Roger Bundridge is a horror writer who recently graduated from University of Iowa with his BA in English & Creative Writing. Oftentimes you can find Roger writing, or reading or watching, some aspect involving horror (transgressive queer horror being his favorite). He lives with his partner and his Pitbull, Harley, who supplies soft snores while he writes.
GREEN SHAPE
by
Roger Bundridge
Hours went by and the sun lulled itself into a deep sleep. We ate dinner by the fire pit, drank half our alcohol, smoked two joints, and when we thought the night was beginning to weigh on all of us, Missy suggested the act.
“Why don’t we go swimming! Doesn’t that sound fun?” Her words weren’t slurred, but they were high pitched–her high indicator. She always got a little squeaky when she smoked because it wasn’t something she did often. To get that neuroscience degree, she needed her brain mostly intact.
I was staring at Andrew when she spoke, who had his shirtless torso wrapped around Eric’s shoulders from behind, on the other side of the fire. Eric looked at me through the flames, and I attempted to play it off as getting caught looking in the fire. Layla had put her nose back in a book, but I put my hand gingerly on her thigh and stretched into a long, admirable stare at her beauty. All I could think about were Andrew’s muscles that flickered a deep orange in the light of the fire.
“Only if we skinny dip!” Jimmy shouted up at the stars that watched us like parents.
Supervision. The whole galaxy is witness to our debauchery, I thought to myself as my fingers slowly slid in between Layla’s while she read.
“Let’s go!” I joined.
Let them witness; now, they’re the only ones who know the veracity of events that occurred there.
Andrew and Eric didn’t take much convincing. They were both practically naked already.
“What do you think? Are you down?” I asked Layla, giving her hand a gentle squeeze a few inches away from my growing hard-on.
“It’ll give your boyfriend a chance to see what a real man looks like, come on.” Eric winked at me, and my body grew warm outside the fire.
“He knows already, but I’m in,” she said.
The trail was dark and dry against our shoes. Branches snapped and animals chittered across our path. When the smell of the water hit our noses and the rickety boardwalk left the bottoms of our feet, the water consumed our flesh in whole and without resistance.
Sharp scraped itself against my calf, that's the only way I could describe it. Whatever it was tore through skin and muscle. My body vibrated beneath the water while I screamed. Air escaped through my teeth, and I tried to pull the bubbles back into my mouth so I could live, but they escaped and left me to die. Because of the dark water and the dark sky, the purgatory of airless elements made it impossible to see.
Andrew
I twisted my body and kept what I could when it came to direction: hope. I would figure it out, I would learn which way to go in order to free myself. My fingers grazed air, and my body broke itself in two. The hair on the back of my head tickled my achilles tendon. It defied everything we knew about science, the speed in which I became a monster.
Heat burned through my veins and flesh tore on its own, but then there was air, and I could breathe, and I could see that my fingers had glued themselves together. When I peeled them apart, they didn’t quite leave one another. Same for my toes. The water held onto fresh scales that sprouted from my body hair.
With my new hands, I could hold the stars. They slid around and collected mucus, and when I put them back, they shined differently on the rest of us.
An obstructed witness.
When a high pitched scream erupted in my ear, the world went dark, and I woke up in the cabin with the rest of them; well, most of them.
The sun was beginning to shine.
A slimy layer of gunk hung loose from my body like jowls, and I made eye contact with Jimmy first. His head was placed on the record player, tongue stabbed through with the tonearm; his singular pierced ears were placed in the record shelf like limited editions. I couldn’t see the rest of his body.
Andrew and Eric were impaled with a curtain rod, their skin melding together. I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
I started to cry, the slime burning my eyes as I thought about the first time he kissed me.
Layla, the sweet girl who gave me her number at a froyo shop–her hands were wrapped around a knife’s handle, the blade in her heart.
She did to herself what she couldn’t do to me. Did I watch her do this? Was I witness to her escape from me? I cried harder at the thought and tripped over Missy’s body on the way out the door.
Her face was broken and caved in like a patch of earth, like mud at the bottom of a pond.
“No. No, no, no. What the fuck, the FUCK!” I slip down the stairs and tumble over myself. Nothing breaks by the time I reach the bottom, but I’m the dizziest I’ve ever been, as it all replays in my head and my body begins to instinctively crawl toward the mass of water.
I won’t, I think to myself. I won’t do it. I won’t go back in there.
I scream at the sky and beg for the sun to dry me out. I need every pore in my body to be squeezed of moisture, for dirt to pack itself into every crevice of my flesh until I am the same texture as the driveway; until I can do no more harm, I will lay here and dry like a patch of animal skin to be used as a coat. When the sun sets and the moon rises again, when the stars look at me, I will be looking back. My eyes will never blink again and my scream will be too brittle to move.