Sponge
What happens when we absorb too much?
Welcome to The Moon At The End Of The Road!
Greetings, dear readers. I hope this story finds you well.
Today’s tale is my very first rejection of the year. You may hear that some writers paper their walls with rejections, but these days it seems wasteful to print the emails. Instead, I take my flops and shove them in your inbox—for one publication’s trash could very well be your treasure!
Rejections aren’t shameful things. The creative world is wonderfully competitive (wonderful because it means so many of you are out there making incredible art!), and judgement comes down to a matter of taste. The reason we hold them up with pride is these scars show our bravery to offer up our stories to the world, instead of squirreling them away in a dark corner like the insecure gremlins we often are. To be rejected you must first try, and trying is a damn fine thing.
That said, you may wish to reject reading this one yourself after our content warning. This story features holes, specifically in human skin. If that’s not for you, I instead offer up the lyrical, entirely non-holey adventures of Pumpkin Cowboy for your entertainment.
For those of you still here—settle in. Pull a blanket round your shoulders; do you feel that? Yes, you’re right: there is a little chill on the spring air. How odd.
Do you happen to have the date? It seems I’ve quite forgotten…
Sephy
Sponge
Image by manfredrichter on Pixabay
There's a tale that's been passed down through the women of our family for the last few generations like a warning sign. Were it a physical thing, it would be made of blistered paint and bent steel, the message scarred (almost illegible), as the first person who should have listened snapped it from its post while hurtling down a dangerous road, unheeding. That woman was my grandmother; God rest her soul, for there wasn't much body to bury.
The story is inherited when a girl grows old enough to be sour. If her head is still a carousel of fairy tales, she'll chalk this up as one of them and fail to learn the lesson. Someone must have taken a bite out of you before it makes sense. You need to know how it feels to be separated from an irrecoverable chunk of yourself, floating around in the stomach of someone who grinned when they swallowed, and will never give it back. Once you see a piece is missing, wait for the shortest day of the year, and tell it behind a closed door, letting disbelief wait on the other side.
Pay attention. There's a lot your mind will want to reject. Ignore it. Listen to your heart and your gut and the tingle on your skin when you know a man is walking too close behind you on a dark night. Listen with your keys between your fingers splayed like claws, with that pin-prick hearing that readies you to run. Listen with your untaught parts, the bits that aren't bent to acquiesce and smile even when the stranger who smells like piss and bourbon tries to tell you a story, his hands lost in a duffel coat, shuffling you closer to the back corner seat of the bus against a window that doesn't open. Listen with the piece of you that screams when you are pinned.
This is how I was told the story, one bitter winter morning after a piece of my little finger fell off into a teacup. I'd been up all night talking Marcie down from a ledge she built up, and I was so tired, I barely noticed a chunk of appendage going awol. That might sound silly, but if you knew Marcie, you'd know the mental labyrinths she could lock herself away in and the sheer length of unspooled logic it took to lead her out, and I was the only one still answering my phone. In truth, if my mother hadn't walked in and seen the ploosh of a body part entering my tea uninvited, I might have gone to school with it left in the dregs.
Instead she yelled "Shit! It is hereditary!", and promptly changed my life over the contents of a First Aid kit.
It started with Grandma's death.
My grandmother's name was Mirabel Lynch, and her funeral was the first I went to. I was told it was a sad ritual, a shedding of sorts, and we would all empty out of the cold church onto the grass and feel the bleak sun starting to warm things up again, the stopped world beginning to slowly turn. But the pews had a shallow occupation, the mourners dry and stunned with disbelief. Only the man in the back row, a Doctor Wheeler, seemed truly stricken, and he had seen her die. Quietly he rocked, head bowed to his knees like a passenger in a crashing plane, fumbling a rosary he didn't know how to use, just rubbing the beads back down to unvarnished olive. My mother turned my head away from him and led us to the front row for a good view of the casket, glossy black as my patent leather shoes, with much less to contain.
I don't remember the service. There were songs that felt like the death of music, prayers that echoed off the walls and met my ears distorted. I remember the coffin slid off behind a velvet curtain, and I wondered if a rabbit would jump out instead. But then we were out on the grass, the adults smoking between the gravestones, no sense of relief to be found.
"She were a great one, your mam," said the publican, who had a habit of popping round to lament his wife's infidelity and the rising cost of beer. "I shall miss her dearly."
There was a mumbling of agreement from the gathered: she had listened to all their woes, the parlour steeped in tea and sorrow. I thought of her as an old medicine woman tending to hearts, patching up the tears with a thread of tender words and a plate of biscuits for the void.
"She knew every secret in that place," Mum said, reattaching my finger as she explained. "If there had been any good ones, I'd have expected the locals snuffed her, but it was all just a bunch of small-town misery."
The wobbly few of Grandma's regular parlour visitors that showed jutted now between headstones, gappy like a mouth missing teeth, eager to suck their fags down to ash and blow away. They were almost at the tab ends when Dr Wheeler appeared. He was the sickly colour of off-cream, like all the rich warm brown had been drained from his face, his smile inverted, his sudden presence a grim spectre even for a graveyard. Dr Wheeler, who kept a drawerful of lollipops for brave kiddies, looked to need ten suckers for his own troubles. His wide eyes, goggled by thick glasses, roved the thin crowd in a stare of ominous condemnation.
"You all right, Doc?" The publican, seemingly elected to speak, asked. "You're looking peaky."
"You should pray," said Wheeler to his new rosary.
"What's that, mate?"
But Wheeler just wailed and sank to his knees, staring up at us all like we were shrugging at disaster. "For god's sake. Why aren't you praying?"
We left him roaring at the church mouth.
I grew up in my grandmother's house, me and Mum in the spare room with the bulky furniture squeezed in to fit. Ours was a seaside town, a little unloved, the air full of salt, the soil rich with crushed seashells. There wasn't much to do but fish and drink and walk along the damp sand, but it was quiet and I liked that you could taste the wind. Grandma's house was full, always: full of clocks and old china, stained rugs and unsynchronised chimes, multiple teapots constantly on the go, and guests, always guests, crowding in the stuffy armchairs with their laps full of worries.
"She never turned anyone away," Mum said. "Day or night. She always kept the upstairs light on; Grandma used to say it was a lighthouse for those lost in their storms."
"She sounds very kind."
"Hmm." Mum held my finger up to the light. There were little pores all over the tip I'd never noticed before, dotted around the sewing thread. She took the needle out of her mouth.
"Kindness cuts both ways," she said.
The night we buried Grandma, there was movement in the bushes.
The rain was heavy and I was curled up in the window seat. I was still numb, sort of warming up to the idea of grandma not coming back. Reality was crooked, not irreparable; we could straighten the frame and she would come wandering back into the picture, any day now, maybe this day: Grandma loved a joke. I looked out into the dark and wondered what the rain would sound like on the shiny, hollow casket.
Then the garden rustled.
My spine locked. Perhaps it was the wind, already shrieking ice down the chimney; but the leaves had flickered against the current of air. The blanket slipped my knees as I searched the front lawn for a lost animal. When nothing moved, I pushed my nose up to the glass.
Two full moons shone back. I skittered to the floor, bringing Mum running.
Dr Wheeler pressed his palm to the fogged window. His glasses glowed like big yellow headlamps staring into the lounge. I scrambled behind Grandma's chair, but the eyes followed like a haunted painting.
"Dr Wheeler?"
As my mother entered the room, the power snapped, the room dropped into darkness. The doctor's upside-down smile waited. Mum stood between us, blocking those radiant eyes from finding me.
"Doc? What's going on?"
"It'll happen again," the doctor called, his voice moaning like the wind. "No earthly medicine can stop it. I tried. I watched it tear her apart."
"You're scaring us, Doc. You're scaring my kid."
"You should be scared. It'll cut through you all."
"I'm going to call someone. Someone who can help you."
He shook his dripping head.
The last we saw, Dr Wheeler pushed the rosary through the letterbox, where it flopped wetly onto the mat, and retreated into the storm. The police searched the headland all night, but there was no sign until the morning, when his body was found beneath the cliff, the bones just pieces held together by string. They handed my mother a wet note, bowed their caps, and left.
"You want to exhume the body?"
"I do."
"The one we buried yesterday?" The grave digger was thoroughly baffled. But Mum was an obstinate sort.
"I sat under a tree with my sandwiches while they dug. The funeral director kept trying to talk me out of it. I don't know how many times he said But really, there's very little remains remaining! In the end I offered him a tuna-cucumber and he buggered off."
The grand polished casket rose out of the earth lightly dusted. Lying on the satin pillow, the very last of my grandmother — a single finger — rested.
"And just as the letter claimed," she said, pointedly signalling my own re-attached appendage, "it was riddled with holes."
The first were the size of pinpricks, unnoticeable except for the fact they had scattered all up her right arm. She put it down as a rash, and totally forgot about it until passing a mirror a few days later.
"There were holes around the corners of her eyes. Just little dots, a tad bigger than the arm ones."
By the time Grandma saw the doctor, they had constellated across her chest and were starting down her back. There were bubbles large as bath pearls, little ones like match heads, crescent-shaped cavities just making stucco out of skin. The muscle around them was springy.
"If I'm too rough with the towel after a bath, all the water comes squeegeeing out."
She was starting to resemble a pointillist study.
Dr Wheeler checked her vitamin and hormone levels. He had a long, serious conversation with a dermatologist friend, then an oncology expert. On paper, she was fine. No test could detect a problem, besides an oddly raised level of cortisol.
"Are you particularly stressed?" Dr Wheeler asked.
"Never felt better in my life. Except for it taking ten minutes to drain before I can get out the tub."
Every day people came to her with heartbreak.
"Every day the holes got bigger."
She saw the doctor every month, then every week. She stopped moisturising, because every time she smoothed the lotion on, it spat back out somewhere.
Then a very dry piece of shin fell off.
Dr Wheeler stared at it on his desk. The chunk of shin was pocked with holes, like driftwood thoroughly feasted on by woodworm.
"Can I see where it came from?"
The surrounding skin was quite changed. There was no bleeding, no sign of trauma at all except for a missing bit, as naturally absent as a puzzle piece. Tiny soft fronds reaching out from the dermis, thin whispers that floated under his breath.
He overnighted the sample to a marine biology friend, who called the next morning.
"Why are you mailing me old sponge?"
Wheeler took a deep breath. "It's human."
The line was very quiet for a while. Then:
"Whatever you're exposed to, you need to get out. Now."
"It's not me. A patient — a pensioner."
A long, controlled exhale.
"The only thing that could do this to a person is toxic exposure," the biologist said slowly. "Whatever it is — radiation, chemical spill, gas leak into the water system—"
"How about the heartache of a whole town?"
"..."
"Annie?"
"Don't call me again."
The doctor came to see Grandma at the house, in a rare moment of solitude. She sat quietly in the garden, a breeze whistling delicately through her skin. There was a strong ocean smell and a view across the clifftop fields from the back of the house.
"Looks like rain," she said as he arrived.
"There's never been a counsellor in this town," he said, sitting beside her. "There's poverty. There's problems. But somehow we have some of the healthiest people in the world, mentally speaking. And I think you know why."
Grandma sighed.
"The holes," she said.
"You soak up every ounce of grief in this place. And then it's got nowhere to go. It just festers. All that trapped pain, none of it yours." Dr Wheeler looked off over the cliffs.
"It's eating you, Mirabel."
She gave him a sad smile. "I know," she finally said.
The thunder started on the horizon. Grandma tucked a little sealed envelope into the doctor's jacket.
"For my girls," she said.
She took off her shawl. Her dry, cratered arms lifted towards the sky, embracing the rain. Mirabel Lynch walked out into the downpour with her face raised. Her dessicated skin swelled and sighed, drinking it in, until her permeable body, fragile as wet cake, melted into the grass.
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