by Breach
June pulled off her shirt and shorts, staring up at her underwear. They were too tight and clung to her like a second skin, yet if they were any looser, they’d slide off. Her bra looked like it was made for children, covering her flat chest. She hadn’t developed the way other girls had.
She thought of her mother, the woman drunkenly telling June she hated her life. She thought of the nights June had been kept awake, her mother forcing her to listen to her sad stories. All she wanted was a sense of control, to be able to stand up to the woman. All she wanted was her mother to see her as something more than a person to cry to. Was that so much to ask?
June frowned, watching her face contort in dismay. She lifted her arms and held her hands out in front of her, waving them around in the air. Her reflection mirrored her actions, and she grimaced, her arms too heavy to hold. They flopped on the carpet, and she rubbed her tired eyes with the back of her hand. She gazed back up at the mirror. Her eyes looked down at her in disapproval. A line of unpicked scabs lined her cheekbones, clinging to her face for dear life. She picked at them and flicked the dry skin onto the floor.
She ran her hands down her sides and wriggled out of her underwear, removing her bra first and then her panties. June looked up at herself in the mirror. Her once soft skin was stretched over her skull, her hair so dull and thin it fell out whenever she brushed it. Her knees no longer knocked together as she walked. A Christmas beetle crawled up her leg and rested on her stomach. She reached across to her pile of books and swatted it with a small paperback, then tossed it across the room, flicking the beetle onto the carpet beside her.
June looked up at the mirror once more. She wondered what it would be like to be a Christmas beetle. The metallic scarabs seemed to follow her around, fluttering over to land on her shoulder, as if it had something to say.
“What do you want?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “Why are you just hanging around? Piss off and do your Christmas duties.”
The scarab’s little legs skittered over to her collarbone and up and over her chin, sitting on her nose. She wrinkled her nose, yet the beetle didn’t move. It seemed unphased by her presence, as though June was merely a spot to sit on and contemplate life as a Christmas beetle. She looked up at the mirror once more and gasped. The scarab was enormous and covered her entire body, making her look round and fat and ugly. She leapt to her feet and stared at it as it fell onto the carpet. It was small. Barely larger than a fingernail. She rubbed her eyes and pressed her hand to her stomach. She needed to sleep.
June walked over to her bed and collapsed on the mattress, placing her hands behind her head. Though her fingers were bony, and her knuckles felt like rocks, she was comfortable this way. She didn’t want to sink into the pillow. She closed her eyes and ignored the groans in her stomach. Her organs felt like they were attempting to claw their way out, yet she couldn’t give in.
The scarab, now small again, moved to sit on her forehead, and she opened her eyes, staring at the reflection above. Slowly, June raised her arm to push the beetle away. Her hand hovered above it, and she exhaled a terrified breath as the scarab began to grow larger once more. Frozen in fear, she could feel the throbbing behind her eyes and the thumping of her heart in her chest. Her muscles contracted, her gut twisting like a corkscrew, burrowing deeper and deeper inside her stomach. Her mind turned over and over like an engine that wouldn’t start. She lowered her hands and covered her eyes.
“There’s nothing there,” she whispered. “Nothing there. Nothing there. Nothing there.”
June rolled over on her side, drawing her knobbly knees up to her chest. She pulled the sheet up over her body, breathing heavily in the stuffy cocoon. As a child, she’d been frightened of the shadows on the walls, and scared of her parents when they’d attempt to reassure her there was no such thing as monsters. She imagined they were in on it, that they had concocted a conspiracy, and it was they who had sent the monsters to terrify her.
The scarab grew larger once more and pressed its whole body against her, its front legs piercing her skin as it burrowed into her back. The pain was like needles that had been dipped in ethanol, and June howled as it dug its legs into her skin and burrowed deeper into her back. The beetle tore open her skin like wings and crawled inside her ribcage, pincers scraping against her like knives. Its front legs elongated and penetrated her arms, stabbing through her skin up to her hands and jerking them like she was a puppet. Its back legs did the same to her legs, and wiggled them around, as though it was dangling her stick-thin thighs on a string.
Her throat was empty as June tried to cry out for help, even though she knew it was unlikely anyone would come to her rescue. She had isolated herself, keeping her distance in the tiny shoebox unit. She wished she had called her father for his birthday. She wished she had read over her sister’s manuscript. She wished she had been good enough for her mother to hold her after her first teenage breakup.
June screamed as the scarab jumped up and clung to the cracks in her mirror, her body swinging wildly. Her chest and stomach seemed to fold in on themselves, so all she could feel was the pain of intense agony. It was worse than her self-inflicted hunger. Her bed seemed so far away she could hardly see it, as though she was hanging from the roof of a skyscraper.
The scarab ripped at her underwear, so she was left staring up at her naked body, piercing her body, becoming part of her body, ripping off her skin, so it fell into a wet pile on the ground. June repressed the urge to vomit at the mountain of flesh, clenching her fists as her teeth fell from her mouth and sunk into her skin. She gasped in pain as her hair fell out in chunks, pulling flesh with it, so rivulets of blood fell onto the carpet below.
She thought of her mother once more. The woman had given her a quest to find the son she had adopted before June was born. She’d interrupt June’s studies, feed her scotch well into the night as she told June over and over again about how she found her own mother dead one morning when she was thirteen, how she had turned to drugs, how June’s father had been her saviour. Yet she had never once asked June how she was feeling. She had never once asked June about her day. She had never once asked June if she actually wanted a drink. As June hid in her bedroom, barricading the door with her chest of drawers, her mother would throw June’s uneaten dinner at the wall, screaming at her crying daughter.
June looked up at her body and vomited, crying as the mess slid down the bleeding muscles that had hidden underneath her skin. Tears ran down her cheeks, the salt searing her face like fire. She was trapped, just like she had been trapped in her childhood home. All she wanted was to become something else, to be something other than who and what she was. To be human was to love. And yet the one person she needed to be loved by had never said “I love you”. Why bother being human if no one loved you?
“Go away!” She screamed, throat hoarse and filled with chunks of vomit. “Get away from me! I don’t need you!”
The scarab pressed a pincer into her stomach, emptying it of the little food June had consumed over the past three days. The contents spilled onto the floor beneath her as the scarab crawled into her stomach, nestling comfortably as though June was its mother and it had returned to the womb. In her intense terror June somehow screamed with her whole body, her mouth rigid, fists clenched with blanched knuckles, her nails pressed so deeply blood spilled from her palms. Her mother’s face intruded on her thoughts once more, crying as she told June that she wished she had never become a mother, that she wished she were dead.
“Why don’t you love me?” June howled. “Why can’t you love me?”
June let out a final guttural scream as the scarab became part of her body, its limbs taking over her own, its horns impaling her eyes, so they popped and hung from their sockets. The scarab pushed up against her spinal column, so her back arched at an impossible angle, her knees twisting outwards, her elbows twisting inwards. And as she hung there, her bones breaking under the strain of her contorted body, for a moment, the worl
d was still, her flesh a symbolic token of her private inner thoughts. You are not human, her mind whispered venomously. You do not deserve to be loved. The world endures your existence, as did your mother. She never wanted you. You do not deserve to be human.
Were June a real human being she would have been able to break free of the curse that bound her. She would have been able to break free of the nightmare that currently assailed her body. Yet she did not belong to the world, nor her body, and never had. Tears fell from her gaping eye sockets as her scarab flesh hung from under her the hard dome that had formed from her ribcage, the flesh grapefruit-red and spongy, dripping bloodied juice like thick raindrops.
“June?”
June cocked her head at the sound of her mother’s knocking. She’d forgotten the woman had promised to bring over her Christmas present.
“June, I haven’t got all day! Your dad is waiting in the car.”
Lungs screaming, June took a final breath as the scarab’s head burst through her own, and yet, she did not die. Instead, all faculty she had of her body was robbed, as the scarab crawled to her bed and made a nest within her sheets, burrowing as deeply as it had within June’s stomach.
“June? Here I am coming all the way over to your house to give you a present and you’re not even here! Typical!”
June head the screen door slam as her mother went back to her car. She thought of the woman at her 15th birthday, drunk and flirting with her friends. She thought of the woman at her 18th birthday, drunk and calling her boyfriend an arsehole. She thought of the woman at her 21st birthday, throwing a scotch decanter at her. I wish it were you I’d given up for adoption instead of him! And when June started slicing her wrists with her razor her mother didn’t understand what was wrong. She said it was a teenage phase.
June’s breath clung to her throat as she thought of all the times she wished she could disappear. She’d wish she could transform into an animal and run away. A lion so large she could tear her mother to shreds and a beetle so small she could slip away and disappear forever. Yet she could not leave her younger sister. She could not let her be devoured by the monster that was their mother. June had dreamed of living in another world. She’d dreamed of living in another’s skin. She’d dreamed of finding a place of her own. She’d dreamed of living by herself. June had dreamed of one day completing her life’s quest by finding her brother. Of proving herself to her mother. She’d dreamed of leaving the world and all its horrors, even if it meant leaving her sister. Yet she knew that dream would never come. She’d never find the Eden she so longed to wrap around herself like a comforting cocoon. She’d never find inner peace within her body, and would always remain an insect, easily squashed under the weight of her mother’s shoe.
June opened her eyes. Her face had split apart like a blossoming flower, its pointed petals reaching out towards the warmth of the sun. The scarab’s limbs protruded from her forehead, cheekbones, chin, so she became one with the insect, and the insect became one with her. Once more she thought of her mother. As hard as she tried, June could not love another. Failed relationship after failed relationship had stained her heart. She realised, at that moment, that her mother’s love was all she wanted. No one else could compare. She was hungry, starving for her mother’s love.
The scarab curled June’s body into a ball as the last trickle of blood fell from her flesh. Though she continued to breathe, dreaming of love without isolation, she did not understand why she was born into her body. With the scarab’s eyes she looked at her wall of photos, smiling with her old primary friends during happier days, her goofy smile plastered on her smooth unblemished skin. The scarab lying dormant within her human form, waiting to break free.
“June!”
Her mother’s heavy footsteps cannoned down the hallway. She reached June’s bedroom and opened the door. June’s scarab jaw unfused, her mandibles growing impossibly large. Stomach churning, her long limbs flopped to her sides. Fists clenched, her nails pressed into her palms as she straightened her knobbly limbs. She arched her back, pushing her fleshy thorax upwards. Taking a deep breath, she stood tall on her new spiked legs.
“Do you love me now, mother?”
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Traumatic Reflections
Ronnie Smart
Ronnie Smart is a Scottish-born Kiwi writer, who grew up on a steady diet of horror stories, kung fu movies and Romantic poetry. His work has been published in several publications in NZ and overseas, including Blue Fifth Review and Alluvia. Contact him on Facebook, Twitter or his blog.
When it begins, at dusk, the lunar bond
tugs at my mind and soul; I feel my teeth
grow long within my mouth. My skin responds
by stretching tight, the muscles tense. Beneath,
my limbs begin to break. I scream, collapse;
my muscles twist and turn, I feel them tear,
my heartbeat drums a frenzied pace. Perhaps,
that tortured howl was one last hopeful prayer
your silver bullet works. My eyes implored
you take some vengeance for my bloody crimes;
I’ve ended many lives: those I adored,
my friends…and children. Please, no more. It’s time.
So shoot me now, my love, it’s but one touch;
but still your hand. It shakes… too much… too much…
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Sub-Urban
Alfie Simpson
Alfie Simpson used to write plays in the suburbs of Adelaide, and now lives in exile in the city of Melbourne. When not working on stories about being a very small thing in a very big universe, he fixes commas for Farrago Magazine. His story The Endless Below (Breach #02) was shortlisted for the 2017 Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story.
This one’s about Dan, and it’s sad. I met him up in Brisbane, which is where he stays now. Doesn’t move around a lot. But a few years back, he was living in Melbourne. You’ve heard about that whole ‘Shifting City’ project they had going? Well, it’s still like that. They’re talking about closing it down, but they’re always talking about closing it down. Too many people like Dan.
And hey, it seemed like a good idea, at first. Planet’s shrinking, right? Space is premium. You can almost see it going through their heads. I mean, how often are you actually in your house? During the day, I mean. Exactly. And who wouldn’t like to just stroll out their door and walk a couple of hundred metres to the office? And cars, buses, trains, trams – Melbourne used to be all about the trams. But they’re not necessary. Too much pollution, too many accidents. Though I guess we’ll see.
Anyway, they set up a few test blocks. Specially designed housing. Pretty basic – they didn’t want to have to factor in tricky angles, so the places are all shaped like bricks. Goes like clockwork. 9am sharp, the cogs whir, the houses go under, the offices come up. Residential recedes, and commercial slots in over the top. Clockwork. They have built-in access chutes, so you’re not trapped if you wake up late, and you can get back home if you forget something. You can stay there all day if you want to, just as long as you don’t mind being underground. Can even visit the neighbours. Walk the substreets. And when five o’clock rolls around, it all happens in reverse, and up comes your house again.
There were problems, sure. Moving parts always mean problems. A warning siren went off whenever the rotation happened, but you still had accidents, like I said. You’d leave the lawnmower too close to the street and it’d get caught by the machine. Things’d fall through the gap: dogs, kids. They solved it by installing these barriers that went up as the block started to descend, but you could still find ways to get yourself killed if you tried hard enough. People are dumb. I don’t need to tell you that.
But here’s Dan. He’s got a wife, a new baby, a job doing the numbers for a weather-control multinational, and he’s the happiest guy in the world. Her name’s Leah – the baby I don’t remember, but it was a boy – and they’re looking for somewhere to set
themselves up. Neither of them have got family in town, and Dan’s worried about being too far away if something happens. Leah can take care of herself, but she admits it’d be good to have the peace of mind. Anyway, you know how this turns out: the Shifting City project sounds perfect, and the government’s willing to subsidise first-home buyers. Why not, they think. If we don’t like it, we can move.
They do like it. They like it a lot. Not exclusively, mind. There are hang-ups – place is hideous, for one. But that’s kind of the point of modern housing. Ugly facades, flash interiors. And this is a pretty flash interior. Open-plan kitchen, master bedroom with ensuite, all the kit included. Dan likes it. Leah likes it. The baby’s got a temperature-controlled cot with a light-up model of the solar system above him, so he’s more or less living the dream.
And so it goes. Dan leaves in the morning, walks a few blocks, and by that time the rotation’s finished and there’s his office building. It’s a long, flat thing – I don’t want you picturing skyscrapers popping out of the ground – and inside’s functional but comfortable. He makes some friends. He gets things done.
Leah’s home with the baby, but she’s worked her whole life and she’s going a bit stir-crazy. Plus she starts to worry about what being underground all day might do to a kid. Luckily, their neighbourhood is a string of restaurants and coffee shops during business hours, so all Leah has to do is head to the access chute with baby in tow and ride the elevator to the surface. She finds a job with a tech startup and works remote. Laptop and child, a different café every day.
For about a year, this is their life. Not how they thought it would be. Maybe better, maybe worse – maybe just different. The project keeps going. The place that shares their spot becomes a restaurant, and they give up the afternoon shift so it can stay open till nine. Dan comes back from work and walks straight to a table and they eat together. The manager knows them both by name, and his daughter even babysits downstairs from time to time. It’s all going great. Smooth and elegant. Clockwork. But the clock is ticking.