gauze from the medicine cabinet. This is going to hurt.
I remove the blood-soaked shirt, close my eyes to the gore, and run my fingers under the water without looking. Then, as fast as I can, I wrap the stubs, around and around, until the roll runs out.
I keep my hand up, even though my arm feels numb—"Oh, God!"—besides a deep, horrible throbbing I somehow didn't notice until now. A wave of nausea and dizziness rolls past as I clutch the rim of the sink. Tears run. I just want the pain to stop.
I need to get to a doctor.
Are there even doctors anymore?
I've peed myself. Not much. Just a wet spot in the front of my pants.
I use my plastic cup (My roommate still uses it sometimes, despite the fact that I wrote my name on it.) and I drink cup after cup of water. A cramp like a bowling ball in my stomach makes me cry out in agony. I hurriedly pull down my pants with one hand and relieve the pressure into the toilet.
I try to breathe as little as possible so as not to take too much mist into my lungs. As I grunt and push, I’m forced to pant despite my by best efforts, like a black hound left in the sun. I taste oily bitterness in the foul air and an even stronger copper tang than before. My skin has become sticky like I sat under a tree that wept sap. The agony of pushing doubles me over. Make it stop!
The contents of my stomach slip out into the toilet bowl.
Now that it's all out of me, there is a great emptiness that feels euphoric. I could float away. (Or maybe that's the Oxycodone kicking in.)
I wipe. Yellow mucus, like egg yolk, coats the tissue and the side of my hand. My sphincter burns and aches to the tailbone.
Something thrashes in the toilet. I jump up, startled.
In the mostly clear water, a newly hatched albino penguin chirps and flaps its fins, helpless and pathetic, though I don't see any eggshell. My affection for him is powerful and instantaneous. I snatch him up with one hand and cradle him in my arms. His eyes are closed, yet he looks up at me and opens and closes his beak as if he wants food.
I have to find him food!
He is male, though I don't know how I know. Maybe it's because he came from me.
I dry and swaddle his fluffy body with a bath towel. I cuddle him to me, and I want to lay down on the floor and sleep, but instead remain standing. My exhaustion and my love and the Oxy makes me feel delirious, and I silently half laugh, half cry.
“We’re going to be okay,” I whisper.
I hear a chattering in the next room and hold my breath to listen.
"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
It has to be my roommate. But what is he saying?
I open the door to a putrid stench that is twice as strong as before. A thing dressed in yellow, shrouded in fog, sits in a chair, repeating the call, "Tekeli-li!" It's like the screech of a raven. How did I ever think it sounded human?
I protectively clutch my penguin to my chest.
The thing in yellow holds out its arms. The fog shifts and reveals an elderly Italian woman dressed in a yellow silk kimono. I don’t believe what I’m seeing. As she tilts her head down and looks through her sparse lashes, her expression is motherly, almost bashful.
The thing in yellow isn’t a monster at all.
"Tekeli-li!" Her lips don't move, but the sound still seems to come from her.
A powerful, alien urge compels me to step closer, like a malevolent force has somehow changed the rules of gravity. As her arms stretch like elongating shadows, my need to let her hold my newborn is horrifyingly acute.
I struggle to speak. “You can’t have him!”
My voice seems to hold power. I break free from her pull and flee through the mist, down the hall, and to the pantry. Before I understand what I'm doing, I grab a can of squid off the shelf.
Even with a pull tab, it's a struggle to open with one hand while cradling a chirping penguin chick.
"Hush. I'll have your food out in a sec."
I stick my head out and look back down the hall. The woman in yellow hasn't followed. I don’t remember her having any legs.
I slurp up a piece of squid, desperately chew its rubbery flesh for at least a minute, lower my face, and let the penguin suck the mush from my mouth. I compulsively repeat this until my jaw aches.
He is already larger, his gray fluff replaced with slick, shiny white plumage. I stick out my chest and smile with pride. He's so beautiful! I spit up the last piece of squid into his mouth.
Empty cans clutter the floor. Only now do I realize I've gone through all the squid, the sardines, and the tuna.
A sudden stench makes me choke. "Did you potty?" I check the bath towel. It's still clean.
"Tekeli-li!" the old woman cries from outside the pantry.
Instead of legs, her lower half is a protoplasmic blob. A sinus cavity in the front sucks in the mist like a vacuum.
"Tekeli-li!"
I bash her in the skull with an industrial-sized can of peaches. It sinks in and disappears, creating a more cylindrical shape to her face that stretches out her wrinkles and bulges her eyes.
I clutch my chick close and back up, slamming into the shelves behind me. "You can't have him!"
Her lower iridescent-half oozes toward me while her upper human-half stays back. A dozen eyes form around the sinus cavity as it continues to funnel in the mist.
"I said you can't have him!" My words don’t seem to have power anymore.
She will have us both.
I reach forward with my injured hand and swipe a row of cans off the shelf onto the crawling protrusion. The gelatinous skin absorbs the cans. She pulls back, and the metal crunches inside her amorphous form like she is some kind of trash compactor.
I use a broom to shove at the accumulated metal clumps within the blob, trying to push her to the side. The handle is about to snap. I just need to create enough room to slip by her. A dozen human fingers emerge from the blob and grasp at the bristles.
Abandoning the broom, I dart past her through the open space, her putrid stench and the residual taste of fish making me retch, and sprint down the hall, back the way I came.
Once in my bedroom, I suck in the clear air as if surfacing from underwater as I close the door behind me.
We're alive! My pulse races, and it takes time to catch my breath. I slide to the floor. I still have my chick, my little baby.
God, that thing! Some of the reaching fingers had fingernail polish.
"I got you. We're okay."
The penguin bobs and weaves his head. His cries are now more squawks than cute chirps. He's not a baby anymore.
"We'll be okay. We're safe."
Sooner or later, we'll need water. I’ll have to go back out there.
No. I can't think about the thing in yellow right now, not if I want to stay sane. My love for my offspring is the only thing that keeps me from losing it. I have to stay strong for him. His eyes are just slits. Blind or not, he's still perfect.
I sing a wordless lullaby to calm him. I'm not sure if I'm remembering it or making it up as I go. The song feels old, older than me, maybe older than everything. He quiets and nestles against my chest.
While I sing, I cry over him.
No matter how much I love him, I can't take care of him. It's not as if I can go out for more squid. What kind of life can he really have in this room? We'll die together, of starvation or worse.
The song is about a cold, distant place, a dying world under a red sky filled with black stars. The constellations are unfamiliar. I know this without needing words. Waves lap against the bone-white shore of the Lake of Hali.
As I sing the last haunting notes, a chill prickles up my neck and scalp. The song didn't come from me. It came from an outside source. It came from the thing in yellow.
It's a nightmare that can crush cans inside itself and grow fingers and eyes and God knows what else. It could easily get through the door.
Instead, it waits for me.
It's not just a monster. I've seen its motherly face.
"Tekeli-li!" She calls over and over from the other side of the door.
Maybe Tekeli-li is my penguin's name. Maybe I'm the monster for keeping them apart.
I'm a surrogate.
The albino penguin could never truly be mine. No matter how painful, I need to give him to someone, or to something, that can take care of him. I could never be a worthy father. Never. Not after what I've done.
Dana cries in a heap on the sidewalk. She’s getting wet. I was angry because she went out in the storm, and now she’s lying in a puddle like an idiot, crying her head off like it’s my fault she fell off the porch.
“Get up!”
I pull her to her feet. Blood runs down her leg. For a moment, it’s fine, because I think it’s just muddy water.
I never said I would be a good father. All I promised was that I would try.
I open the door of my room.
The thing in yellow sees me and returns her face to its original shape by pulling the can of peaches down inside her throat and chest. For the first time, I notice a simple gold crown on her head. She is the Queen in Yellow, and I have her prince.
"Please. Take care of him. He's all I have."
She takes him from me and coos, her expression gentle and loving.
Mouths, all cooing in unison, form along her widening face. Some have human teeth. Others have shark teeth or piranha teeth or wolf teeth. The mouths descend like striking snakes.
The slick plumage of the penguin shreds. The flesh rips apart. Blood spills down the yellow silk. Bones crack and crunch.
The Queen fades to mist. A primal scream of anguish tears through me, and I reach out into the empty air. Daylight shines through the windows. I hear cars, and construction, and the other familiar sounds of
The Ovum Horror Page 2
