Sorry, Mom (complete)

 

Best of Bizarro Fiction v1 is no longer for sale, so I am posting it here for all to enjoy. Or not to enjoy. Because real art is unenjoyable.

 

This story is grotesque. It contains body horror and unconditional love. Enjoy. 

 

 

 

 

Sorry, Mom, but I Didn’t Love You

By James L. Steele

I’m standing in my personal gymnasium looking at myself in the wall mirror. I don’t see my reflection. I don’t see myself. All I can see is her. All I can remember is her.

In the year 2001, my mother’s spine began growing out her ear. I noticed it one morning while she was getting ready for work.

“Mom, what’s that?” I asked and pointed at the small vertebrae poking out of her ear canal.

She smiled at me and said, “It’s my spine, son.”

Now I was only seven at the time, so I was still a kid, but I was beginning to develop the ability to question what I was told. Somehow I had this feeling that it wasn’t just something to smile about.

“Is it supposed to do that?”

“To do what?” she asked. When I didn’t say anything, she told me goodbye, gathered her purse and walked out the door.

For the next week or two, whenever mom came near me I hid from her. When she looked at me, I hid around the corner. When she touched me, I pulled away and ran to my room. She talked with me numerous times, but her explanations never shed any more light on it. She would ask what was bothering me. Every time I would say, “Why is your spine doing that?”

Mom would say things like:

“It’s okay, son. It’s just my spine.”

“It’s part of my body, like my nose.”

“Why are you frightened? See my teeth?” When she said that, she would open her mouth and touch a few with her tongue. “My teeth are bone, too, and you don’t think anything is wrong that they’re visible do you?”

“I’m thankful you’re so concerned about me, but I’m fine. See? I’m still your mother.”

I would always repeat my initial question, and mom would always sigh and hug me and continue her reassuring platitudes. I pretended not to be scared.

It was the first time in my life I can remember mom’s reassurance not working. In years past, she talked me out of the fear of monsters in my closet, being sucked down the drain at bath time, and the rumor that eating school lunch would give me warts. But this time was different.

It got so bad my father had a talk with me. I figured finally I’d get an answer from him, but instead of being comforting and reassuring, he was stern. He told me things like, “there is nothing wrong with your mother! Stop being afraid of her! Nothing’s different about her. She’s just fine.”

“But... but... Her spine is showing,” I said.

“So what?”

“Isn’t it... supposed to stay...”

“Stop this, son. It’s just your mother’s spine. She feels like a freak thanks to you. Now you go out there and give your mother a hug. Show her you still love her.”

I walked back out to the living room and gave her a hug. She embraced me in return. “I love you, mom,” I said. I had never been more disgusted in my life.

I watched when company came over. They talked, laughed, drank and didn’t seem to notice mom’s spine. I felt like I was doing something wrong for reacting the way I was. It took months, but I finally accepted this part of my mother. By then I barely noticed it, and life returned to normal.

I think it was around the year 2002, or maybe 3. I was around my mother all the time, every day, so I never really looked at her. Then, for the first time in two years, I noticed mom. I saw her from the back, so she couldn’t see me staring.

Her spine was not just a single vertebra sticking out. I counted eight of them hanging from her ear like a skeleton worm. She kept it braided with her hair to conceal it. Her ear canal was swollen and red from being stretched out. One vertebra was lodged in her ear now, like a baby’s head in the birth canal trying to work free. I turned around and bolted out the door before mom knew I was there.

I wanted to ask mom about it, but I was afraid I’d get in trouble again. Just a week later that stuck vertebrae popped loose, and the thing grew another two inches overnight. Day by day I watched it getting longer.

Mom began to stand funny. I didn’t remember her standing with that hunch before, but as the spine grew longer, her hunch became more pronounced. By 2006 the spine had grown so long she couldn’t conceal it by braiding it behind her head anymore. She had to let it down. It dangled freely by her elbow. She couldn’t stand straight anymore; she leaned on the side opposite the dangling spine, which only drew more attention to it.

2007. My birthday. Mom was setting my birthday cake on the table for my 13th year. Not only did her spine now dangle past her hips and she walked like a marionette with a broken string, but her left wrist had swollen to the size of a baseball. The first knuckles had disappeared into the swollen flesh.

She smiled at me. She kissed me. “I love you, son,” she said.

“Love you, too, mom,” I replied, as I always did.

The party went on as normal. All my friends had a great time. So did the adults. The kids never made fun of me because of my mother. My father still kissed her. Every few nights I heard moaning and heavy breathing through my bedroom wall.

2009. Her spine had grown all the way down to the floor. It dragged and left scratch marks on the concrete, or tile, or linoleum, or hardwood everywhere she went. She walked by swinging her whole body into each step, using her swollen hand as a counterweight for balance.

That year I noticed a second spine had been growing out of her other ear. It hung halfway down to the floor, so it must have been growing for years and I only just noticed it.

Her face had started sagging. In a matter of months, her cheeks hung down to her shoulders. The bags under her eyes had puffed out and dangled to where her cheeks should have been.

The flaps of skin under her arms were so vast she looked like a flying squirrel. Her breasts would touch the floor and drag right beside her spine, but she had tied them together in a knot, which she discreetly kept tucked into her blouse. I saw it out once. The knot hung to her knees.

Every day when I came home from school I’d find her in the kitchen, making dinner, singing and dancing to some tune on the stereo. She gave me a warm smile and a hug every day.

My father began teaching me to drive that year. I tried to ask him what was happening to mom, but every time I asked he looked at me like I just asked why the sky was blue.

“What do you mean what’s happening to her? Nothing’s happening to her.”

“Something is. She’s getting worse.”

“Your mother is perfectly healthy, son. Stop treating her like she’s diseased.”

In 2010 I turned 16 and got my license and my very own clunker. I made every excuse I could to get out of the house. I stayed at friends’ houses, or overnight with girlfriends just so I wouldn’t have to go home and see my mother. This continued until the day I graduated high school.

When college day came, mom and dad insisted I live at home to save money, but I wanted to live on campus. Of course I told mom and dad it was just time for me to get out in the world, see what’s out there, and they bought the excuse. I promised I’d visit often, but I went months at a time without seeing them. I always said I was swamped with schoolwork and couldn’t make it out of town, and they bought that, too.

During a six-month stretch without leaving campus, my classmates asked me why I never left. Didn’t I have someplace to go? Family? Other friends? It was at a dorm party, and I told the truth. “I can’t stand to see my mother.”

“Why?” asked my girlfriend, Miranda.

I rattled off the list of all the things that had happened to her over the years and concluded with, “and I can’t watch it happen.”

Miranda threw a fit. “That’s how you treat your mother?! For God’s sake, you heartless asshole! Your mom needs to know you love her, and you’re not helping treating her like this!”

So I went to see her. It was the spring of 2013. I took Miranda with me. As soon as we walked in the door, Miranda ran up to my mother and hugged her.

My mother’s spines had grown even longer. Mom had slipped both of them into long tube socks to keep them from scraping the floor. One sock was red, the other was green. She looked like a clown from hell.

Her wrists had swollen to the size of grapefruits, her fingers disappearing up to the second knuckle. Her fingers didn’t move; they were just limp nubs with fingernails poking out of solid, swollen flesh.

Her skin was so baggy it wasn’t attached anymore. It moved freely, like an old stuffed blanket without interior stitching and the insides just clump in one corner. Her facial skin had migrated to her back, and her stomach skin was now where her face was. A fleshy hood covering her skull.

“Oh, son, it’s been so long.” Her jaws moved under her skin but there was no mouth to move. No eyes to look at me. She held her arms out, grapefruit balls beckoning me to embrace her skin flaps. I stood at the door.

Miranda kissed my mother and held her, brushing one of my mother’s spines out of the way as though it were a stray lock of hair. I screamed, turned around, bolted to the car, jumped in and peeled away.

That night my father called and yelled at my voicemail.

“Ungrateful bastard! That was your MOTHER! You come back here and apologize to her right now!”

He called three more times, each time slightly calmer.

Two days later mom called and left a message. “Son. Your father doesn’t know I’m calling. He doesn’t want me to. He wants you to be the one to call, but I can’t do that. I want to hear your voice. I know you’ve been afraid of me since you were little. I don’t understand why you don’t want to see me now, but you don’t have to explain. Please, son. I’m your mother. Call me back.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t visit. I didn’t even call Miranda again. I figured she wouldn’t want to see me again. After the messages stopped and I lost the memory of that night in my studies, I realized the major I had chosen. I had been asleep until the year 2013, and I finally understood why I chose biology.

Feverishly I studied, looking for clues, names, conditions, ailments that matched my mother’s. I asked professors, but they only told me what everyone else had told me all my life. Books and articles and history were the only places I could ask my questions and not be shot down or berated.

When money ran tight, I got work. When the car broke down, I asked friends for help. When I was hungry and had no money, I went without food. I did everything to stay financially independent so I wouldn’t have to go home and ask my parents for help. Finally I graduated, and I took a job out of state.

In 2017 I received an envelope in the mail. Inside were pictures of my mom and dad. Her spines were twice as long as her body now. Her skin had apparently been rotated back to its rightful place, but it hung so loose I couldn’t discern any body parts at all. She was now a hunched blob of soggy flesh. Her legs and arms were hidden under the folds of skin so loose she was unable to wear clothing now. I vomited.

Enclosed was a letter, written by hand. Mom updated me on how things had gone over the last few years. Father’s health deteriorated. They retired a while ago. She couldn’t move around very much these days.

I was supposed to feel pity and sadness. I was supposed to miss my mother and be grateful for the outreach. Instead, I felt repulsion. I didn’t answer the letter. I didn’t call her back. I returned to my work.

I told no one in my profession about my mother. It became my secret. Even as I received awards and grants for my groundbreaking research, I lived in fear of my mother trying to contact me again. Fear of having to explain myself. Everything I achieved in my short life would be negated if anyone found out.

Then in 2021, my father called. I had a feeling I shouldn’t let voicemail get it this time, so I picked up.

“Son...” He paused for a solid minute. “Your mother is dying.”

“Oh God.”

“Would you do her the honor of being there before she dies?”

What kind of person would I have been if I said no?

I was there the next day. She was on a hospital bed, hooked up to numerous machines. Her body was puffed up and squishy. She had no limbs anymore; my mother was a water balloon with eyes. The doctors told me her bones had lost cohesion, along with her bodily organs, and now everything was free floating inside her swollen body like a bowl of stew. She had grown another spine from her left eye socket. It hung to the floor with the other two. Her bowels had apparently relocated themselves to her mouth. The sphincter was closed. I hoped it would never open.

She saw me. Her eye lit up. Her mouth opened as if to cry out to me. Instead, she defecated on her chin.

I cried. I had avoided this for years and years, hoping I would never have to see it progress any further, and now here she was. My mother. Staring at me. She loved me and wanted to know I loved her. I bent down and embraced her.

“I love you, mom,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” I squeezed. The liquid inside shifted around. Bones bounced around, organs swirled and floated to a rest.

I wretched all over her. I turned away of course, but it was too late. She was covered.

Alarms went off. Doctors pulled me off and went to work on her. In minutes she was dead. She died looking straight at me, her remaining eye pleading “why, son?”

I asked my father again what happened to her.

“You’ve been whining about your mom being sick since the day you could talk!” he screamed. “She had to live every day rejected by her only son! She lost her will to live when you left for college, and even on her deathbed you—!” He couldn’t finish the sentence. He squeezed his fists over and over. Finally he finished. “I never want to see you again.”

I wasn’t invited to mom’s funeral. In fact, I received a restraining order. So I went back home to be alone with my thoughts. Mom was dead, and I was happy not because it ended her suffering, but because it ended mine.

I never saw my father again. For all I know he’s still alive. I haven’t had the courage to try calling him. Nothing I can say to redeem myself. I wanted to tell my father that in spite of everything I still loved her, but I could never bring myself to make the call.

I had no reason to call him. I had ten years of happiness and freedom. No calls, no pictures, nobody asking me how my family was. Nothing to remind me of her.

Shortly after my 37th birthday I looked in the mirror. It was the first time I looked at myself in several years, and I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. A vertebra was growing out of my ear.

I ignored it. I let myself believe it would just stay put. Maybe I’d get lucky and it would never bother me or grow out or need a sock. For three weeks it just stayed there and then the pain started.

Of course I went to a doctor. I knew many medical doctors, a fringe benefit of my profession, and in the last ten years, I became very close with one of them, doctor Yasier. I told him what was happening and what happened to my mother and that I wanted to know what this was. By now two vertebrae were completely exposed and a third was pushing through my ear canal.

“It’s just your spine,” said my friend.

“Just my spine?” I answered. “Are you sure? This isn’t unusual?”

“As far as I can tell, no, it’s a perfectly healthy piece of spinal column.”

“Can it be removed?”

“Removed?” Doctor Yasier did a double-take as if I had just said something that turned his entire worldview upside down.

“Yes, I want it removed, can you remove it?!”

“Uh... you have to understand there’s no medical reason to remove it. It’s not hurting anything, it doesn’t appear to be related to any disease. I can’t recommend removing a piece of your spine.”

“Nobody else’s spine does this!” I yelled. I surprised myself, yelling at my best friend. “This can’t be normal get it out of me!”

“But it’s happening to yours. Every body is different, and your body is just doing its thing. I wouldn’t worry about it unless it starts interfering with everyday activities.” He was so calm. So disarming.

I walked out of his exam room pretending to be content with his professional opinion. I ignored the spine for another month. I ignored the third segment when it popped free. I ignored the fourth and fifth and sixth segments as my ear birthed them.

I went back to doctor Yasier’s office under the pretense of a regular checkup. I half-hoped he would notice the spine growing out of my ear, see that it was getting worse and change his mind, but he didn’t even look at it until I brought it up.

“See my spine?” I said, pointing to my ear. “It grew.”

“I see that,” he said. “And it’s looking very healthy.” Then he chuckled. “And you wanted to remove it.”

I laughed with him. Then I told him it was pretty painful dealing with the pain as each segment came out of my ear. He prescribed some potent painkillers for me to take—but only on my bad days, he said.

I went to the store and bought a hacksaw. Then I downed half the bottle of narcotics. For the first time, I touched my spine. Until that day I clung to the hope that if I refused to believe in it, this extra spine would go away. Touching it made it much too real. I waited until I was nice and loopy, laid my head on the table, gripped the spine at the segments closest to the ear, and sawed.

The painkillers worked better than I expected. The plan worked better than I expected. I figured the pain would be too much for even this medicine to block, but I barely felt a thing, and it only took eleven slices to cut through it. When my head raised from the table and I looked at myself in the mirror, I smiled. I had just enough presence of mind to call an ambulance.

I woke up on a hospital bed two days later. Doctor Yasier was there. All he did was shake his head and walk out the door. I never heard from him again, and he refused me as a patient from then on. He must have told the attending physicians about my mother, for the doctors and nurses started looking at me differently. Before, I was an award-winning researcher. Now they saw me for who I was, but I didn’t care. I stopped it. I did what my mother never could, and now that I knew it was possible to prevent it, I was happy.

In 2040 my hand started swelling. I bought water pills, and they helped, but I wanted to know what was actually happening. I went to a different doctor, one who didn’t know me at all, doctor Sola. She told me it was excess fluid building up, and I asked for surgery.

“It doesn’t need to be removed,” she said. “It’s just the body doing what it normally does.”

I didn’t argue. I pretended to be reassured and left her office. Syringes were part of my lab equipment, so I had plenty of them lying around. I taught myself how to drain a cyst. I experimented on myself, and I removed the fluid.

I held up my hand as I discarded the needle. It was normal sized and I could move my fingers again. I smiled. I laughed. I fought back. I stopped it. Then I noticed weight hanging from my ear. I reached up and felt it. The spine was back—four segments were out. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed.

From then on I was more vigilant. I checked myself weekly, took photos, took measurements, plotted them on graphs, determined to find patterns. By 2043 I had drained my hands dozens of times and figured out how to keep my spine trimmed without overdosing on narcotics. It became routine.

That year a second spine began growing from my other ear. I panicked. I know I did, because I remember taking measurements and photos for hours at a time. I canceled appointments and speeches and seminars to focus on my own body. Weeks passed like this, and I watched them grow. As they grew, so did my hands. When I determined there was nothing new to learn, I grabbed the syringes and the saw again.

Monthly checks weren’t enough anymore. I was checking myself every day. The spines were visibly longer, and both my hands were visibly larger every day—no more slight nudges in numbers confirming their growth. Trimming the spines and draining the hands became a weekly ritual, but it worked. It was working. I was winning.

2044 rolled around and I noticed my skin was loose. I could grab the flesh on my bicep and rotate it around to my tricep, let go, and it would stay there. That’s when I hired a personal trainer, bought gym equipment and twice a week learned how to exercise. I told my trainer never to let me give up or quit. Often it was he who had to keep up with me.

After only a few months of weightlifting, my skin stayed firm and attached. The new diet worked wonders for my body as well. I ate foods high in nutrients that were good for the skin and muscles. I drank milk and ate calcium constantly to keep my bones from deteriorating.

A few years went by like this. I kept the spines short, the hands deflated, the skin toned and stationary. Some of the happiest years of my life, both personally and professionally. My work had made me very rich, and now at last I had taken control of my body.

But the spines were growing faster and faster. By 2048 I was trimming them every couple of days. I was draining my hands every day. I was in the gym every day—it was taking more and more exercise just to keep my skin in place.

I resorted to cosmetic surgery. People called me vain. People called me outrageous, squandering my wealth on my body, but I didn’t notice. I had created the routine years ago, committed to following it, and I subconsciously kept up with it as the pace quickened.

Every day I checked myself for signs. Pretty soon I was doing it every few hours because I noticed changes. Areas where the plastic surgery failed and the skin was loose. Patches where fluid was building up—by now I was draining fluid from every part of my body.

By 2052 I never left the house. Keeping up with the spine cutting and fluid draining and exercise had become my full-time job. It reached this point just in time for me to retire. I took up jogging, but as the weeks went by I could feel my ankles turning to mush. I kept the fluid drained, but draining the fluid only made me look like a deflated balloon.

I panicked for an entire year keeping up with it all. I pushed myself to the limit, I ate nothing but good food, I kept my body as active as possible, I took care of myself, I cut the spines daily, and the more I worked out, the more fluid built up.

Finally the fluid built up so quickly it happened during my exercise. I was to the point of stopping the workouts halfway through to drain my joints. It escalated to stopping after every set. By the time I couldn’t perform a single rep without fluid pooling into the muscle, my bones started to break apart.

Doctors restored the broken bone, but during that time I wasn’t working out and the fluid was free to accumulate. I begged the doctors to drain it, but they refused. When I got out of the hospital I drained myself, but just minutes after the fluid was out of me, it came back. I could sit on the couch and watch myself swell up.

I tried working out, but more bones broke. Fluid pooled in the cavities they left behind—fluid I couldn’t drain easily. I tried jogging, but my legs wouldn’t support my weight anymore. I kept up with the diet even as my skin separated and started migrating.

A few minutes ago I was on the couch. A pile of needles was next to me, all full. I had stuck myself in the chest. I pulled out a syringe full of fluid. My body didn’t deflate at all. The area simply refilled. As I tossed the needle into the pile, the skin on my arm sagged and flapped like fleshy wings. They were filling up with fluid, too.

I sagged in defeat. I got up, walked through the house, taking stock of the life I had created. Walking was difficult these days as the bones in my ankles were only just barely cohesive. Doctors estimated in a few months they would dissolve into the soup my body was becoming, and I would be helpless.

I paused at the gym and looked around at the exercise equipment, all unused for months. I looked at the wall, noticed what was missing, and slowly shuffled to it. I had the mirror wallpapered years ago, and now I knew why. The same reason I left home and didn’t visit my parents. I tore a strip of wallpaper down.

Now I’m staring at myself in a full-length mirror for the first time in many years. I don’t see myself. I see her. I see mother. She’s staring at me, skin swollen and falling, spines dragging on the floor because she was willing to settle down and accept what was happening to her.

I wasn’t. I was better than her. I took care of myself. I tried to stop it and I held it off for years. Now I’m 60 years old. I’m retired. I was in good health all my life. Doctors told me nothing was wrong with me but here I am swelling like a skin balloon, organs and bones dissolving into soup, and a biting pain behind one eye that is the signal a third spinal shoot is about to emerge.

“You did this to me...” I whisper. It feels good. I say it again. “You did this to me!” I repeat it again and again until finally I’m screaming it.

“You did this to me, mom! I hated you! I hated your touch! I hated your kisses! I hated looking at you! I hated your squishy, sweaty hugs and I hated saying I LOVE YOU!”

My voice cracks. I don’t care. I keep screaming.

“It’s because of you I’m like this! I don’t love you! I never did! I wish you weren’t dead so I could tell you this! I want you to know how much it hurt me to watch it happen!”

I reach out with a puffy fist and smash the mirror. Shards slice my hand open. Another slices my stomach. My fluid rushes forth. The skin bursts apart. My loose insides flow out with the fluid. As my body drains from my skin, I sink to the floor.

I finally told the truth. I know mom didn’t want to hear it, but I had to confess. Now I’m free. My hate saved me from dying as she did. I take comfort in that.