I’m being pulled apart by animals. They push their maggot hands far into my body, probing under my skin. Every single one of them wants a flowering piece of my flesh. I don’t understand why, because my flesh is weak and rotten and toxic and poisonous and it will spread my curse onto and into them. But they don’t care.

Every time I sleep, I feel their hands reaching into my skull and gestating in my swollen brain, taking up more and more space in my thoughts so that I can no longer think new ones of my own. I can’t form new happy memories anymore. Malignant and corrupt foetuses grow fat in my pregnant crown, waiting until I am unable to think anything for myself and I end up reduced to a base and wrecked thing somehow even more fallen than I am now.

When they have filled my head to the brink of eruption and there is no more of my own consciousness to gorge on, they will burst wet and new from the ruin of my skull and spill onto the sallow dirt before me, uncurling their malformed limbs and arching their spines in a tetanus whorl, howling at me for letting them down and failing them. I try to explain that I’m not their creator or the root of their torment; it was the putrid hands that impregnated my head and caused them to erupt wailing and anguished into the fuck of the world, but they ignore me.

As soon as the last one leaves my body, I dig my own fists into the shining crater of my skull so that no other beast can claw its way inside me.