Becoming

A Short Story

Photo by Kevin Bosc on Unsplash

Something is changing, and it cannot be undone. I felt the first cold shiver that something other than myself was clinging alongside me several months ago. A passenger in my blood—just a scratch of a thing at first, but still a presence that quietly worried away as I kept it bottled inside.

Whether a product of poor upbringing or stubborn by nature, my reasons for neglecting my concerns are elusive even to me now. Regret is such a self-righteous endeavor, though, and I loathe the pious. I don’t owe you an explanation for my maladies, however many, either. This is a thing that simply is.

My doctors think me a raving lunatic, and to my chagrin, I am starting to agree. Yet, I hear it moving even now—this pop, pop, popping as whatever it is shifts its coil around my spine.

There is a lull in this horrid elevator music, and, tinny and far away, the technician’s voice cuts through the hum of the MRI machine. The magnet’s roar gains intensity as the earplugs slip from my ears.

“How are we doing in there?”

Midway down my back, there is a pulse that is not in line with my own heartbeat. Whatever clings inside of me, I think it may be vaguely metallic—possibly high in iron. My blood shivers as it whooshes in my ears.

“I’m okay,” I reply to the technician, even though I am not. Not for the reasons she is asking, though. I am not claustrophobic, nor do I need a blindfold or another pillow. I am not okay in many, many other ways than these.

The machine table shifts, sliding down and back up again slightly. When the grating dial-tone sound spins up and starts chugging, battering the inside of my skull like a jackhammer, the barbed coil around my spine tightens, making me scream.

---

I spend my evening resting in my chair at the window, watching the cars on the street below and the people they consume or regurgitate. Even in this state of rest, clutching tight the closest thing to comfort, I am in misery.

I want it out of me, and for not the first time, I consider getting the box cutter from the drawer in the kitchen. I haven’t yet weighed the pros against the cons. That being the pros of scraping this thing from my spine versus the con of having to stand.

The cars below honk at nothing, and I am sure that if the drivers weren’t enclosed by metal boxes, they’d be more polite to each other. The way that I am forced to be. There is an inherent weakness in pain. It is assumed by all who come in contact with it, that pain makes the painful weak. It makes us brittle

Sycophants of wellness would be eaten like mewling lambs in these constructs. I imagine what I could do if my might could match this ability to endure.

There is something comforting and empowering about isolation—a bravery to it. I tell myself this as my hand trembles, bringing a glass of water to my lips. I slosh it over my pants, and when I flinch at the cold, this tangle of thorns weaved through each notch in my spine tightens. I drop the whole glass on myself.

An indifference washes over me as I consider doing nothing about my current state. Not just the water soaking into my lap, but any of it. All of it and none of it.

Nothing.

A sharp bark of a laugh catches me off guard, and in my reflection, my knees are pressed against my chest, one arm around them, the other covering my grinning mouth. I can hardly keep from laughing. I’m not certain how it started, but I know that I cannot allow it to continue. Something in my reflection isn’t me, and I worry that if I show it to itself, I will never be able to shove it back inside.

---

“Nothing,” I say. It is not a question.

My doctor has her computer pulled away from the wall. She is standing in front of it, not sitting, as if she does not intend to be in the room long enough to get comfortable.

“Nothing that would be causing what you’re describing.” She moves the mouse silently along the black pad on the computer stand and squints closer at the screen.

“They noted a small disc protrusion without stenosis. Probable hemangioma seen in the T6, T8 vertebral bodies. Looks like a signal lesion, T2, measuring…” She stops talking and finally sits on her stool. She folds her keyboard arm up and moves her computer back against the wall, sliding her stool closer to me.

“Look,” she says. “These things are small. Most of us probably have—

“Could they be causing pain?”

“I— Yes, I suppose in all the right circumstances, but it’s highly—”

“What is the treatment?”

---

Several months ago, on a guided sobriety trek through the Michigan Upper Peninsula, my sponsor and I stopped to camp at the edge of a sandy embankment untold miles northwest of the town of Epoufette.

I loathe the outdoors, but not as much as I loathe being sober, so staying occupied far from the glass aisles of the local grocery on my first anniversary in recovery seemed miserable, but the sort of misery one could tolerate with decent company.

At some godless hour in the night of our second stay in the forest, I was awoken by a sudden tug. Upon gathering my consciousness, I felt the receding impression of hands around my ankles. My bare feet were completely exposed, outside the flap of the tent.

I reeled my legs back under the flap and sat erect, listening for a crunch or snap of some fateful twig to give my attacker’s presence away.

There was nothing.

Insects screeched, and the occasional night birds calling for mates swelled in the night, rolling in waves like the mammoth Lake Superior somewhere to the south, pulled by the moon. My rattled thoughts attempted to settle on the image of my AA sponsor creeping in the darkness alongside my tent, smothering away a chortle as he imagined my fright.

Those thoughts were dashed away as I heard my camping partner snoring within his tent a few feet to my rear. My flesh ran cold and my pulse ran so fast, thumping hard against my ribcage, I could hear only the swell of my fluids in my ears as they craned to listen to the night.

I hadn’t noticed that the wilderness around me had gone still. No more birds or insects crooned, and not even the wind fluttered the fabric of my tent. I am not sure how long I sat holding my breath, but when I exhaled, the rush caused my consciousness to almost snap off like a crushed marble. I swooned, and upon gathering myself, satisfied the experience must have only been some sour dream, I laid back against my blankets again and closed my eyes.

I woke screaming as something ripped me from my tent, tearing me through the mesh fabric of the door.

---

I no longer speak to this sponsor. My ravings that night, the subsequent day—needless to say, he no longer returns my calls.

I was never able to find the words to describe what had transpired that night to Michael, my sponsor, and I struggle even now. Struggle may be the wrong word because it implies some sort of impetus—a drive toward some known goal. It’s not a struggle so much as an inability, so at a point, I found it futile to continue to try.

In the beginning, I sought treatment strictly for the wounds of whatever had accosted me in the night. Long gashes raked my abdomen, and some unidentified punctures dotted my left elbow and forearm.

By all accounts, I was lucky. The local hospital relayed to me the statistics of animal attacks in the area and reiterated this fact endlessly.

“You are very lucky.”

I did not feel lucky. I told everyone I could about what had happened that night, “It had human hands, for Christ’s sake,” but nobody would listen. Bear attacks were commonplace in the area, which was the sort of victimhood I was assigned.

I remember the eyes of one local nurse as I told my story—how when I mentioned the hands, the long hair that brushed over my face as my accoster had licked my flesh—there was a flash of recognition; recognition as if he were a witness, too, or at the very least, a party to a similar tale.

---

I never got to ask. I drove back to the Upper Peninsula, back to that hospital in search of the nurse when things had gotten bad enough my doctor had given up and dumped me on an orthopedic something or other.

Nobody could give me information on who it was I was purported to be misremembering. All of the technicians and doctors in the emergency room had no recollection of any nurse—of any one at all who fit the description of the man who seemed shaken by my story. I suspected them to be lying, but after being escorted by security back to my vehicle over an hour later, I made the eight-hour drive back to my home, empty-handed.

---

In the office today, after driving all night, Linda tells me it looks like I had too much fun last night. Whatever coils around my spine has spread to wrap my ribs, twining its spindly phalanges around each twiggy bone.

It vibrates as I struggle to maintain as much self-discipline as possible. The vertebrae audibly pop as my new shadow twists. I force a smile for Linda, and provide her with a nod I hope is not too terse. For all her faults, Linda is far worse than first impressions allow, and it is not in my better interest to offend her so easily, so early in the morning.

I wish to trade places with these people, if only for a second. The gasp—the shock of the sudden interruption to their normal lives—would have them groveling before me. I elate in the fantasy. This satisfaction floods over me as I imagine Linda’s soft and plump body twisting as whatever rides my veins digs its tendrils into her nerves, too. I picture the popping, stuttered bend to her spine, like a malleable straw being torqued by a child as this darkness clings to her nerves.

My nose begins to bleed as I sit at my desk, and I haven’t yet turned on my computer screen.

---

“Michael, I don’t like the outdoors.” I sniffle and wipe away the wetness that tickles the tip of my nose. I’m not sure if it is a tear or if my sinuses are spilling over so thinly, it just feels like water.

For all I know, it could be blood.

“You’ve been drinking,” he says. He’s guessing, because if he could see me better in this light, he would know that I have not had a drop.

“No,” I say. It is only a whisper because I cannot trust the strength of my voice. “I have not been drinking.” I sniffle again, and something drips on the floor.

“Oliver,” he says, and it comes out in a rash whisper. My heart dissolves into a cold puddle, thinking of how he’s let me down. “Why are you in my house?”

I can see him waving his hand through the air, his blank eyes staring at nothing, as he searches the darkness for the drawstring of his lamp. When his fingers come close enough and finally brush the chain, I warn him.

“Please, I couldn’t bear it.”

Michael’s hand stutters and closes in on itself, maybe realizing he should listen. Maybe grasping at something that doesn’t exist. His hand rests over his heart, but as I watch, I see he chooses not to set his head back down against his pillow. His neck strains to hold his head, like a painted turtle sniffing the air.

“Do you know what I keep coming back to?” I ask. “That night in the woods—why me?” A laugh trembles out of me from somewhere, and I gag trying to swallow it down. I can see Michael’s eyebrows, knitted above his shuttered features, confused, and not from being newly woken.

“You were snoring,” I say.

In the dark, lying in his bed, Michael gives a slight shake of his head, and opens his mouth to respond.

“Quiet,” I say. “Just listen.”

He snaps his jaw shut and finally lays his head back down.

The nodules that have grown from my spine have pierced the skin, but not in a way that matters. I will not have use for skin much longer. The spiked tips of my bones scrape against the wallpaper as my body unfurls into something new. Covered in Michael's warmth, I have never been so cold.