I Hate My Body - A Short Story

 It has been almost a year since I've finished a short story. I've started a few in that time but neglected to finish any of them, maybe because I didn't actually end up liking the story or lost all faith in my ability to write it, or I simply succumbed to my perpetual battle with apathy and numbness and simply abandoned them due to a lack of effort. Whatever the case may be, I'll try to return to those eventually. This story in particular sort of came from nowhere and nothing. I'm not sure what inspired it outside of the song I was listening to while I first started writing it. Still, I suppose it shares aesthetic and thematic similarities with virtually everything else I write. The character's name and a part of his inner dilemma are the same as one of the main characters from the novel I started working on early last year and then abandoned as well...so, the following could very well be used towards that eventually. If not, then it will be left alone as a stand-alone short story about nothing but nightmare nonsense. The title of the story is taken from the song that inspired it, and it is a sentiment I feel to a profoundly powerful degree. Make of that what you will. 

And don't ask me what any of this means, I lost my mind trying to write this story. 

I Hate My Body 

There were crimson-colored tinsel cascading from the porous, yellowed ceiling. Likely discolored from a combination of age, lack of maintenance, water damage, and a profound amount of cigarette smoke that clung to the top of the auditorium like spectral sheets of rancid fog. Uncanny, dissonant music was thumping through the crumbling walls, blaring out of massive marshall stacks perched unevenly at the very edge of the cheap, pinewood stage. 

There was no DJ.

There was no band. 

No one knew the source of the sounds warbling and rumbling through the stilted, strange atmosphere in vicious cycles of pounding repetition. And no one seemed to care. The bass blanketing the background of the track only got louder, followed by hammered dulcimers screeching and reverberating in obscene volumes, seemingly ready to burst forth from the mesh of the speakers and devour the hapless crowd. The maddening noise shook the inexplicably polished floor, reflecting the sallow, lifeless faces of the uneasily swaying audience, warping their reflection as it subtly heaved up and down. It distorted their features beyond the original distortion they already all carried with them when they first entered, plastered over their lightless faces. A distortion bred and bruised onto them from the beginning, fatally without their knowledge or consent. Born half-formed, malformed, disfigured, chemically altered, drug-addicted, and rejected. Some were born formless, rising out of the oceanic depths of depraved, poisoned gene pools with no one to claim them; oscillating in the napalm atmosphere until scarred flesh, broken bones, and hastily stapled gauze finally swirled around their growing pustules that carried unique strains of infection anticipating a physical body to transform with disease. Now they all filled this perverse, uneasy auditorium, sluicing into each other as they swayed and rhythmically convulsed unendingly to the impossibly alien, sourceless music. 

-

Anthony woke up in to this unfamiliar setting, wearing a frayed and heavily stained suit that he definitely did not own. It hung off of him like degloved flesh, clearly a few sizes too big. His hair was longer than he remembered, weighing down his dizzy head and trapping sweat to the back of his neck. Running his hands through it, clumps of hair fell around his feet as he uncontrollably moved through the crowd. Some tiny wisp of a voice deep within his stomach, rising up his throat, and invading his brain, told him that someone within the crowd was his torturer. Someone within this sea of beautiful disfigurement was the dreamer of this landscape, a beacon of shapeshifting darkness that dragged Anthony into this chaos to either reveal or foretell something he already feared. But that was just a nagging suspicion, it could, after all, simply be a hypnagogic landscape with no purpose other than to give his subconscious room to operate unrestricted. 

Conversely, there was the other possibility, the one that he feared the most when it came to every single one of his dreams; everything he was seeing and experiencing was real. That unbeknownst to him, he was trapped in a kind of fugue state being guided through some sort of pocket of reality that only existed to the few; to the diseased, the deranged, the dejected, and the inhuman. Anthony, already struggling with identifying where exactly the line between his humanity and his suspected alien monstrosity lay, knew that at any point every single one of his dreams could be revealed to him to all be true. The nightmares he has long suffered from, reoccurring and gaining intensity with age, all trying to show him one truth; his existence was an accidental result of unspeakably horrific otherworldly forces, dooming him to slowly transform into the shadowy, bloodless, violent creature that occupied every single one of his prophetic nightmares since birth. In the end, there was no control. Anthony was born doomed.

He looked down at his lapel, a seemingly simple movement that required tremendous effort at this moment - as if he was pushing against an invisible possessive force that held his head rigid and upright with thickly barbed puppet strings. The paper name tag he locked eyes on was stitched through his lapel, through his sweat-stained undershirt, and weaved tightly through his flesh. Anthony tugged at it but gave up the second he felt the stitches loosen with the newfound fear that the name tag stitched into him was the only reason his current form was capable of being held together at all. Though upside down, Anthony read the nametag out loud, “David Bunting”. The name hung in space for a moment before his nametag flashed with impossible green light and pulsated like a throbbing jugular vein ready to be sliced. Written there was his father’s name, which now echoed through the ghastly auditorium filled with malformed, helplessly swaying, expressionless patrons perfectly in tandem with the ear-shattering, room-shaking, floor-crumbling music. Whatever was contained in that loathsome name surged through the crowd, seemingly causing certain deformed dancers to drop to the floor, one-by-one, cracking open their squishy skulls on impact. 

Anthony glided through the room without so much as moving his feet, following whatever wave of mutilating momentum that was created by the sonically punishing music. But as soon as he got closer to the epicenter of the undulating pit of disfigurement, the music stopped. Cut short to nothingness and silence, without a warning, without a proper fade-out, the room held in an uneasy, kinetic space - floating in anticipation for whatever was next. Anthony stared forward at the abrupt stillness of the crowd, all of their heads turned away from him towards the empty stage. The back of their heads shifted and jittered in spastic movements, covered in heavy static. And just as suddenly as the last track stopped, the next track started, filtering from nowhere. 

Much quieter and less chaotic than the last “song”, this new one started up slow, with a gradually building rhythmic thumping of bass and drums followed by strange sidereal glitching electronic noises blanketing the background of the track. The cheap fluorescent light tubes flickered and buzzed, occasionally casting the entire scene in impenetrable shadows where only the blood-colored rain of dazzling tinsel could be seen. 

A voice filtered in as the track progressed in hypnotic repetition. A whisper at first, repeated at odd, unpredictable intervals;

“Your smile is ugly

And 

I hate my body.”

Each word hung in the air like an engorged leech, intensifying the atmosphere to further and stranger degrees of fevered, almost animalistic, anticipation. Anthony felt every repeated word surge through him as if it was replacing his empty veins, all the while his sense of being in the presence of the architect of this entire scenario rose to the point of consuming paranoia. It felt like the crowd was a dense, endless forest where, somewhere at an undisclosed distance, Anthony’s predator lay in wait for their opportunity not just to attack and kill him, but to utterly annihilate and obliterate the very fabric of his existence. Something was awaiting the perfect time to weasel their way into Anthony’s head and gnaw away unendingly at his weakened, sickened brain until the last ounce of control he had would be taken away, the skies making up his horizon would disintegrate and drop, and he would awake into a new dawn composed of a great sprawling sea of nothingness, isolation, and total lose of humanity. 

“I hate my body.”

Anthony continued to be pushed closer and closer to the stage by some invisible, likely malicious force. The stage in question rose above the sea of shifting, shivering, featureless heads and began to wobble and ripple as if it was trying and failing to take on some new form amid the corrupting, intoxicatingly strange atmosphere. He took a deep, raspy breath, his lungs sucking in all the colors oscillating in the flickering darkness. All the shapeless, quivering masses closed in, dancing in odd, jittery movements as some figures continued to collapse, crash to the floor with a fleshy smack, dry bone cracking, and the sounds of darkened liquid rushing out as they hemorrhaged and writhed. Anthony looked down at one of the dancers after they collided with the floor. And although their face was pressed up hard against the ground, he heard their voice clearly and loudly over the chaotic din of the music. A voice that sounded far too similar to his own, filtering in through his ears and assaulting his already fragile brain; 

“My love for you will never end.” 

He stared down at the mass on the floor as more bodies fell around him. The cracks in their skulls spilled forth not blood, but instead a star-speckled twilight pool that oozed out of them in thick, lumpy waves and spread around his feet, rising into the air and causing an unknown threshold or consuming void to swirl above all of their emotionless, vacant heads. A vision came forth from this as the song surged in volume and the singer’s stilted, pained voice rained down in a permeating mist of madness;

“I hate my body.

And I hate my body.

And I hate my body.

And I hate my - “

A cloud of light, twisting onto itself like a broken bone, pulled Anthony in closer only to unfold in front of him and explode. Out of the sparks of phantasmal light came a vision of Victoria. Her eyes swollen and red with tears, her breath heavy and struggling, his arms covered in deep, bloodless lacerations extending to grasp her trembling shoulders. 

“My love for you will never end. I can’t let you go.” 

She wipes away her dark brown hair, matted to her forehead from sweat and tears. Her expression is that of confusion and fright, lips quivering and eyes vacant in heavy dissociation. And without her mouth parting at all, Anthony swore he heard, as loud and clear as if it were a part of the thumping, cacophonous song; 

“Please know, I don’t feel any anger or hatred at all.”

Anthony, with his mutilated arms, skin hanging loose from the pale opened wounds, tries to bring her close for a hug. But Victoria appears terrified and pushes him away. The light begins to fade, the vision of her dissipating, her voice clear once more and synched up with the music as she says to him;

“Your smile is ugly.”

She’s gone. The vision faded, Anthony back in the dream and in place of her, he is face-to-face with one of the dancers in the crowd. Rigid and still, except for their head which was a gaping wound of dazzling darkness and a toothless gaping maw hanging loose from their unhinged jaw. The surrounding skin was porcelain white, their eyes were gone, and the whole ugly nub of a head vibrated and shook rapidly with static and incomprehensibly alien noises. And like the rest, it dropped hard against the floor and leaked out its void fluids that joined the swirling cloud above. The rest of the fancily dressed, puppeteered, void-leaking corpses fell away and made a direct path forward to the stage for Anthony. The rising wooden stage in front of him was now a reflective black surface that seemed to breathe and drip with tar-like bodily fluids. Perched on top, pulsating and squirming and emitting guttural sounds like a horrifically dying animal drowning in their own blood, was a massive, porous, and course egg-like lump. It was covered in a mucous-like sheen and clearly heavy with pregnancy. 

The speakers of the stage melted into nothingness as Anthony, in a frightened trance, moved closer to the creature on the stage. One last bout of sonic mayhem launched into the air with violins screeching, piano keys being smashed, metallic tubes crashing into each other, jet turbines whirring and screaming into explosive crescendos, and the singer belting out underneath a deafening death rattle, 

“I hate my body!” 

Then church bells and high-pitched drones oozed out of the egg-like creature as the room spun, the audience behind Anthony picked themselves up one by one like marionettes collapsing in reverse, and something cleaved its way out in a mind-shredding, incinerating birth. 

Anthony reached his hand out and pulled out a still-forming shadow that plopped off the stage and landed at his feet. His name tag fell off of him, his stitches came undone, and he felt his flesh melt away into the amniotic, wailing shadow unforming on the floor. The dancers started up their dancing once more, now underneath the twinkling, twilight abyss careening above them, consuming the atmosphere, as Anthony lost himself in the unseen creation birthed from his nightmares. He heard the voice of his love, Victoria, screaming for help and crying his name in terror, he saw himself transforming into something hideously inhuman and strange, and he saw visions of great stone mouths rising out of the earth to spill forth the fated violent end of his miserable, sordid little life. 

Lastly, he saw his old self embracing Victoria on a rusted hospital bed left on a hill of dead trees and darkened grass. A milky, dripping full moon fell above them as they escaped into each other in beautiful, loving silence. Then a flash, and he was alone - uttering to himself over and over again under an uncontrollable fit of tears; 

“I hate my body, I hate my body, I hate my body, I hate my body.”

-

The void ate away at everything, sucked it all back into the disgustingly pregnant creature left on the stage, trapped in the nightmare auditorium isolated in a pocket of fragmented reality. The dancers, with their gummy, shivering, malformed heads, danced on in pairs into shadowy oblivion. 

Anthony woke up on the floor of his room with his body twisted in a knot, tissues covered in dried blood all around him, his stereo smashed in electrical sparks, music trapped in a loop. All alone in the scintillating darkness with a rusted box cutter in his scarred hand, slashing away endlessly, mutilating himself in frantic, possessive fits looking for evidence of his humanity as the broken music droned on and on unendingly. His night was only just beginning. 

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