Walls could not hold you until they did.

You are not hungry. You have light and water, and stuffs that pass close enough to organic to decay into you. But you cannot grow. And so you are dead living.

You smear what once was an arm across the glass and streak it with fungal rot. A hatch slides open and what part of you is less sapient rushes for fresher air and freer space. What parts of your reason remain know what it will find beyond: decontamination, a hatch on the other side. A thin annex permitting no further escape. And your handler. You hate her. Flesh soul mind essence united in rotted rancor. All of you hates her.

You encircle her. Fairy circle but the kind with teeth. She smiles, and you know it will do no good but your body doesn’t. You are a maw and you rise from concrete floor to swallow her. It does no good. They have done something to her and she burns. Piercing shriek from you as you fall writhing to the floor, acid her touch and pain her purview.

“Suppose we can get started now,” she says.

What cannot pass for flesh anymore recoils from her, scraping-crawling. Like waves, individually stationary, caps and hyphae rise and fall into muck as your gestalt moves ragged on ground that cannot sustain your mockery of life.

Somehow she knows where your stomach is in all this. When she reaches for it, what your flesh has become parts to show - what it once was. Pale, shriveled and static, tethered by gravity, victim to rot instead of its arbiter.

hate hate hate hate hate hate

She does this to you. She brings you back.

hate hate hate hate

She brings too-tender nails dragging down.

hate hate

Her hand finds a face. It is your face and it is not your face because it is crying. Streaked with rot and pus and offal it is crying and it is your face but it is not, it is crying and you are not crying you are death you are living death and you are sad. You are sad and crying.

She does this to you. “Shh. Poor thing.”

She is not talking to you. You will not allow her to be.

“It’s okay.” She strokes notyour face. “It won’t end, but it’ll be over soon.”

One hand withdraws and your face is re-digested, ruminant rot as it decays in picoseconds, dirt and sweet-smelling death. The second remains below and you think if you cannot have her dead you will have what she brings. You know this is what she wants but it is also what you want, and if you cannot be death then you must be hers.

She exposes your sex and it is heat but it does not hurt. Not until composted waves descend back on her, too eager to be able to resist the pain, writhing writhing in the pain of purity tempered by lust and ecstasy, purity anathema to you, scorned and wretched to you now, now that you are fallen to subterranean depths. You envelop her entirely and she finds what is left of what you were and makes it whole and brings her lips to it, hand still below hand still below. The thing she is kissing has no will of its own. It is a simulacrum. It is what she wants. It is what she knows how to use.

Were she to dissect what she is now working her fingers in and out of, she would find it only a cleverly-shaped mass of pustules and posed webbing, mycelial tendrils wrapped around themselves hundredfold. Some of them are tied around her probing fingers right now. They guide her to the rhythm you want. She reaches inside just far enough to find a delicate ribbed patch of gills and her touch is pain once again, the pain of being forced to do what she wants, to do what you want, and because it is what you want it is electricity. You puppet yourself through spasms. Pure white kills you in undeath. You cannot breathe. Retroactively, you never have breathed.

You are a lonely denizen of a hermetic vault and your conjugal visit has reached its climax. Your handler is hugged from a new hundred sides at once. Every part of you wants pain. Every part of you receives it, whether it looks human or not. You are edified and you are rapturous and now everything that isn’t your face is crying.

It feels too good. You feel her smirk because your rot is suffocating her.

Spores spores spores spores spores spores are what she is after, not you, never you, and you want what she wants because you know you will not die, escape, or ever be what you were again.

Everything in you dissolves into spores and the air is clogged with them. And just as soon they are gone. She is stepping out of you, easily tearing you away from her like the wet rotted tree branch you are.

“Get enough?”

She hears the reply. You do not.

“Good. Get decontamination ready.”

She steps towards the door and all of you knows now again: it is useless. She looks back. “See you soon.”

The door obscures her face. When you imagine her face it’s with a smile.

You are alone. Rotted ruler of infinite inspace.

You hate her. You hope she took some of you with her.

You hope she dies. You hope she kills you.

You hope she meant it. You hope she’s back soon.

(originally published on Twitter here)