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incandescent-eden · 4 years

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31 Days of Horror: Distort (1)

My story from yesterday for the first day of @witch-kid-writer ‘s 31 days of horror! (The prompts are really cool, I highly recommend checking them out!)

Total word count: 1653

TW / CW for: body horror, graphic descriptions of bodily horror sounds, moments of unreality, graphic descriptions of panic attacks, fatphobia mention

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Imogen Gong was a quiet person. She had good grades, full AP classes and honors society in high school, got a partial scholarship to get into a decent college, practiced piano and violin and Chinese - the perfect image of what she was expected to be. Her parents were so pleased with how far their daughter had gotten.

For her part, Imogen wasn’t going to contradict them. Yes, I’m going to a great school, she told aunties who would cluck and congratulate her. Thank you, I’m really excited, I worked really hard. She would muster up the most emotion she can, tried to bend fatigue into pride, tried to twist empty, meaningless compliments into some amount of self-esteem.

And, as she should have prepared for, but didn’t expect, she crashed hard. Sure, her grades were still average, but the compliments dried out, and her sleep schedule became less of a schedule and more of a metronome bouncing back and forth between never sleeping and sleeping through classes, with panic attacks set as the notes. Quarter note equals sixty-six, repeat five times a day, her old piano teacher’s voice echoed in her head when her chest was tight and her muscles clenched involuntarily, and air was scarce.

If only she could play her panicked breathing as an instrument and her heart as a drum, and play a one person symphony orchestra, so she could become famous and rich and drop out entirely.

As it stood, she dropped her theory of computation class her third year of college and, in an effort to avoid having any eight am classes, re-enrolled the second semester that year in Professor Tenner’s class.

Professor Leonard Tenner was a curious man, in the way that he was absolutely, bizarrely average. He wore rectangle glasses and an ill-fitting suit every day he taught, and boyish white cheeks and balding brown hair. He spoke with a mild voice, with an accent that was painfully American, but just standard enough that his dialect gave no indication as to where in the United States he was actually from.

Imogen sat slumped in the second row.

“So suppose, I have this graph. The shortest path, then…” Professor Tenner would say with a small smile, as he drew the graph in faded whiteboard markers on a grayed out whiteboard, filling in circular nodes.

Professor Tenner looked up from the board for a second, his light eyes boring into Imogen. “Is everyone following along alright?” he asked with a mild smile.

The words that crawled from his mouth twitched and writhed, as though laughing, curling into themselves and over and into the students’ ears.

“I hope you’re all getting this information,” Professor Tenner continued. He traced the edges between the graph nodes, added number weights full of circular two’s and eight’s.

Each graph had different colors, pallid red and green and purple and blue graphs full of crossed, curving lines. The flat, gray whiteboard was stretched and distorted with the graphs scrambling over every inch.

“The shortest path, then…” said Professor Tenner, again and again and again, pacing from one end of the classroom to the other.

“The shortest path, then…” All the while, the graphs continued to twist.

Imogen’s pencil shook. He was going too fast; she couldn’t possibly write down the question that quickly.

“This will be on the exam, so make sure you know it,” said Professor Tenner. Imogen’s intestines twisted, as cross as the garish graphs that stared mockingly back at her with their incomprehensible paths of varying lengths. She hadn’t realized exams were coming on so soon.

The shortest path. The shortest path was...

“Oh, would you look at the time?” Professor Tenner said, at last. “I’ll see you all in class next week. Remember, the homework is due on Tuesday, and my office hours are Thursday from three to five!” His voice could barely be heard over the rush of students packing up to leave.

Imogen silently packed her things and went back to her room.

“Everything alright?” Cathy, her roommate, asked, when Imogen entered. Cathy was already seated at her desk, her psychology textbook cracked open, glasses smudged.

“Just tired,” Imogen replied, collapsing on her bed. The mattress was stiff. Her stuffed rabbit, Floppy, teetered precariously on the edge of the unlofted bed, moments away from falling to the cold tile floor covered in shed hair.

“I feel that,” Cathy said, highlighting a passage of her notes. “I’ve been studying my ass off for this exam.”

“I’m sure you’ll do great,” Imogen said, crawling under her blankets. The twisting in her torso would not go away. “I’m going to take a nap. Stayed up til four last night trying to do Tenner’s homework.”

“God,” muttered Cathy piteously.

Imogen made a noncommittal sound in agreement, curled into a ball to try and stop the cramping.

When she awoke, it was dark, and Cathy was gone. Probably at dinner or in the library. She checked her phone: notifications from Twitter, an email from her stats professor reminding everyone to bring a pen to class, and a grading notification from Tenner’s class. With a frown, Imogen checked the grade notification. The soft blue glow of the screen was cold, despite the thick blankets in which Imogen wrapped herself.

Her skin prickled with heat and ice simultaneously, staring at the impossibly curved score that danced on the screen as her hand shook.

Taking a small breath, Imogen locked her phone, throwing herself back into darkness. The twisting in her intestines worsened.

She was vaguely aware of Floppy lying on the dirty floor, but Imogen was too numb to poke her hand out of the blankets that swallowed her and rescue the stuffed rabbit. The world was spinning.

Imogen closed her eyes. Willed the spiraling graphs to disappear. Begged the curved, bloated, distorted score from her last homework to have been wrong, to stop glaring at her from behind shut eyelids.

Her breathing started to get faster. Quarter note equals forty, then fifty, then sixty six. In out, in out, in out, gasping and gasping and gasping, and suddenly it’s not her piano teacher’s voice she hears, but Professor Tenner’s.

“The shortest path, then…”

Imogen flipped on her light, shaking as she stumbled out of bed. The world itself wasn’t moving, not logically, but the straight path to the bathroom turned into a twisted maze, spinning around her with every wobbly step.

The bright fluorescent lights of the bathroom washed everything out as Imogen leaned on the counter, hovering over the sink. In, out, in out, the breaths came, faster and faster, but then - finally! - slowing down. Her skin was a pale green in the bathroom mirror, the same green as Professor Tenner’s markers.

Faded, weak, a shadow of the bright green the marker once must have been. And used to draw twisting graphs, twisting and twisting like Imogen’s intestines.

Imogen watched her eyes in the mirror, watched as the dark brown shifted from hopeless to glaring. If she could just stop cramping, she could start to do something.

To her surprise, her organs complied. The pain went away immediately.

Imogen blinked. Pinched herself.

Watched with glee as the skin gave way, stretched and curled around her fingers as she twisted. Laughed, even.

This had to be a joke. She tugged at her fingers, her thumbs, her palms.

Pop.

She had always struggled to play tenths on the piano, but no more.

Gazing in the mirror incredulously, Imogen pulled at her cheeks, watched as her lips curled into a smile.

She could get taller, she realized, stretching herself by several inches. Crack, crack, pop, went her spine. Her face slid into a wider smile even as her cheeks flattened. Mom had always wanted her to be taller, thinner. Now she could be.

For a second, her smile lingered, until the homework score flashed in front of her eyes once more.

The twisting in her intestines returned.

Will as she might, Imogen could not erase the pain this time. She grabbed her abdomen. Hugged it tight. Watched as her skin turned from sickly to pink from the blood rushing, twisting with her own hands this time. Twisting and twisting and twisting until the pain went away.

She kept twisting, desperately trying to erase the smooth curves of the number that flashed in her mind. Stretched her limbs outward at sharp angles, as far away from smooth curves as she could get. Pinched and pulled, faster and faster, copying the graphs Professor Tenner had scribbled on the board. Twisted her joints until they were the half-filled curlicues of her professor’s handwriting, and pinched her skin until it was the faint purple and green and red and blue of the markers.

Ignored the sounds of popping and crunching and squelching.

Imogen smiled to herself. There was no one else to smile to - she couldn’t even see where her mouth was in the mirror.

The shortest path was clear in her mind, now, an obvious path from elbow to lung to pelvis. Imogen kept shifting, rearranging, distorting herself until she had created each graph configuration of Tenner’s questions and several more.

Shortest path, longest path, minimum spanning tree, and so on. All of them were clear now.

A new number flashed before her eyes, the score she would get on this exam if the answers came as easily as they did now.

She could challenge herself more, get harder and harder questions right. Add more paths, more nodes, more edges, more cycles. Her breathing picked up again, this time from excitement - quarter note equals fifty five.

The sprawling, spiraling skin and the cracking and clacking of bones as they connected to form a new graph were barely even noticeable now. Imogen solved the shortest path from her knee to her skull, faster than before.

The shortest path, then… echoed Professor Tenner’s voice in Imogen’s mind, again and again.

#writeblr #horror #body horror #original fiction #original writing #31 days of horror #distort #body distortion horror #panic attacks #reevie writes #original story

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