MicroHorror

I suppose I first noticed something was wrong a couple of months after my return from Brazil. I’d been out there studying deforestation patterns and part of my remit was to visit the peoples living in the rain forest. While on one of these reccies, I was bitten.

The culprit slithered off too quickly for my guides to identify it and all they could do was give me catchall anti-venom and hope for the best. I had a mild fever for two days, but when that passed I thought nothing more of the incident.

It was Lindy who first noticed the change. She was stroking my back one night and felt a patch of plastic-feeling skin. You know what blokes are like, it didn’t hurt and no one could see it, so I happily ignored it.

Ten days later the skin on my arms and legs started to change too, became dry and stiff like leather. It was vanity I suppose, rather than fear for my health, that eventually propelled me to the doctor’s. She had seen nothing like it before, and I came home with a prescription for an emollient and instructions to return in two weeks if things were no better.

I actually went back to the doctor’s after just three days. It was on my face. I came away with cortisone cream and an urgent referral to Dermatology.

I’d stopped going into work by now, stopped going out at all if the truth be known, and was becoming seriously worried. Then Lindy got called away to look after her mother who’d had a small stroke. I was on my own.

Lindy would ring every night and I would tell her things were fine and not to worry. I did enough worrying for us both.

Every evening, once it was dark, I would sit in the back garden and get some fresh air into my lungs after a day indoors. It was during one of these evenings that a small mouse ran past me. I can’t explain why, but the thought of that little creature stayed with me until the following evening. This time, however, while I was sitting there, I was watching, waiting, listening for it. After an hour or so I became impatient and broke up some biscuits, scattering the crumbs around me. I stayed frozen until the moment it was within reach and then, almost instinctively, with a speed I didn’t know I possessed, I grabbed it and dropped it live into my mouth. It went down easily, no chewing needed. The following night I caught three more, but it wasn’t until the weekend that I got my first cat.

It sauntered along the path and I grasped its tail, lifting it high above my head. The thing yowled and spat and writhed while I lowered it into my mouth, the hinges of my jaw, for the first time, dislocating. The peristaltic waves of my gullet crushed the life out of the poor animal and propelled it into my stomach, while I spat the fur from my mouth. I catch a cat most nights now.

I still tell Lindy not to worry when she rings, but God knows what she’s going to be coming home to next week. My skin has turned to scales now and my nose has flattened, kind of blended into my face. But most worrying of all, yesterday I noticed that my arms and legs are not as long as they once were.