Cocoon by Whitney McShan
*Wet bits of me drip down the insides of my thighs. This shedding of my soft, unused parts is normal, I’m told. An inconvenient, painful metamorphosis that I should celebrate. The natural consequence of a purpose unfulfilled.
*Each time the shedding comes, I lose more of myself than the time before. Blood and flesh are discarded in dark clumps. How much of what’s been lost defined who I was, I wonder as I plug myself to stop the leaking. I think of a ship taking on water as it rocks along a roaring, blood-red sea.
*Something else is forming from this inescapable ritual. Something small coagulates into a new life that becomes more vivid as I become murky and porous.
*Other parts of me are shedding now, too. I used to have extraneous things like eyelashes and toenails. It feels important to keep these bits even as they liquefy. I gather them with rags and buckets. I develop an urge to lick newspaper. The edges cut my tongue, and the pages are stained pink.
*I plaster strips of the wet paper against myself, bandaging the leaking parts of me. If I can keep myself in me, then it can’t become something else.
*When I sleep, I dream of cold, dark places. Primal and subterranean. Stone walls wet for millennia. A constant dripping. A steady erosion.
*Parts have begun sloughing off of me, sometimes in sheets. I stick the matted hair, pale flesh, and yellow sludge back into myself and secure it with more paper.
*I sleep for what I think is a long time in my papier-mache’d tomb, but it’s hard to be sure. Timekeeping becomes difficult without eyes or ears.
*There is a point in the middle when I no longer exist, at least in any form that anyone would recognize as me. I am nothing but soupy potential, primordial ooze.
*Then, slowly, there is tugging. A thickening. Forms gathering and drawing together.
*I chew through paper with new, sharper teeth. A wet membrane unfolds from its home on my back. I am born screaming.
Whitney McShan lives in central Texas with her wife and son. Her work has been featured in Instant Noodles Lit Mag and Hellbound Books Anthology of Horror. When she isn’t writing, she’s either reading or thinking about monsters.
Artwork by Sarah Peacock
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