Bad Girl in the Box by Tim Curran

Author:Tim Curran [Curran, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: author, dark, Fiction, fantasy, horror, literary, Paranormal, writer
Publisher: Silver Shamrock Publishing
Published: 2021-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

3

Debra Standish was alone because Walter left her. Oh, it had been coming on for years, but once she ate the meat and an entirely new world opened up to her, he had been frightened away. A lifelong vegetarian, he would not eat what she offered. He would not taste it. He refused to even smell it. She chased him around the house, trying to force the meat into his mouth, but he was lithe and fast and he slipped away.

He had been looking for a reason to leave her for many years, she knew, and the meat provided that reason: Debra was insane.

No, no, no, Walter, she thought as she crouched naked beneath the stairs that led to the basement. It’s nothing quite that simple.

There in her little cobwebbed alcove, huddled in the darkness, she thought of the meat. She dreamed of it and lusted after it. She had been out of meat for nearly sixteen hours now and the most horrendous things were happening to her.

Things that made her believe that maybe Walter was right and she was mad.

But I’m not mad! I’m not!

It started with the hunger, of course, because that’s how the meat controlled you. One bite and you wanted more. You had to have more, so you stuffed yourself and then stuffed yourself again. With each taste the addiction became more pronounced. Your metabolism burned hot and high like a smelting oven and if you did not feed it more meat, the quicker it fed on you.

Debra knew these things without actually knowing them. She could not have put any of it into words, none that made any sense.

She only knew she was starving.

The hunger pains came infrequently now, but when they did it felt as if the guts were being torn out of her. She usually went out cold when they struck and woke up on the floor bathed in lukewarm sweat.

But something even worse was happening now.

It was her skin.

There was something wrong with it.

In the darkness, she ran her hands along it and instantly pulled them away with a cry of disgust. This isn’t my skin. Another skin has grown over it. Yes, an alien skin that covered her entire body. It felt cool to the touch and scaly like that of a fish.

Oh, not that…

Not fish…

Not goddamned disgusting slithery fish…

They haunted her nightmares since she was a child, bulging fisheyes staring out at her from weedy green depths, splayed fins, and oily, scaly skins. Her mom and dad fished for river suckers every spring. They would clean them, gut them, scale them and filet the bones from them, then salt them and dry them on racks.

And the smell, the godawful repugnant stench of the suckers was only secondary to the briny taste of their flesh and the nauseating flavor of the broth her parents boiled from them.

The fish shack…

The fish shack…

She still dreamed of the fish shack where the suckers were cleaned and deboned—the oily floorboards, the fishy stench, the scales and fish bones and river slime…

She began to shake, droplets of sweat popping out on her face.

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