BIRTH

An excerpt from my upcoming novel Ego Homini Lupus. Trigger warning for body horror, incest, gore.

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Light flashed hot in a sheath of rotten meat. 

The flesh of her thighs ebbed and flowed, driven by strange tides. Her skin rippled like water. Curled and dreaming, she watched waves of pallid skin meet at her groin and drown her sex. There was no pain. She touched the smooth surface with her fingertips. It gave at her touch, pliant and soft. And then, gentle at first, then firm, something rose up to press against it. She saw the outline of a cheekbone and an ear. 

Pressure built between her legs. She tried to cross them, but her new flesh made them heavy and unwieldy, and a shape was coming, heaving up against the skin. Round. Her mother’s face pushed through the caul, wet flesh slithering over her fine features. Her pale eyes fluttered open. Her lips parted, showing porcelain teeth, and in the dark depths of her mouth a fat black tongue squirmed hungrily. 

The flesh about the face began to bubble. Thick bands of muscle squirmed beneath the surface. Joan felt nails scraping. The outlines of long arms pushed up against the pale sheet of her skin. Fingers hooked unseen through the knotholes of her pelvis. Was it pulling itself out of her, or her into itself?

“Please, mommy,” she whispered into the thick, wet dark.

“Please, mommy,” the face mocked, its voice high and thin and hateful. “Please, mommy. Mommy. Pleeeeease, mommy.”

“Stop it!” Joan shouted, clapping her hands to her ears.

“Stop it, mommy.” It began to sob, whining and sniveling, and as it did its fingers burst from the flesh of her thighs and it dug its nails into her skin, and she knew that it was coming. Black slicks of blood sheeting down its crooked shoulders, its crowded, narrow teeth. It split her open like a moth’s cocoon, breaking off dry chunks of her, clawing its way free, teeth gnashing, biting off ribbons of its own fat tongue.

Mommy.