Slime
If she doesn’t turn on the lights, she can’t see the piles of laundry. If she doesn’t pay attention, she can ignore the smell of mildew on her towels. So, as long as she’s only coughing up black slime once a day, she probably doesn’t need to do anything about it.
She makes eye contact with herself in the mirror while she washes her hands, but the streaks on the glass still creep closer to her face. Of all the rooms in the house, the bathroom is deteriorating the fastest. She didn’t think a room this wet could accumulate so much dust. She wonders why dirt clings to porcelain so well. She tells herself the arrival of a spider is a good thing. At least it’ll deal with the other bugs.
She turns the shower on hot enough that her whole body flushes pink. The falling water makes the slime bubble when she spits it down the drain. The white soap bar sits on the dish she bought to keep it off the grime-coated shower shelves. The spider adds to its web.
She tells herself she is too tired to do anything but can’t seem to go to sleep before 2:00am. She snoozes her alarm one time more every day. She has a headache that never fully goes away.
In the morning, the milk boils over when she tries to make oatmeal. The foam spills over the rim of the pot and under the burner, thinly coating the burnt-on pieces of food beneath the stovetop. Once she has eaten, the slime spills over her lips and onto the floor in much the same way.
She’s having trouble thinking clearly. She doesn’t leave the house anymore. She hasn’t talked to anyone in days. Unread texts pile up beside the dishes. The spider moves when she turns on the bathroom light. She thinks it is staring at her.
Washing her hair, she combs out the chunks of slime build-up with her fingers. She makes a mental note to keep a hair tie on her if she keeps throwing up the stuff. The more she tries to tease it out, the deeper it works its way into the strands, leaving her hair tangled in thick, sticky clumps.
She moves the reminder to call her doctor forward another day. She’s puking more frequently, but the slime hasn’t gotten much thicker, and she doesn’t know when she’ll have a chance to go in, anyway.
Her teeth stay discoloured no matter how much she brushes them, and the residual slime adds a bitter edge to whatever she eats. She can’t tell if the nausea is a symptom of its own or a side-effect of the taste. She doesn’t eat much now, anyway. Food is much less appetizing, knowing it’ll come right back up, dark and congealed as she leans over the stained toilet bowl. The spider is definitely watching her now.
Her bedroom floor is littered with dirty socks, clumps of hair, and old receipts, and the walls have started to close in. Having given up on shifting the piles of papers between her bed and her desk every night, she goes to sleep in a nest of unsorted mail. The slime seems denser, especially right after she wakes up, but as long as she’s only heaving over the toilet for a few minutes each time, she’ll be fine. She can feel the spider’s eyes on the back of her head as she retches. It must enjoy this, somehow.
With each hurried trip down the long hallway to the bathroom, more dirt and debris cling to her bare feet. She stumbles through the doorway, already spewing as she crosses the threshold.
Closing her mouth is no longer enough to stop the rising tide of slime in her throat, and it’s too thick now for her to spit out. It pours past her lips, slowly at first, but eventually fast enough that it begins to form a sizeable puddle on the bathroom floor, blanketing the dusty tiles and discoloured grout. She covers her mouth to try to stem the flow, but it seeps through her fingers and runs down her arm. She hears a bubbling, rippling sound from the sink, and sees the same thick black substance emerging from the drain. She tries to scream but chokes on the sound. She tries to run but slips in the slime, which has already spread to cover the width of the floor and is starting to rise. She falls, face hitting the tile and pulling away, slow, sticky. Nearly eye-level with the shower drain, she sees that it, too, is oozing. Crawling desperately to the door, mouth still leaking, she finds her hands, slickly coated, can’t grip the handle. The slime rises faster.
When it reaches chin-level, she learns that it is too thick to swim through. When her head goes under, she won’t be able to tread. If she could breathe through her mouth, she would be hyperventilating by now, but all she can do is watch it happen. Her eyes land on the spider in the corner of the ceiling. It is staring at her. It has been judging her this whole time. It will be glad when she drowns.
The slime interrupts their silent stand-off. It covers her face and seeps back into her through her nose, her ears, and her eyes. As she suffocates below the surface, the pressure of the sludge threatens to crush her. The weight pushes her down, pressing her into the floor. The outline of each cool tile digs into her back. Submerged, she hears a low rumbling sound as liquid rushes past her ears, and her throat begins to ache as slime gushes through it with more urgency than ever. If the room keeps filling after she dies, maybe the slime will get the spider, too.
originally published in The Lamp Vol. 16