Flash Fiction / Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis
It consumed her by degrees. Memories of superfluous events went first; birthday parties, conversations with strangers, books she’d read—little smatterings licked away like jimmies on an ice cream cone, leaving her colorless.
At first, she didn’t notice. She felt only a dull hollowness and just the slightest itch of loss. Over the next few months the itch deepened to a pervasive gnawing. It burned through her veins and sucked out her marrow, stripping her of dimension. What games did she like to play as a child? She didn’t know. Who was her best friend? Her first kiss? She couldn’t remember. Dark holes replaced her memories—holes so deep she didn’t dare stand at their edges too long, for fear of falling in and being swallowed.
Finally, she understood. It was alive. Conscious. Not early senility, or stress, or some psychobabble anxiety disorder, but some thing deliberately hollowing her out. Making room.
She replaced her Adapin prescription with a spiral notebook and a package of disposable pens. This, just after she arrived at work and couldn’t remember which cubical was hers. None of the disinterested faces she passed while she searched for her desk looked familiar.
Diary. The word made her think of bright places where young girls smelling of nail polish and floral perfume and bubble gum horded harmless secrets and vivid fantasies. She wondered if she’d ever been such a girl as she splashed what remained of her life across the pages in blue ink.
Huddled in her small apartment, she sat for days trying to place names and meaning to faces in her photo albums. She paged endlessly through the diary, reading what she’d written, noting in new entries whenever passages lost meaning, as if chronicling her own disappearance would somehow help her to hold on to herself.
Yesterday, the sight of her name on the page felt foreign. She spent the day studying the stranger in the mirror, trying to find recognition in grey eyes, attempting to read thin lines etched in the pale face, until the sight of herself filled her with revulsion.
Last night, she wrote in her diary that the fight had been tedious, to the point she’d doubted her own strength at times—something she once considered inconceivable. In the end though, she’d been victorious. The thing she’d read about in the previous pages had been weak. Nothing more than crawling vermin, easily squashed beneath the feet of even the least consequential beings. When she finished the entry, she smiled, and went to bed.
She dreamed of ruined landscapes. Rivers of ashy asphalt snaked between piles of smoking rubble. Broken glass and twisted metal reflected the gleaming blaze of fire. Stone cathedrals crumbled to sand. Beyond burning horizons she heard the rhythm of her power approaching, like the thudding, synchronized bass of a march.
The sound thrilled her.
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The development of the thing inside her here is very nice. More, please. This is a good concept for a novel. Lots of room for development.
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