Where Does Your Body Begin?

The sun was beating her senseless. She had long lost the strength to keep herself upright. On all fours, her head dangling from her shoulders, she stared down at the blood on her arms. It plainly refused to dry out. Instead, it kept spreading all over her body until it had covered every square inch. 

Then, it began sinking in. 

She could feel it seep through the pores of her skin, osmoting through the vessels carrying her own blood and clumping around her bones. She could feel her bones. Suddenly,

Suddenly, the blood changed its direction, no longer gently falling through but pushing, 

p u s h i n g

o   u   t   w   a   r   d   s   -

Her skin was shot from her body. She screamed. A shiny red carapace had forced itself into its place. She felt the wind brush over thorn-tips on her limbs. The pain was unbearable.

The sun kept burning. Her bodily fluids had all become hard and sharp. She needed to drink, quickly. 

Her mouth tube snaked its way into the cracked desert earth, desperately searching for liquids. There were people huddled together in caves beneath the sand. They seemed to be hiding. From her? Her tube accosted one of them. They were shivering. Salty. She saw a face: The girl. The tube went in, liquids went out. The shivering stopped. The tube grew and reached for the next shivering figure. Another face flashed: Minas. The tube went in...

With every person she drained, her body swole to greater size. New eyes kept popping up on the sides of her head like bubbles in an overboiling cauldron. By now, they had formed two low-hanging cones nearly scraping the earth. She could see everything and kept seeing more of it.

Soon, the caves had run dry. The shivering had stopped in totality. The earth was now deathly still, yet the sun kept getting hotter. Her thirst was as perishing as ever. There was nowhere left to go but

                                                                    d

                                                                    o

                                                                    w

                                                                     n

                                                                    .

                                                                    .

                                                                    .

She reached the bottom. There was liquid. 

Not human, but alive in some sense.

Making sounds of disapproval as the tube went in...

...

Too  much.

Way too much.

The swelling sped up exponentially. Her eyes exploded by the millions. She lost control of her mouth-tube; it swirled around, knotted up, got stuck into itself and

The liquid was laughing.

Everything went dark.

She saw herself. She wanted to cry.

Deep within the darkness, a woman in rags with the head of a horsefly.

"Me", thought Uatchita.

The monster revealed two rows of mismatched angular fangs in a wide grin bursting through the flesh beneath its mouth-tube.

"Me!" it hissed,

sprouted an extra set of sinewy arms with sharp claws at their ends

and-

"Yooo, Utchi...?"

The sun turned into a candle holder dangling from a low stone ceiling. Uatchita felt the familiar softness of her bed beneath her body. She raised her head. Kiyah stood in the doorframe, arms wrapped around herself, throwing her a strange look.

"Y-your clothes..."

Uatchita followed Kiyah's eyes to find the clothes Minas had handed her the night before spread out on the floor next to her bed. All of them. She must have flung them off before dropping onto her mattress last night. Not that she remembered. She turned back towards Kiyah and was surprised to find her flustered. Kiyah averted her eyes.

"Uhh... Are you just gonna... stay naked...?"

Uatchita considered it and realized that she couldn't find a reason to get dressed. She knew that there was something she was supposed to feel in this situation, but she just truly, genuinely did not care. There was nothing of her left to hide.

"Whatever. What do you want?"

Kiyah seemed taken aback.

"Well, uh... Amon saw you coming back last night. He said you totally ignored him, and that you looked- ah..."

Kiyah examined her face.

"He said you looked... crazy."

Uatchita couldn't think of anything to say.

"So...?"

Kiyah leaned into the doorframe, her arms crossed infront of her chest. Her beak had shrunken to about the size of a duck's. Her gaze aimlessly wandered through the room.

"So, uh, I thought I 'd, uh, check on you, and..."

Her eyes landed on Uatchita's still bloody arms. She stumbled against the wall.

"A-are you okay?! You're covered in blood!!"

She ran over and picked up her arm.

"What the hell happened last night...? Did you get hurt?!"

She turned it around, looking all over for bruises. Her hands were warm and soft. Uatchita wished they weren't.

"I'm fine! It's... nothing happened last night, okay? Just the usual."

Uatchita tore herself lose. Maybe too forcefully. Kiyah seemed almost angry.

"Nothing?! Oh, Utchi... Did those watcher guys finally get you? I knew this was gonna happen! I knew it!! Didn't I tell you those trips would bite you in the ass some day?!"

She was getting seriously worked up, and very... close. Her beak was growing again. It hovered above Uatchita's throat. She carefully pushed it aside.

"No, not the watchers, it was... Ugh. Can we talk about this later...? I'm too tired right now."

Kiyah hesitated. She had never been one to push obvious sore spots, but it seemed like this may have been the straw to finally break the camel's back. Uatchita's head hurt. She needed Kiyah to leave. Right now.

"You're very close, Kiyah. You do realize I'm still not wearing anything, right?"

Kiyah froze up. It seemed she had actually forgotten in the heat of the moment. Her plumage shifted from eggshell white to crimson red.

"Y-you... Uh, I, uhh... Well, I guess it's.... Uhh..."

Uatchita demonstratively raised her upper body. Her breasts were now hovering just below Kiyah's beak, which immediately bent itself out of the way. Kiyah flinched.

"Ah... Uh... A-alright! L-l-let's talk about this... Some other time... Some... Other..."

Kiyah's answer trailed off into mumbling as she reversed out of the room, painstakingly avoiding looking at Uatchita's breasts. There was something almost funny about the whole procedure. But Uatchita didn't have it in her to laugh. When Kiyah had finally left the room, she rolled onto her side, curled up into a ball and stared at her hand. The look in the man's eyes as he laid pressed against the wall wouldn't leave her mind. She had had the knife at his throat. She had come so close to actually...

This was blood that could never be washed off. She clenched her fist as hard as she could. Of course, once again, the tears wouldn't come.

She kept tossing and turning for a few hours, then she gave up, got dressed and made for the forest.

The skin beneath her shoulder blades was itching terribly.