The New Flesh

Lisa Gale. Age eighteen. Captain of the senior varsity volleyball team. She had the body that every boy, man and woman wanted and she knew it, too. After every practice, Lisa would strip the clothing from her body, sometimes pulling her top completely off, just before she’d enter the locker room, just to give the boys in the bleachers a little something to talk about. Lisa loved her body and damn near everyone else who saw it loved it, too. But, as we’ve all been told before, most things are not as they seem.　Lisa’s body is one of those things.

One night, just after practice, Lisa tossed her sweaty clothes in a pile in front of her locker, but as she dropped her arms to her side, a sharp pain pulsated in her left breast.　She walked over to the mirror, kneading her fingers along the pain lines, massaging the ache away. The pain eased. She walked in the shower room, not giving it a second thought.

She squeezed a dab of shampoo into her left palm and gently worked it into her long blonde hair, wrapping the length of it atop her head in a swirl. She washes herself facing away from the showerhead; she had always had a weird phobia of being splashed in the face with water.　It made her feel somewhat claustrophobic, as if she were unable to breathe.　Probably because of some suppressed childhood memory.

She stepped back into the stream of hot water to rinse the lathered shampoo from her hair.　A torrent of water collided with her forehead and branched off into tiny streams.　 The water flowed over her eyes, blinding her. Panic began to set in. She shook her hands violently in the air, desperately trying to dry them so that she could clear the water from her eyes.　In the process, she licked a few of her fingers against the tile wall.

She opened her eyes. That was when she saw it.

Looking straight up at her now was an eyeball, burrowed deep into her left breast and peaking out from a flap of skin where her nipple should have been. She closed her eyes and screamed, but when she opened her eyes again, her nipple had returned and the eyeball was gone. Nervously, she to tried to pry the nipple open again, like an eyelid.　The areola spread apart, revealing the anomalous eyeball underneath.　The flesh strained and forced itself closed once more.

Panicking now, Lisa grabbed a hold of her left breast with both of her hands and squeezed with all of her might.　Her nipple swelled and slowly parted as the eyeball began to surface.　She then placed her right hand directly behind the eyeball and gave her nipple a taut pinch.　Tiny red veins were bursting out from the white skin of the orb, like little baby spiders emerging from their nests.

PLOP.

The eyeball slopped out and rolled slowly to the drain. A tear of blood leaked from the tip of her nipple and traced down her abdomen, finally fading into the water.

Not sparing a second, Lisa checked her right breast and, sure enough, there was another eyeball roosting inside. She squeezed her that breast, just as she had the left, but this eyeball was being stubborn, it refused to come out from its nest.　She pried back the skin of her nipple and dug her fingers deep into the socket.　The eyeball was trying to root itself into her skin through muscles and veins that sprouted out from it’s backside.　She severed all connections with a pinch of her fingernails.　She ripped the second eyeball from her breast and hurled it to the concrete shower floor below. The ball splattered against the ground like an egg before the water washed it away.　The shower drain was tinged pink with her blood.

The other eyeball was now looking up at her from the shower drain. She shrieked and stomped it down the pipe, squishing it through the tiny hole of the drain cover. Gooey bits of eye-flesh gobbed up in-between each of her toes. She ran out of the shower and back into the locker room. She quickly dried herself off. She wanted to get home as quickly as possible. As she was drying off her legs, the lips from between her thighs began to growl.

"Blink"

Copyright: © 2010 William Pauley III

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Originally published on Flashes in the Dark 12/01/2009