⛔️ Trigger Warning: Body horror, medical anxiety, needles/blood draws, disturbing skin imagery, and implied death.
I’ve always enjoyed hot weather. I live in Arizona, where summer feels less like a season than a test of personal worth. I’ve always passed that test — until I didn’t.
It started with a strange softening of the skin around my eyes. I groaned and wondered if I should be considering Botox. I’d thought that was only for old ladies, not for thirty-somethings like myself, but apparently I was wrong.
I thought about calling my mother to ask when she’d started seeing signs of aging, then decided I’d do it later. I was due to call home soon anyway. I promptly forgot, of course.
Until two days later, when the heat soared to over 120° Fahrenheit, and I noticed it wasn’t just happening to the skin around my eyes. My jowls and the skin under my arms had begun to sag, but I hadn’t gained any weight. It didn’t make any sense.
To top it off, my hair seemed to be growing faster, which was even more bizarre. It had grown nearly half an inch in just under a week. I made a doctor’s appointment to get checked and find out if there was something wrong with my thyroid or glands or something.
When I called, they told me they couldn’t fit me in for over two weeks. Until I described my symptoms. Then suddenly, they couldn’t schedule me fast enough; they found me an appointment time the next day, and I spent the evening being thoroughly panicked that my symptoms had so badly worried the doctor’s receptionist.
But when I looked in the mirror the next morning, it was all worse. I had nearly two full chins, and the flesh around my waist was hanging loosely like uncooked chicken skin. My elbows looked like they had little wings made of floppy dermis.
Horrified, I stared in the mirror. I didn’t just look a little older or a little flabby. I looked like I was collapsing in on myself. I pressed a single finger into my cheek, then pulled it away. The dent remained.
I shrieked and ran to my closet to squeeze my folds of flesh into some sweatpants, then rushed to the doctor’s office three hours early. He had to see me. He had to fix this. Now.
The receptionist took one look and sent me immediately into an exam room at the back of the office to wait for Dr. Ferris. But when the doctor entered, it wasn’t Dr. Ferris at all — I didn’t recognize this man, but he began examining me immediately without a word.
I argued for a moment and asked questions. He offered no answers. So I shut up and followed his directions, answered him, and tried to keep from screaming when he gripped my knee and I saw the marks from his fingers just… linger like deep canyons in my skin.
He tested my temperature, blood pressure, heart rate. He listened to my heart and lungs, palpated my belly, which also left deep impressions that didn’t seem to fade. Then he made notes in a tablet he carried and pulled a syringe from his pocket.
“We need some blood for testing,” he announced, not really asking so much as telling me what was about to happen.
“Do you know what it is? What’s causing it?”
“Not exactly, but we’re getting closer.”
“It’s happening to other people, too?”
“A few.”
I nodded in relief and let him take my blood — he took twenty-two vials. Somewhere around vial nine, I asked whether they were planning to leave any blood inside me. He assured me they needed every vial to identify the cause.
By the time he finished, I felt woozy and nauseous. A nurse brought me some orange juice, but I struggled to drink it, my lips refusing to stay tight to the rim of the cup. They had to bring me a straw, which I could use by holding my mouth closed around the plastic.
The unidentified doctor gave me a bottle of some pills he said would help slow the progression until “they could fully understand the problem.” I didn’t ask any more questions, just took the meds gratefully and swallowed one on the spot. Then I made my clumsy way home, my foot beginning to slide out the top of my shoe and overflow the sides every time I pressed on the gas or the brake.
When I reached home, I collapsed onto my couch and called my mom. I needed comfort. And I needed her to come help me — I was struggling to do simple tasks myself with my skin on my fingers growing floppy and loose.
When she answered the phone, I began to sob immediately.
“Mom, I need you. My skin is all falling down, it’s all sliding off my bones, and I don’t understand it!” I wailed in a rush.
“I’ll be right there, as fast as I can, sweetie. Just hang in there,” she said. And then she was gone.
I was so grateful that it didn’t occur to me until much later that she hadn’t sounded… surprised by what I said.
She arrived the next morning. By that point, I could barely accomplish anything with my fingers, and every movement felt like I was dragging a large portion of myself behind me. The skin of my legs had all collapsed around my feet and ankles, my breasts dangled below my waist, and all of my flesh slid and draped as though it were no longer attached by more than the thinnest of threads.
“Maaa,” I said, the word barely intelligible as my lips hung near my chin. “Hep me.”
She sat on the edge of the bed and pushed the hair from my face. That was the moment I realized my hair hadn’t really grown — my scalp had simply stretched so far that my follicles didn’t begin until near my ears.
I wept silent tears, barely able to open my eyes at all, my eyelids also stretched and drooping. My mother stroked my skin so gently it left no marks, although I likely wouldn’t have noticed if she’d stabbed at me. My skin felt like it belonged to someone else entirely.
“You look like a wax doll left in the sun too long, my sweet girl,” my mother said, her voice full of sadness. But still no surprise.
She continued to stroke my skin, but at some point I realized she wasn’t just comforting me. She was looking for something. Examining me all over.
“Whu lookie fuh?” I asked, as best I could.
She cast me a faint smile, then returned to her search. “Just checking to see if you have any needle marks. Did you go to the doctor?”
“Yesh,” I answered.
My mom frowned and stopped her search. “Oh hon, why’d you do that? They’re looking for us.”
I just stared at her angrily.
She sighed tiredly and settled back against the headboard, continuing to stroke my skin gently, no longer searching.
“I should’ve warned you. I’m sorry.”
“Waaar?”
“You’re changing, my girl. It happens to us all. I thought maybe it wouldn’t happen to you,” she offered sadly. “You see, your father was human. You’re only half naga.”
Naga? I tried to blink, but my eyes just welled with more tears. I wanted to scream that she was crazy. That this couldn’t be true. That she lied.
But I needed her comfort too much to risk alienating her. So I kept my rage inside. I had plenty of places to hide it just then, so I did.
“Get bettah?” I asked.
“Oh yes. You’ll recover in the next couple of days. You’ll molt. This skin will come off and you’ll have a fresh new one beneath it.”
How could she not have told me this? How could she not have warned me? My rage grew. But I was trapped in my own fleshy form and unable to express any of it.
“It’s the extreme heat,” my mother finally said. “It triggered your molt early. I told you not to move to the desert.”
Her last words were more than I could stomach. Growling my desperate frustration, I forced my bulk to roll to the side, letting my heavy, loose flesh spread atop her where she reclined next to me on the bed. I vaguely felt the pressure of her hands and legs struggling beneath me — just love taps, nothing more.
We lay there together for nearly three days. I felt no hunger or thirst. I felt very little, except… heat. It felt like I was cooking from the outside in.
On the fourth day, I woke feeling lighter. When I stood, a heap of drying skin remained on the bed behind me, my mother’s lumpy outline beneath it.
Looking in the mirror, I saw a stranger completely unmarked by my old scars. As I stared thoughtfully, I decided… it was time to move north.
This story was written for Top in Fiction’s Heatwave Substack disruption summer event. Check out some of the other stories written for it!
‼️ If you liked this, you may want to check out some of my other horror stories.
Did this story make you laugh, cry, or think? Buy me a cup of existential dread, and I’ll keep the stories coming.
Wow! This is so totally unexpected, bizarre and fabulous! Bravo!
Trippy and so good.