She has the nightmare again that night.
In the dream she isn’t human; but this is not frightening. She is somewhere between insect and machine. Her skin is glossy black and hard. She is segmented and articulated, each joint more flexible and independent than any animal’s; she can touch any part of her body with almost any other. Her limbs are long and thin, with extra joints, but any one of them is strong and steady enough to hold her weight. Her eyes are clear and spherical and solid, like diamond cabochons, seven of them ringing her head, and she can place a finger directly onto any of them without pain or fear. Her mouth is dry and made of a dozen dextrous fingers. Nothing adheres to her skin without her consent. Long thin tapering interlocking shapes on her abdomen suggest an exposed ribcage, but in fact they can unfold, come apart and serve as extra climbing-legs or stabbing-arms, revealing her digestive tract as a flexible, segmented black tube coiled upon itself like a seizing millipede.
All of her movements are perfectly mechanically precise. She does not need to breathe; air diffuses into her through invisible spiracles all across her body, oxygen pulled improbably from the atmosphere by a physiopsychic Maxwell’s demon. Her body produces no waste: everything in skin and flesh and bone can be turned into energy and glossy blackness. Great flat elytra can unfold from her back and face toward the sun, sucking in light more efficiently than any leaf or solar panel, to convert the carbon dioxide her body produces back into oxygen to burn.
In the dream she will be looking for something or someone, or examining some puzzling object or phenomenon, or creating something, or simply existing equanimously, when she first feels it. There is something inside her.
It is not smooth and hard and cool and dry. It is wet and hot and quick. It squirms and it clutches. It folds and ripples and undulates. There are parts to it, nubs and slithering lines of damp soft skin and a prickly lumpy press of greasy hair. It is vibrating, she thinks at first, but no that is not the correct word. It is spasming, its whole body flexing in and out, inflating and deflating many times a second like a grotesque fireplace bellows, and each time it desperately expands it takes her precious cool dry air into itself, and each time it feverishly contracts it returns hot moist swamp-air, air that it has passed all through its own wet hot meatsome interior and wrung itself into.
It squirms and it clutches and it moves through her, and it is so soft and so damp, and it paws at parts of her she has never needed to consider before, parts of her that exist beneath her smooth black perfect unbroken carapace, beneath her cool concavities and solid black metal-plastic-chitin. It is inside of her, and yet in her dream she is staring at it, it is taking up her whole field of vision, and it is everted, so that even as it is inside of her she can see inside of it. And it is hot and wet and meat, and just as it is pulsing and squirming and spasming inside her, all its own parts are pulsing and squirming and spasming inside of it. It is a violation of her, but it is also a violation of itself, and what it does to her its own body does to it, squirming and slithering and clutching and pulsing and spasming and squelching inside itself.
She sees it, as it moves inside of her, and she cannot take her eyes off it. She is queasy, and in the dream she has never felt queasy before, it is not a thing her insides have ever done, she has never needed to contemplate her insides, in the dream she has only ever been a perfect still cool dry thing -
She could turn her eyes aside from it but she is transfixed by the horror and the violation of the thing, the wetness and softness, the pulsating and undulating pieces that squirm against each other -
And here is a soft wet pocket of it, and there is a new thing inside the pocket, a curled new shape that is growing -
And as it grows it stretches clumsily, trying to move without understanding that movement is what it is doing, trying to exist when it does not yet know what it is -
And it is growing -
And it is hot, and it is wet -
And it is distending the shape of the thing it is growing inside
And
And
And there are more of it, there are two five ten twenty, and they are all growing, as fast, faster
And the original thing, the one squirming and crawling through her, is fat and hot and panting and exhausted with gravidity
And the largest of them squirms out of the wet hole in one side of the interloper, and it is hot and wet and skin, and it begins to grow fur
And its squirming wet sisters follow it, or grow too fast and rip their mother apart
And she sees every thread and hair and fiber and tendon of the thing as it tears, every sac as it bursts, every smooth hot wet pink continuum of meat as it rips
And she sees each of the violation’s daughters, and she sees the same soft wet pocket inside each of them, and she sees the same curled new shape inside each of them, and she sees the same clumsy stretch and the same growth
And they slide forth from each other slick with transparent slime
And they grow
And they clutch and squirm inside of her
And they slither and crawl through the parts of her
The tunnels of her
The coiled passageways of her safely sealed beneath her carapace
And they are skin and she is soft beneath her
And they are warm and she is hot beneath her shell
And they are slick and she is wet beneath her shell
And her carapace is distending
And her chest is spasming
And they are meat and she is meat
And her mouth is wet and full of slime
And her eyes are soft
And she folds
And she undulates
And she has no shell
And they are coming out of her
Through the pores in her skin that seep sweat and oil and slime
Through the slick cavern of her throat in which a soft sensitive tongue lurches pathetically
And they are wet and their fur is slicked to them
And they are rats
And she knows what a rat
And she knows what she is
And as she wakes up, she heaves a great retch, loud and explosive enough to arch her up from her bed. And she rolls to her side, and her eyes stream with tears, and she gags again, but nothing comes up this time. She pants, heavy coarse-throated pants.
She wipes her eyes. She takes a drink of water, and another drink of water. She feels the meat of her throat work to suck it down into her chest.
She lies back down in her bed. She tries to let her thoughts leave her. She tries not to contemplate what she knows she is.