slippage from between the pale legs. She pulled
away, horrified at herself, terrified that somebody
had seen her.
It hadn’t worked the same this time. She’d gone
too far, and the revulsion she’d fought for so long
had finally overwhelmed her completely. Her hands
shook and her vision blurred. She finished her work
quickly and staggered out of the parlor. Her cheeks
burned and she felt like she would faint. She staggered home like a zombie, wondering if she’d broken
herself permanently, tipped herself over the precipice into the yawning abyss of insanity. She started
to see with shameful clarity just how low she’d come
over the previous weeks. She was terribly aware of
the swelling mass that rested just over her epiglottis,
stretching the flesh to breaking point. She vomited
twice before she got to her house and once
all combined and calcified in filth. Looking at it now,
she had no idea if she would be able to remove it without surgery, but she was too ashamed to call for help.
She reached back into her gaping maw with her
tweezers and prodded the lump. Sharp jolts of pain
shot through her neck almost to her collarbone and
she thought again of splinters. How far had this thing
spread through the meat of her jaw and neck? She
prodded again, but dropped the tweezers into the sink
as pain overwhelmed her. She dropped to her knees
and pressed her hands against her neck. From the
outside, she could feel with her hands what she’d been
afraid she felt through the pain inside: movement. The
nugget was changing, unfolding. She felt something
long and jagged pulling out from between muscle and
skin. The whole malignant conglomerate chunk was
breaking loose and pressing forward over her tongue. It
was much larger than she could have imagined, stretch-
more in her kitchen sink. There was a terrible itch
and pain radiating through her mouth and neck.
Back home, back in the mirror, she opened her
mouth and stared into the void. Her throat was almost entirely closed over, and black tendrils caked
with creamy clots of paste were stretching out over
her tongue and the roof of her mouth. She realized
that there were swollen strands stretching across
her neck that made her think of splinters. The core
of the nugget was almost as big as her fist, and she
could see it stretching into the depths of her like a
tail. Alice thought of the horrible things it was composed of and almost retched again. Spider remains,
pus, blood, grease, spit and now the piss and semen
of a corpse. More than that, it was a physical manifestation of all of Carrie’s shame, guilt and revulsion,
ing her jaw until the corners of her lips split and started
to bleed.
Carrie kneeled over the sink, raising herself until
she could see her reflection. All at once the mass broke
loose and tumbled into the sink with a splash of blood,
pus and vomit. Carrie’s fluids and the white paste that
slicked the surface of the thing were not enough to hide
its nature. It was alive. It was as long as her forearm,
and almost as thick. The writhing thing looked like an
impossibly large grub, but with long, black, finger-like
legs trailing from from one end. The other end, which
she guessed to be the head, had an opening that ran
vertically down the underside and was lined with yellow
hooked teeth. Wriggling tendrils hung from the opening like worms. It had no eyes but she could tell it was
looking at her. Carrie stepped back, then opened