Abscission by L.M. Lydon

“Good night, Mom.” Leah’s daughter’s voice is a cotton candy saccharine chirp. The sturdy little body curled against her side in the snug twin bed burrows closer, back pressed to Leah’s front. Even as Chloe threatens to crowd Leah out, the warm amber hue of the nightlight sketches gilt threads in her long hair. Clean child smell fills Leah’s nostrils.

This is the part of bedtime Leah cherishes: after all the “I need to go to the bathroom,” and “I’m thirsty” tactics have been deployed and exhausted. Although it cuts into adult conversation and TV time, Leah always stays until Chloe falls asleep. Her husband complains, but her daughter will only want her at bedtime for so long. Seven is just three or four years from tweendom. The relentless arithmetic of time that carried Chloe away from caterwauling toddlerhood will soon turn against Leah. Reading out loud and cuddles are like the tree leaves outside degrading incrementally towards autumn gold and orange: to be cherished precisely because they’re fleeting.

Seven is a delightful age, not just because the histrionic tantrums are over.

That first year, Leah woke several times a night to brush a tubby baby tummy with featherlight fingers—just enough to sense motion. Every nocturnal cough captured by the monitor had launched her into instant wakefulness.

Now, Leah no longer needs to scrutinize the position of stuffies, blankets, and pillows. She barely remembers the morning dread of discovering a silent, pale form sprawled in the crib, or worse. Her skin prickles.

Leah exhales and closes her eyes. She focuses on the warm, pacifying sensation her logical mind knows is oxytocin trickling through her body. With effort, she evicts outdated, reflexive concerns. She wills herself fully present in the now, like that stupid meditation podcast her therapist recommended always blathers about. Body warmth and the metronome of Chloe’s breathing lull her. If she doesn’t leave soon, she’ll fall asleep.

She drapes an arm over Chloe for one last squeeze. As Leah withdraws her hand, she rubs it along a supple bicep like a talisman. Her heart jumps as some—thing—shifts beneath smooth skin: surely just a muscle twitch from an active child relaxing into slumber.

Leah strokes her daughter’s left shoulder again. A hard lump ripples beneath her fingers, writhing in a direction and path muscles were never designed to move in.

As her heart squeezes upwards into her throat, its obstructive pressure forces the pitch of her voice higher. “Chloe?” Leah’s eyes dart open.

A foot from her face, the skin of Chloe’s arm pulses and bulges, as if a parasite burrows beneath. More nodules appear, blistering upward in clusters.

“Yes, Mom?” The child’s voice deepens with each syllable, finally emerging with the hoarse croak of an angry toad. Chloe’s neck twists towards Lea, distending until her head cants backwards. Once limpid blue eyes luminesce a reptilian, jaundiced hue.

Leah’s jittering hand scrapes against a thrashing, subcutaneous blob as she yanks away. The growth bursts in a physics-defying fountain of pus that glows the same color as those unnatural eyes. Reeking liquid geysers upward until it sprays the ceiling, tinting generic white paint urine-yellow. Rancid quivering chunks of lardlike flesh ooze from the wound, carried along a stream of pus like loathsome icebergs. The flood drowns the pale pink winged unicorn bedsheets shrouding the mattress.

Ruptured, Chloe’s skin peels away from her body in uneven layers resembling a molting viper’s. Like rigid sticks, the girl’s legs crack. The mounds they leave in the covers look misshapen.

Leah screams until her throat tears and no further sound emerges. Her hands shake as she reaches out, then recoils, ensnared by warring instincts. Rendered mute, she lies paralyzed as the creature that was once Chloe rolls toward her.

Despite its disfiguration, Leah can’t make herself flee. Six pulpy arms unfurl and wrap around her, constricting like boas. Jagged barbs lining the inside of those limbs like a praying mantis’s spikes pierce Leah’s flesh, transfixing her. “I’ll never let you go,” it says as its grip tightens. “I love you too much.”

One by one, Leah’s ribs buckle inwards in starbursts of agony. The lavender walls of Chloe’s bedroom, plastered with crookedly hung doodles of stick-figure dinosaurs and fairies, fade to black.

“Mama!” Slim bony fingers clutch at her arm.

Leah is free of pain and restored to bodily integrity, lying in bed as if nothing had happened. She sucks in air like a turbocharged vacuum cleaner.

The little girl’s voice is as wavering and squeaky as a school-issued recorder. “You screamed so loud. You scared me. Did you have a bad dream? Please, open your eyes and look at me.”

Leah swallows hard to force down the burn of bile. She hasn’t needed medication in years. God, she can’t let the psychosis infiltrate her life again. She has no postpartum hormones left to blame. She loves Chloe so much her heart could burst. How could it be happening again?

What kind of mother is she? Of course, there’s nothing wrong with Chloe: it’s all in Leah’s head, just as it’s always been. How could she even imagine such a revolting thing lurking within her daughter? It must have been a one-off nightmare, triggered by ambivalence over her baby growing up.

“Mama!” Chloe shakes her arm again.

Yet Leah can’t make herself open her eyes. The phantasm felt so real, even more so than when Chloe was an infant. She knows doubt corrodes her psyche: even fleeting belief will only give the night terror more power in the future. She should dismiss it as a hallucination, but the bedsheet squishes with dampness as she shifts her weight, and the scent of rotting fruit perfumes the room.