Bodies Are Disgusting by S. Gates Page A

floor with Lucien's fingers buried in the
flesh of your neck and one of his knees on your chest. You flail at
him weakly, but your arms feel boneless. He merely chuckles. "Oh my
sweet darling, what I would give to wear your skin right now," he
says, and wiggles his fingers in your neck. The tips of them stroke
the back of your trachea before ever-so-gently pressing on it. You
try to scream, and this time he lets you.
    * * *
    You jolt awake, your hands going for your
throat to verify there aren't actually holes there. You're still in
the coffee shop, but it's nearly empty. Your laptop sits in front
of you, the screensaver cycling through different soothing fractal
images you downloaded one morning after work. Simon's walking
toward you. "Ready to go?"
    Blinking at him owlishly, you nod. "Yeah. Uh,
just let me pack up. I kind of zoned out, I guess."
    He scowls at you. "No shit, Sherlock. You
barely said two words to Luke after he sat down. What the hell were
you reading, anyway?"
    Your mouth opens, but you realize with a
chilly sort of feeling that you don't even remember. With the flick
of a finger across your computer's track-pad, you dispel your
screen saver and glance at the last thing you left open.
    It's the thread you were following before
Lucien arrived, but there have been several more posts after the
final one you read. "Just... some dumb internet bullshit," you
hedge. "Sorry."
    Despite yourself, your eyes skim over some of
the new posts before you shut your browser down. One anonymous user
writes, "tracked ms's ip. dude's haus is on the other end of my
town. good samaritaned this bitch n called the cops. gonna see if
that shit makes news @ 11."
    The most recent post is dated approximately
ten minutes ago. "THE GIRL IS DEAD, ALICE. AND IF YOU ARE
IMPRUDENT, YOU MAY SOON JOIN HER. <3"
    On a lark one day in your youth, when you had
been feeling particularly frustrated with your legal name, you had
looked up how common it was. For over a century, it has been within
the top five hundred girls' names in the United States. It even
made a showing on the list of top thousand boys' names in the late
1800's. There are any number of people that the final anonymous
poster could be speaking to, or perhaps they simply picked a name
at random to try to unnerve anyone with that name.
    Yet, as you shut your laptop down and slide it
back into its carrying bag, you can't shake the weirdly persistent
worry that it might have been aimed at you.
    * * *
    That night is blissfully devoid of dreams, as
is the night that follows. In the interim, you open your mailbox to
find your first bill from the hospital (it contains more digits
than you particularly care to think about), flush the stragglers of
your codeine-laced painkillers, and get a much-needed haircut while
Simon makes a show of reading overly trashy Hollywood gossip mags
in the waiting area. He makes a similar show of looking bored while
you shop for a replacement phone.
    You bumble through your final appointment with
the neurologist for the next six months, surprising yourself by
remaining silent on the issue of your hallucinations; when you open
your mouth to try, the words stick in your throat and you simply
close your mouth again. The whole time, you toy with the silver
band on your finger. The neurologist scribes you a tentatively
clean bill of health, along with a note allowing you to operate a
motor vehicle at night and a forklift again. When you send JD a
text to let him know, his response is simply, "Good. Tomorrow,
6PM."
    And with that, life starts to feel normal. You
feel a pang of sadness every time you glance outside and don't see
your old car parked in the driveway, but the bruises are all mostly
progressing to the gross blotchy green-yellow phase that heralds
their inevitable fading away. It's getting easier and easier to
write off the wreck and ensuing days as a nasty
nightmare.
    Work is hard, and it makes you notice
contusions in places you hadn't realized you had