Content notes: Short story, Horror, ~2k words. This story contains mentions and depictions of domestic violence.
There are a dozen, hundred, thousand, million, billion little problems in the world. And an infinite amount of issues that are even smaller.
But little problems can get so out of hand, can’t they?
Inside you there’s this beautiful bit of crystalline soul, worn smooth on the outside as the rough grit of experience blows past and shapes you into yourself. Not every experience is particulate; dust to gravel to pebble to stone. There are immovable mountains that you can shatter yourself against again and again. Don’t you wish you were an unstoppable force and not a pile of brilliant, light-scattering glass?
He sits at his computer desk, the screen is dimmed; ostensibly this is because it’s late and he’s being considerate. So considerate. Fingers tip-tap-tip-tap away on the keyboard, quietly, slowly, out of consideration. What a polite man, bet he was raised right.
Bet he was raised with the fear of God. Bet he knows what sin is. Of course he must, they both went to Catholic school and learned the good word, even if they drifted from the organized path as adults. A good boy like that would know if he was doing something wrong.
The privacy screen is work-related, there’s trade secrets after all, can’t trust just anyone. This is dust, lightly drifting its way through her as she sits on the couch across the room, as she reminds herself that this isn’t a level of trust that she’s earned.
It’s fine, it’s meaningless. It’s a blurred screen across the room, a dozen incomprehensible lines of text, and a blob of tanned-flesh tones appearing suddenly before the tab is quickly closed. He glances around briefly without turning his body, but she can feel his eyes on her. She’s staring down at her phone, pretending to read something while her heart races.
She sneaks back to the den once he’s asleep, the good wife. She’s soft-footed from childhood terrors that still lurk below staircases and in the voices of shrill, plump women with aquiline beaks. A soothing hand rises to her chest, she doesn’t know it but she’s feeling the frequency of this betrayal vibrate through the existing fractures, she rubs at her sternum but the feeling still sticks.
There’s tarry-black ichor leaking from the cracks in her fragile essence, holding it together, reminding her where it came from. Viscous fluid that calls itself vital, calls itself a part of her even when her conscious mind balks at it. A talon wedged in a crack, subsumed into the crystal-core but never truly a part. An outsider, embedded to turn her traitor against herself.
She can be trusted. She is trustworthy. She is not a liar. She is not being sneaky. She is not seeking out problems, but, but, but… Maybe the problem was always her. She doesn’t need to find them because she creates them. In a journey of endless questions, there will always be some unfavorable answers.
That first time, she is willing to overlook what she has found. To let the enemy within herself be the one to lie to her, tell her that she’s just paranoid and insecure. It isn’t a big deal. She questions her husband and he says it was a simple accident, a misclick, unintentional exposure. He smiles, kisses her, and moves on without an actual apology. She feels something twist inside her after the conversation ends, something pulling at the flesh inside of her ribcage.
It went on like that for a while, her noticing little pebbles of inconsistency that wedged in her delicate seams, ached in her chest. The sticky sludge seemed to leak into her stomach, nauseating her when she tried to inventory the patterns and find the source of the problem. She built entire equations to do the math, to solve for where love and attraction diverged from each other, to solve for the meaning of monogamy in a modern world. The solutions were nonsense numbers that screamed YOUR FAULT. YOUR MISTAKE. YOUR FICTIONAL STANDARDS.
It hurt, because they weren’t her standards at all. They were the ones she thought she had to adapt in order to be loved, they were his. A part of her wanted to run away, to quit men entirely and find a wife or two who would see her fractured self and understand. But that was another fictional reality, she’d tethered her entire life to this man with the expectation of a long and fulfilling future. And yet nothing was hers, not even him.
When it happened again, he had another excuse, but admitted some fault, offered promises, insisted it was a fluke. She believed him, even as the pit in her center grew, turning her organs into a bubbling asphalt lake. She told herself she was overreacting, overthinking, that she was wrong to believe that any man could resist the lures of digital beauty. She told herself that before the internet, men just walked out. Wasn’t this better?
It got worse. Chat logs, photos, videos… She wakes her husband in the middle of the night. She knows she's out of control at this point. She screams him into consciousness, and the man that awakes is a stranger.
At first, he plays dumb, he expects her to react like she did before. She’s supposed to believe that his promises mean something even after he broke them. But she doesn’t, the ichor falls from her eyes in clear streams that look like tears, emptying her of self-doubt. She’s angry, shaking, and accusatory.
When he gets aggressive in return, that’s her fault too. When he raises his voice and wraps his hands around her throat and squeezes, she tells herself she should have just ignored everything. When he apologizes afterwards, she tells him it was okay. He didn’t mean it. She’d just stressed him out. Wouldn’t anyone be stressed and upset in such a situation? It was her fault, her timing was poor.
Her neck was sore for a few days, but not bruised. That meant it wasn’t so bad, right? He didn’t really want to kill her, even though she’d accused him of it in the moment. He was sorry and he brought her gifts, but nothing could quell the flow of sludge that soaked into her blood stream and corrupted every thought. Maybe it wasn’t corruption, maybe it was right.
She tells herself she’d never be one of those women, but she is. She stays in the house and dwells on it all, fluctuating between feelings of betrayal and feelings of self-hatred. She’d let all of this happen, hadn’t she? She’d put up with it, and now it was okay. It was expected. She was still that little girl who would always, always, always, stick it out until it fell apart completely.
Maybe he wasn’t raised right. Maybe he doesn’t avoid sin. Maybe he doesn’t understand the fear of God. A piece of scripture comes back to her, something from a sermon in a church she hadn’t attended in years, everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Maybe God just wasn’t with them at all anymore, they were both tainted now, strayed too far from the path.
She walks through their home like a ghost whenever she can't distract from what lurks within. It fills every pore, it hardens around her crystalline fragments and promises her that she won’t lose any more of them. She hadn’t noticed she was so broken until now, it hurt but the ichor plugs the space and licks at the wounds. It doesn’t heal her.
It fuels her further down the rabbit hole, where she discovers that everything is a lie. There were no accidents, no mistakes, no misclicks. Just lies, just manipulations, just sweet words used to trap her in a false sense of security. Years of hiding, of escalations, of her being the good, idiot wife who didn’t ask questions and believed she could trust.
She wants to tell herself that she shouldn’t have looked, that she brought this on herself, that she could ignore it all because ‘that’s what guys do’. But she can’t anymore. He promised he’d stopped entirely after he hurt her, promised he’d seen the error of his ways, but he never did repent.
There was no true confession, just a repetition of everything she thought was fine for all those years. Just the belief that she would believe this promise was somehow different than the last. Just the expectation that she was still the same naive girl who was willing to avoid and distract and forget it all, to pretend that she could still trust while the pit inside grew ever deeper, reaching into the depths of her core and pulling out the wild animal that had spent her entire life trying to claw free from its crystal prison.
The realization was a meteor, the unstoppable object, the immense force that rewrote and restructured everything within her.
She wakes him from a deep sleep that night, this time straddling his hips with her own. The lingering fear passes through her, stardust tickles across her throat, it is nothing. What he has done is nothing. His hands are tied and he gives her a sleepy smile as his eyes flutter open, he’s fantasized about things like this. With other women, not her, she’s just a placeholder. She’s just a warm hole while he closes his eyes and recalls anyone else. That’s just how it goes, right?
“Don’t you feel how empty I am? Haven’t you noticed I’ve changed?” She wants to give him at least one last chance, somehow. A moment to confess.
He looks confused. Like he can’t imagine why she’s still angry, like he truly hasn’t noticed that something has been wrong for quite some time. “I’m… sorry?”
The explosion in her chest is audible as crystalline shards launch in every direction, shredding through cell-walls and embedding in the bones of her ribcage. The true animal is reborn here, soaked in the pestilent black fluid of a tainted, broken womb.
“You’re a fucking liar!” She spits the words at him, saliva speckled with grey where the spray lands across his face.
She presses both her hands against his chest, the weight of the beast behind her, pushing the breath from his lungs as he gasps and panics. She sees his eyes widen the way hers must have that day, feels the hollow lungs beneath her struggle to reinflate, and she laughs. The sound is a gurgle as the tar overflows from her throat, nothing left to contain it.
Her fingers seem longer as she releases the pressure from his chest and listens to him gulp in air, half-conscious now. She slides a hand over his chest, her nailbeds are blackened now, nails thickened and curved like talons. He lets out a small, pathetic noise as the claw slices a line against his collarbone. The ichor pours from her lips, over her chin and down her body, pooling where their hips meet.
She leans into the puddle, bringing her face closer to his as she presses her new fingers against the heartbeat in his throat, gentle in a way he wasn’t. When she smiles her teeth are blackened, when she whispers it is thick yet still fluid. “You should have loved me.”
The sludge dissolves his skin where it lands, devouring him inch by inch. She doesn’t register that he’s screaming until the sound sputters in his throat as it’s eaten away. In minutes he’s gone, leaving her straddling the soaked, blackened sheets.
For a few moments the only sound is the squelch of her movements, and the faint trickle that still streams from her mouth. There’s a vibration at the bedside, and she rises to investigate. She feels taller now, stronger, as she picks up his phone and reads the notification.
Ashley - Work: See you tomorrow ;)
She laughs, she can’t stop herself, it’s hysterical. More viscous fluid erupts from her throat, and she rubs it into her skin. She luxuriates in it, it’s her blessing now, her power. No more death by a thousand cuts, let it all run free.
She’s still laughing, gurgling, dripping as she wanders out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and out of the house. In her wake she leaves footprints, black stains on the earth where she treads; which, in the right light, shine iridescent like oil-slicks and crystal prisms.
Ugh. This one hurt. I've been there.
Great story! Build up and history. You had me hooked. I loved her changing into her powerful form too.