She curled over the sink basin, retching again. At first it had been sick, then bile, then something worse. Thin and black, spattering the porcelain and running in rivulets down her chin. Her knuckles were white, gripping the basin’s edge. The beds of her nails were dark, and they had been since they’d scratched at his face, his arms, trying to push him off. A few were still broken, split and crusted with tar-like fluid. She gagged; the liquid had turned thick and slow, choking her on its way up. Finally, her throat went dry, and she scrubbed her sleeve across the ruin of her face. In the mirror, dark eyes stared back at her. Shadows lay deep beneath them, and if she hadn’t been so sure that her mind was unraveling, she would have sworn her pupils were growing, consuming her eyes to leave dark pits in their wake. She turned on the faucet and watched her splintered nails ooze against the metal.
She tucked her darkened fingertips under long sleeves and hid her face behind sunglasses, even in lectures, which she was still attending. The world could not see her, and she badly wished that she could not see the world, either.
He was there.
Two rows ahead of her, tipping back on the uneven metal legs of his desk chair.
A week ago, she would have been next to him, his hand on her thigh under the table. Now, the thought of his hands, of his skin touching hers, even through fabric, made her cold. Always cold—and hungry. Needing to eat and being eaten from the inside out. She pushed back from her desk, ducking away from the fluorescents and escaping to the bathroom to expel what wouldn’t stop coming.
She had told him no. She remembered telling him no. And he had said it was okay.
They’d been lying on his bed after a party—some stupid thing at a friend of a friend’s apartment that mostly involved sitting around and drinking cheap wine. When the words had left her mouth, he ran his hand over her hair and told her he didn’t want to push, she was safe, his fingers too far up her dress were an accident. Lying back against him on the bed, looking up at his deep brown eyes in the warm half-light of the desk lamp, she was struck by how much she loved him—had loved him, maybe since the moment she’d first gone out with him three months before. He hooked his leg over hers, pulling her close, and she was enveloped in the comforting, clean scent of his soap. His arms felt solid and safe around her, like a security blanket, and she smiled to herself as she relaxed more fully into his warmth. She just wasn’t quite ready yet, but she would be soon, she thought. For him, she would be. She let her eyes slide shut, and it was a happy thought, because she knew that with him it would be warm and gentle and kind.
But not tonight. He had said it was okay.
And then it had happened anyway.
Her fingernails had begun to darken almost immediately, while they still had the superficial layers of his skin beneath them. She had gone to him, while her pupils were still small enough to look like they’d been recently dilated rather than plucked out and replaced with obsidian marbles, while she was still finding blood when she woke in the morning, if it could be called that—black, cloudy splotches against grey cotton.
“Hey.” She’d caught him on the way out of their shared lecture. She was still cramping horribly, trying not to hunch over. Her voice was high and choked. “Can we talk?”
His gaze swept over her, but any change in her appearance went unnoticed.
“It’s just that I—” her voice broke—physically failed, like a radio losing signal—and she had to restart. “I don’t understand…what happened.”
Her throat felt heavy and tight, just like her pelvis, as if there was an invisible fist closing around them both. He had hurt her, and she missed him like a limb.
He sat next to her on a bench in the hallway, and she pulled a little green notebook out of her bag.
“What’s that?” There was an edge to his voice that she wished were unfamiliar.
“I wrote some things down. To talk about. I don’t remember—I just want to understand.”
His eyes were cool, and she suddenly wished they were back in his warm bedroom, in the world-softening glow of the lamplight. But then she remembered his weight, his lips at her ear murmuring that he loved her while her legs cramped and her stomach seized.
“I’m afraid.” She felt a coldness growing beneath her sternum. “I don’t want to be afraid of you.”
She was starting to cry, and when she swiped at her face, her tears came away as if stained by mascara that she wasn’t wearing. “I thought I said no,” she whispered.
He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, looking like he didn’t know what to do with her. “I mean, it’s not like I hit you.”
The cavity of her chest froze, expanded, cracked. A ripping, snapping cold.
“I have class,” he said, and left her to freeze.
It had been two days. Now, she sat in her car with the heat all the way up, wasting gas, still shivering. She kept her stained hands squeezed together in her lap, fighting the urge to scratch at her own skin, at the slithering things coming up her legs, under a dress she was no longer wearing. She hunched over as the phantom touch crawled up inside her, and she screamed. She screamed high and raw and completely unheard. She screamed until the pain in her head was greater than the pain in her thighs, clamped uselessly together. She screamed until the sound reached back to the girl who had existed the night he’d climbed over her, the girl who needed sound but couldn’t make use of it. She screamed until her voice gave out, until she was vomiting again, spidery black liquid all over her lap. And inside her still, something unwelcome and disgustingly alive.
She tipped back in her seat, gasping, and caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror. Her cheeks were streaked black with tearstains flowing from dead eyes, like cracks in the face of a porcelain doll. Her lips were the color of sour wine, her skin so pallid it might have been translucent. Her forehead was slick with chilled sweat. She was a banshee, a wraith, a broken toy.
She lay in bed until Friday. When she rose, she put her dress back on, and if it hung loosely on her, she was too distracted by hunger and cold to care. He always went out on Fridays, so she slipped along the streets to town, little more than a shadow.
The bar was cheap and packed and far too bright. Neon signs coated the walls; neon liquids cluttered the shelves behind the counter. The chatter was a relentless buzz, a dull whine in her ear. She wove through the crowd, perspiration sticking to her cold skin, blackened fingertips brushing past the crush of bodies. He was in a clot of people, careless, grinning, not watching his drink. She drifted through the space like a spectre, but when she reached his glass, her fingers met it solidly. She lifted it, brushing her lips along its rim. A drop of condensation blackened and fell, spreading through the amber liquid like an ink stain before dissolving into nothing.
She watched him cough, swallow, reach for the drink, put it to his mouth, take it in. He coughed again, dry and hollow, and excused himself.
The bar was hot. She was very, very cold. She followed him past the restrooms, through narrow halls to the back door, and pushed out into the grimy night air of the city.
He crossed the alley and leaned against the wall of a neighboring bar, heaving and retching, trying to expel something he didn’t know he’d let in. He covered his mouth, and his hand came away stained with black. When he turned, she was there.
Her name crossed his lips. His eyes had a frantic, feverish shine. “I think I’m sick. Something’s wrong, there’s something in me—” He clawed at his hair, his throat, his heart.
“I know the feeling.”
She moved toward him, looking down at his half-hunched body, and pulled him to his feet by the sweat-damp fabric of his shirt.
“There’s something—I can’t—” His eyes were equal parts hopeful and afraid, until she shoved her fingers into his mouth—then they were just black. Great, gaping holes; iris and sclera eclipsed by pupil, consumed and obliterated.
She was not warm. She was not gentle. And she certainly was not kind.
“It seems unfair, doesn’t it?” She asked, voice low and scraping. “That I look like a monster because I was touched by one.”
She jammed her fingers deeper and felt something give at the back of his throat. Pulpy black liquid flowed between his teeth, around her knuckles, mottling his chin and flowing down her wrist. She was a terrible mirror, eyes shadowed, lips black, and he choked on the sight of her as surely as he choked on her flesh, gurgling and limp, corrupted and corrupting. He crumpled, as those without a spine all do, in the end.
The chatter from inside the bar filtered back to her, and she knew that if she passed through the door, the room within would be squirming and human and warm. The boy beneath her was none of those things. His jaw was contorted, at least dislocated and probably broken. The skin stretched around it was coated with something necrotic and festering. Sluggish black bubbles still rose from his anoxic lips. His limbs were heavy and twisted at angles that would have been painful if he were alive to feel them. There was something hideous in coming apart, something horribly satiating in taking apart another.
The night air was quick and cold in her lungs. She turned towards it, drinking deeply, the brittle cage of her ribs expanding to let it in, pushing against the fabric of her soiled dress. Pitch-dark stains stretched up to her elbows, like shadows over her ghostly skin. Her hair hung limp, damp with something that wasn’t hers. As she stepped out of the alley, the light of a streetlamp fell across her, illuminating her eyes like two oil-slick pools, empty as the shell of the boy she left behind.
Kate Bladek is a creative writing student at both Washington State University and Aberystwyth University, where she is attending a year-long study abroad program. Her other work can be found in the Land Escapes and Gossamer Wight literary journals. When she isn’t writing, Kate can be found reading, crocheting, or exploring the caves and trails of Wales.
Published 5/10/26