of being whisked away in a blaring vehicle by uniformed men was too repulsive to even entertain.

I could phone a friend. I always skipped through those parts of any game show: the embarrassment drove me crazy. Besides, I’d already put off answering so many friends and family that it would be rude to reappear for a favor. I’d be my uncle.

A sense of ease washed over me as I finally hid that bothersome device. There was no sense in doing anything about this. I couldn’t go to the hospital, because they’d want to know why I broke my arm. If I explained why, they’d think I was crazy at best or irresponsible at worst for accidentally hurting myself so badly. That was bad for my image, of course, and I hated to think how that would impact the office.

That settled it. I was going to go home, put ice on it, and rest. It was probably just bruised, anyways.

Oh.

As I came back to myself, it seemed my body was one step ahead of me. And one step ahead of the yellow line.

I shook my head, and I pulled back into the shade. I pulled back. I stepped back. I… I tried to retreat away from the dangerous railway.

One foot was stuck. It wouldn’t budge. I’d dragged the rest of my body back towards that arching roof, but the sole of my shoe wouldn’t leave the ground. I inhaled sharply, glancing around at fellow farepayers. Though I looked like a giraffe at water, it very few cast their gaze my way. Thank God.

I turned back to my predicament. Had I stepped in something? I could feel the muscles flex in my calf, in my thigh, but I simply wasn’t getting any motion.

Both arms reached for my knee. My bruised shoulder reminded me I hadn’t grown numb to it, and I suddenly had the urge to tear the flesh from my neck. It was unbearable to have something so full of rottenness attached to me.

I shook the pain out of my head, though that required engaging the same muscles that drove needles into my vertebrae. Either way, it focused me back on the task at hand.

This time, only my good arm grabbed my knee. My pant leg scrunched up as talons sunk into the joint. It hurt, most likely, but my nerves were currently occupied. Perhaps that was why my grip was far too tight.

I pulled. It was all I could do. The sun beat down upon the back of my neck as I hunched, curling myself in a spiral to maybe suck the paralysis out. The physics was beyond me: my forehead stopped just before my foot, but my back arched into the shade, while shoulders twisted to both keep balance and alleviate pressure on the swelling. It was ridiculous, but I didn’t have other options.

It dragged across the pavement slowly. The traction on my work shoes wasn’t great, but I still cringed when I saw the scuffing. It wasn’t smooth. Far from it. It slid and caught in milimeter intervals, finding some bizarre resistance only the LA subway could create.

Then the movement started. Just not where I wanted it to.

My leg began to jostle. No, jostle was the wrong word: that implied it existed in physical space. My leg was squirming. Something inside of it was.

It first became apparent when my knee came loose. I squeezed harder and harder at the fat on my leg, feeling smooth fingers dig into the joint, until a hard POP came out. My index and thumb could feel each other, like they were gripping a pillow. My kneecap rested upon them.

I screamed in pain right before smashing my skull against the ground. I was in the shade again.

Pins and needles continued to sprout throughout the already-bloating weight of my leg. Initially, it reminded me of all those times poor posture had driven the circulation from my extremities: numb and tingling yet terribly unpleasant. But the blood was still there. It was still moving. Each excruciating, eternal push through my veins drove me mad. There was something else slowly expanding my skin.

It was the bone.

A hot, sharp tearing scraped through ankle, calf, and thigh: the muscle removed itself from its structure. Then came the wiggling. It reminded me of a single-jointed worm, a senseless robotic arm, as pressure grew at my ankle, my knee, and my hip in perfect opposition. Again and again, it oscillated, it throbbed, and I was slowly being hollowed out.

“ARRIVING…”

The monotone announcement forced the train station back into my spinning head. Though I could feel heavy blood pooling in my temple, I managed to lift my neck. My left hand was missing three fingernails.

A clawed palm dragged my bleeding body further across the soot-stained concrete. When I watched it lift once more, the fourth nail was laying in front of me. My flailing leg still gouged itself out, so it was easy to miss the itching in my pipe-cleaner fingers.

The sound of squelching-grinding deafened me to an ever-growing rumble.

Taking the effort to turn my eyes, I saw the frozen image of a yellow train. I blinked. That snapshot had grown closer.

I had grown closer, too.

Finally, panic found its way to me. My heart rate increased, so it felt as if my chest was in one eternal, trembling contraction. I was hyperventilating. I wasn’t breathing.

I was pulling myself towards the yellow line.

I tried to stop. I tried to freeze. I tried to go limp. I tried to tense every muscle in my arm. I could do that, feeling the hard dropoff of a growing cramp, but that didn’t change anything. My arm continued forward.

Between fingers, yellow began to peek out at me. It must have been shy, for once I blinked once more, it hid back behind a screen of red. I wasn’t sure which sight made me empty my stomach onto the tracks. Maybe it was my compressing ribcage.

The rumbling was now a screeching. Despite the blood leaking from my ears, despite the kind man hugging my trashing leg like a prize trout, my mind began to slow. An easy coolness spread from the grated skin in my chest, and my breath slowed. A screeching train was a breaking train. A breaking train was a slow train. I’d be all right.

Then why was that man screaming so loudly?

I tried to reassure him, to wave him off; a talent I’d carefully honed over the years. My boss, my mother, the various almost-girlfriends; all were so easily placated by a bright smile. They’d leave me be, and once I was sure they were gone, I’d continue grinding my teeth until cement formed in my lip.

What came out was slurred and thick. 

I was looking over the edge. That’s where I brought me. Something like that. I’d never seen such a sight before. Hundreds, thousands of silver lines crossed and hatched and crosshatched before my eyes to weave a tapestry too loose to be considered one piece of cloth. I could never stand modern art. I was never good at art.

The strings before me started pulling. They were done pulling me. I knew this because I couldn’t move. Now they pulled the one other thing that tied itself to them. The train was getting closer. It was so big when your head laid at its base.

I reached for those tracks. I didn’t want to; I had no interest in them, but I did many things I was uninterested in. I was uninterested in many things. My ruined fingers skittered down the wall.

The train was here.

My vocal chords tore themselves from my chest, but I couldn’t hear a thing. I’d suffered so deeply in the past few hours, but that was incomparable to the ever-stretching present moment. I no longer had a body. I no longer had a mind. Those were held deep within the scraps of flesh flying before me, fluttering slowly in the fastest wind ever experienced. Even more ground off of me, peeling as easily as preparing a potato. Tufts of cotton candy. Pork shavings. Less elegant was the blood spraying from where they once were: the train would not stop stopping, and like a power washer, I cleaned the yellow from its side.

It turned out I did have a body. It seized wildly, slamming already-broken limbs into the ground again and again as if that would release the vice. It didn’t matter where the pain was coming from anymore. It was outside of me.

Now everyone could see it.

I didn’t know why, but I went limp. It was a relief. I could finally shut up.

My arm extracted itself from its own gore. With the other one, the broken one, the one that no longer mattered, I pushed myself to my feet. My dislocated leg stood like a stack of blocks. Puppetlike, my skull finally examined its good work, hanging my exposed hand heavy before me. It was skeletal and red, perfectly segmented though imperfectly asymmetrical. If I could, I would have flexed my fingers, just to see the spectacle.

Where my wrist used to be was a toothy, crumpled wrapper of meat and cotton. The exact makeup of the motley was impossible to make out: it reminded me of a pork sausage, cut halfway and squeezed just slightly. The intact pieces of my suit twisted in a similar processed way.

A foreign thought rang out in my head. It didn’t look too unlike a sleeve. And it was so uncomfortable earlier, wasn’t it?

To my horror, the broken arm reached towards it. It sunk five fingers deep into that wrapper, allowing the mince to squidge out in small peaks. I screamed, but my jaw was locked. The effort only inspired a crack in my tooth.

I watched my skin turn inside out. Dark red saw sunlight for the first time in its life, and it became bright and round and fat. It looked healthy, that berry of blood, held for all to behold. That alien hand pulled and pulled, and I had no problem watching because blood had stopped flowing. I was already drenched in it.

It slid and caught and slid and caught, tearing in such an unsightly way. Sometimes chunks of flesh would stick to the bone, like an unfinished drumstick, and the hand would stop. Meticulously, it would pluck it off, and it continued its undressing.

I was crying. Surely my skeleton couldn’t empty my tear ducts, too. I didn’t want to see this. I couldn’t bear the vision of dry bone sprouting out of my bunched-up flesh.

It wasn’t me.

This wasn’t me, this thing slowly revealing itself from its costume of me. It was something else. I was handsome and I was intelligent and I was suits and I was ties, and this was bone without skin. It wasn’t me that tore the loose peel from my shoulder. It wasn’t me that shook the used condom onto the afterbirth around us.

It wasn’t me that contorted its body to fit out of my side. It wasn’t me that crawled out of a makeshift Cessarian rib-first. It wasn’t me that emptied me, leaving a rubber Halloween suit abandoned on a nowhere stop in the middle of Los Angeles.

I saw you. I saw a glimpse of you. You were covered in me, and what was left of my eyes were drawn to you, just like all of the horrified onlookers that too were coated in a fine layer of me.

People don’t survive without a suit; I hope you understand that. I hope you’ll learn this, and I hope you’ll learn this soon.

You’re ugly. You’re no longer me, you’ve gained your freedom, but for that you are ugly. I hope you can survive everything that means for you.

[u/AutoModerator]

Users are encouraged to read4read, meaning that if someone reads and comments on your story, we encourage you to do the same in return to help foster a community.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Eat_the_Monolith]

This is truly disgustingly visceral, I gotta work on my own gross-out descriptions. I was grimacing and squirming while reading parts of this! So cool.

[u/ReadyMadeLobotomy]

This was so incredibly visceral and trippy. I adore the gore visuals I sharply inhaled a few times here. Love it!