At first, it had just been little things that had gone missing: some hairs, a part of an eyebrow, his eyelashes. He thought for sure it had been alopecia or some sort of patterned baldness, but the pattern didn’t make any sense. Then painlessly, his nails started to go.
They weren’t bloody, and they only stung because of his raw skin’s exposure to the open air, but if he kept gloves on or band-aids over them, he could get on in his day just fine. When the toenails began disappearing is when the pain hit him the hardest. He could barely walk. Thankfully he had a work-from-home job where he could sit at his desk or in bed all day, but the pain of being locked into sitting had been what prompted him recording and documenting his experience.
People from all over had thoughts and feelings about what was going on, and despite his assurances that he had visited doctors who had all been equally baffled, there would always be a handful of specialists recommended to him in the comments of his posts.
“I promise you; no doctors will help. I can show you the messages from them.”
His followers grew daily as the anomaly continued, mostly young people here to watch his disfiguration, with the occasional faceless profile adding every so often. Somehow this woman had found him, no idea how. He had been posting his story on social media in an effort to find a community or support, not to be hunted by this woman.
As the issue progressed, more and more of him went missing. Now it was no longer in blood and gore like the nails had been, but as if the part had never existed to begin with. The tips of a few fingers, sporadic in the parts missing; a little bit off the lobe of one ear, and, horrifyingly he questioned, did he have less teeth? When he counted, there were surely less than he remembered. That’s when he began to notice the sound.
Far off but ever present, the distant echo of a scream would ring in his ear, as if someone was shouting in fear at the top of their lungs. The words were jumbled, lost to the wind of a direction he couldn’t place, but it was there more and more. In the last few days, the days he began to notice his lips receding, his eyes shrinking, and his stature condensing, the screaming was constant. Unintelligible but constant.
In the midst of a new round of panic, there was a knock at his door.
“One tecond,” he managed to garble out with his now truncated tongue, it almost shriveling inside of his toothless mouth now.
When he opened the door he was greeted with a toothy smile and a woman barging into his home.
“Get out! Ahhhh!”
He attempted to push the woman away from himself as she sunk her teeth into the meat of his shoulder, but her strength outmatched his assumptions based on her frail frame. Her hands clawed in his ribs and his other shoulder as the woman began to chew, the skin pulling easily away from the muscle running neck to arm. There was little blood to the smiling woman’s surprise, but the young man had seemed weak when he had cracked open the door. He writhed under her grasp, twisting in horrible, hyperflexible ways that his body should not have allowed. His screams filled the apartment. A delicious smell of butterscotch and tobacco permeated the air, and for a moment the smiling woman was dazed by ecstasy. The young man used her stupor to wriggle out from under her grasp and escape into the hallway. As the door to his building clanged shut, the smiling woman was shaken back to awareness.
Her meal was escaping.
He yelled for help, running down the block towards the hospital nearby. He had grown used to the pain in his feet, but now the run was more of a stumble. He was unsure of his footing and balance, but he attempted to put as much distance between himself and that woman as possible. The apartment complex was a tangled mess of buildings, and while people were in their homes winding down from the day, it was too cold for anyone to be out on the balconies and patios, so no one paid him any mind. With every yell in his heightened state, he felt something leaving his body. It was like the sound of his voice carried off some physical part of him, his breath was leaking his essence into the air. His arms felt weaker, his strides started to shorten, and what should have been a bloody shoulder looked like he had scratched himself on a branch or something.
The smiling woman stood outside the apartment building, looking out into the parking lot for a sign of a car peeling away. He wouldn’t get that far; she knew where he lived, and he eventually had to come back, would eventually let his guard down. Hopefully he didn’t figure out what made him special and put an early end to her meal. She was lost in thought when a whiff of butterscotch caught her nose. He was running to the east, but she knew if she went running after him, the vision of her frail looking body surging with athletic strength would call too much attention to herself. She wasn’t ready for people to see the full force of her, to know her plan. She didn’t want anyone interfering with her ability to eat as much as she could, absorb as much life as possible before she reached completion. She would let him run and follow behind. The boy was too maimed already to get very far.
The young man kept calling out for help, running in the direction of the fitness center in his complex. Surely there had to be someone there who could help him or would at least buzz him into a safer part of the building. He continued to yell and continued to feel smaller and weaker with each scream. No one was responding to his pleas for help, but now his own words started to feel smaller and smaller too, the volume of his voice had been diminished to nearly a whisper. When he finally collapsed, he caught the sight of his own hand, barely anything extending from where his wrist should be. Past the deformity of his forearm, he could see the woman slowly approaching, a smile stretched across her face. Though she had weakly attempted to wipe his blood from her face, he could still see it at the corners of her mouth. This woman was a monster. He yelled in vain, the volume continuing to fade, and as he did so, the smiling woman grew larger and larger in his vision.
And then, everything went black. The young man was gone.
The smiling woman frowned, standing over the pile of clothes laying in the parking lot. Though she tried to catch as much as she could, the smell of tobacco and butterscotch dissipated into the night air.