parked with everybody else. I examined my choice of career. I should have majored in Business. I tried to trace the decisions I had made with my life that had led to my being hit in the neck with a supersonic chunk of frozen airline sewage.
All at once I knew that whatever had hit me was not sewage, and that it was offended.
There was something in the back of my head. I could feel it, but if I looked at it too closely, it disappeared. But I knew it was in there.
On the other hand, I still wasn’t dead. That was nice.
For a while, I didn’t think of anything. When I did think, I thought of beer. Tall, cold draft beers dripping condensation on blackened hardwood in a dark room on a bright day. That, and major thoracic surgery.
Eventually, someone would find me. I just had to be patient. I might have to deal with the stigma of being found by the local stoners when they came down to the quad to burn one last joint before they split town, but I could weather that embarrassment. Everything would be fine. Eventually, someone would find me.
My body twitched from time to time. My arm would wiggle under my chest, or my back would spasm. At one point my legs ran three steps and twisted me around in a quarter circle. I tried to convince myself that these were the normal byproducts of a positive process, and not the convulsions of a dead or dying man. It wasn’t easy. I was still entirely numb, and paralyzed, and increasingly nervous.
There was a really nice sunset somewhere in there. A smattering of cirrus clouds that caught the magnificent pinks and oranges and, near the end, hellish reds as day faded into darkness.
The darkness itself was less fun. As the last trace of light disappeared I wondered in that sudden way whether I was already dead, and this was death, the imprisonment of the living mind in the decaying body. Perhaps the onset of night would bring with it demons intent on punishing me for my sins.
There were no demons. After a while there were crickets and peepers. I decided that meant I had come out ahead. The moon replaced the sun and climbed into the sky. Slowly.
My breath hitched in and I sneezed a cloud of powdered blood. My body jerked forward and back, and then, abruptly, I sat up. It took several minutes for my conscious mind to catch up to reality.
“What the hell?” I couldn’t think of anything profound to say. I was still numb, and distracted by a fear that was too large to quantify. I didn’t know if I was alive.
My skin began to tingle, gently at first and then violently, until I was doubled over clutching myself and trying not to move. I couldn’t breath. Needles worked their way over my body by the thousands, marching rows that swept through me in horrible waves. It was like being frozen and burnt in a billion individual pieces.
And then it stopped, switched off as if I had passed some sort of milestone. My sense of touch returned. I took a deep breath, held it and then let it out, trying to be as still as possible. I didn’t trust myself to move.
All fixed, something thought with my brain. I shut my eyes and tried to follow the thought to its source. My mind felt heavier, as if there was something hanging off the back of it. Like a tube raft tethered to a motorboat, or the handle on a Dunkin’ Donut. I opened my mouth and moved my jaw around. I couldn’t get my thoughts in order.
I touched my shoulder carefully, afraid of what I would find, but the wound was gone. Healed. There was a large hole through my shirt, and I was soaked in blood, but my skin was smooth and uninjured. I moved my arm and felt no resistance.
I lurched to my feet and stood still, getting used to the idea that I wasn’t dead. My heart was beating again. That was a novel thought. I ran my fingers through my hair. I was a mess. My clothes and skin were covered in bloody mud. If I got pulled over on the way home they would bust me on principle. Although it was possible they would let me go when they figured out it was all my own blood. I giggled and took off across the field. I felt dragged down, exhausted in some primal way, as if I had run a marathon and then fucked my brains out.
I had a spare shirt in the trunk. I could change my shirt. That was a normal thought, a practical thought, and I clutched at it. The shirt stank of sweat from a run along the canal the previous week, or maybe the week before that, but it was still better than what I had on. I got in the car and turned on the engine and tried to pull myself together. There was a pack of cigarettes on the dash, left there by my roommate the night before, when she’d needed a ride home from…somewhere. I couldn’t remember. I shook one out and lit it with the pop lighter next to the steering wheel. The nicotine hit me like a ton of bricks, and for a second, all was right with the world.
I remember thinking, I should report this, but I had no idea how, or to whom. A visit to the hospital was probably in order, too, but I was exhausted, and everything in the entire world could wait until the morning. I had no idea what time it was, and I didn’t care enough to check. I put the car in reverse and backed up blind, pulled out onto the street and floored it home.
It took me twenty minutes and three more cigarettes to get back to Ithaca. I left the windows down and the radio loud, and when I got home I took a shower and went to bed. I fell asleep immediately, and didn’t dream.
2
The thing on my back wasn’t a tick, but I couldn’t help making the comparison. It was vaguely bug-shaped, an elongated hexagon with rounded corners and a hard surface that called to mind the word ‘carapace.’ Very buggy. It was also dug into the base of my neck like a nail. This gave it a distinctly tick-like affect. I reached up and touched it and was sort of amazed that I didn’t want to throw up.
The shell narrowed to a few inches wide at the top, became a conduit of some kind. The flesh there was scarred over and smooth, pressed out as if the shell had erupted from inside and somehow not killed me. It looked like it had been there for years.
The rest of the thing clung to me like it was custom made. It was at its widest across my shoulder blades, narrower down my back, and tapered to a point at the base of my spine. Maybe two inches thick, right in the middle, and razor sharp at the edges. Light, like it wasn’t even there, but it was. When I moved my head, I could feel where it was connected to my spine, right at the base of my skull. I could feel my fingers on the surface of the thing. It was like having a fifth limb.
I had not paid closer attention to anything else I had encountered in my life at that point, including sex. Was it a part of me, I wondered, or was it just growing out of me?
I thought of mushrooms growing out of logs, blackheads that left behind oozing craters, wasps hatching from spiders, teeth pulled from sockets. Panic prickled the edge of my hair, and I had to force myself to swallow and breathe in through my nose, out through my mouth. I had to stay level.
Up close the shell was iridescent grey-black, striated in every conceivable direction, like it wasn’t all one piece. When I arched my back it moved with me, slipping over my skin with the sinewy grace of a snake. We were connected only at the point where it entered my neck. Otherwise it was unhindered, as if it were meant to move around.
The door across the hall opened and shut, and I heard Iris’ footsteps as she moved down the hall. Probably as motivated as I was by the prospect of coffee. And since that meant Dylan was in the kitchen, there was probably breakfast. Good to live with a chef. My stomach growled, thought about it, and growled some more. I breathed. Hunger was good.
Unless I needed food to sustain the awful metamorphosis of some terrible thing gestating inside of me. And besides, how the hell was I going to leave the room with a metal shell covering my ass? Christ. I probably already owed money to Franz Kafka’s estate.
I listened to Iris bounce down the stairs. I could hear her footsteps very clearly, even though the staircase was on the other side of the house, and carpeted. The colors in my closet were brighter than I remembered them being, too. My eyes had an odd fresh feeling to them, like I’d washed them in lysergic acid.
I could smell Iris’ perfume through the door.
For a momen
t, I let myself imagine what she was wearing. It wasn’t a fruitful thought, but there wasn’t any harm in a little mental leering, and any distraction was welcome. And besides, Iris was a knockout. A student teacher with an alarming joie de vivre, a fun person to be around, a good friend of Dylan’s and a burgeoning friend of mine. She had needed a place around when Dylan and I had decided to move in together. Cheaper to live with roommates. She knew Dylan, but not me and she hadn’t realized until moving day that Dylan and I weren’t a couple. After a lot of laughter we’d had a frank discussion, which boiled down to the arbitrary decision that neither of us would try to have sex with the other…and that was that.
The sexual tension was killing me. That, or I was just a heterosexual male living across the hall from someone who looked like Wonder Woman would have if they had drawn her Greek. One or the other. Either way, I couldn’t face a beautiful woman with a shell growing out of my neck.
I turned around and looked at the thing more closely. From a few feet it looked like my back had been dipped in rubber. Damn thing was gonna be a pain in the ass to hide. I saw a lot of turtlenecks in my future, and grinned painfully, because I hated turtlenecks.
The shell began to change color, from black to purple to red to pink, and then to tan and then