She giggled as she walked before me down the hall, her bright curls bouncing down her back, her bare feet patting quietly against the wooden floors. We reached our room and she exploded onto her beanbag, laughing riotously.

“He kissed me!” She breathed, the words barely audible against the chair. I watched her roll back and forth, kicking her legs up excitedly. She hugged herself and looked up at me.

“Oh. You think it was too soon, don’t you?” I said nothing, curling my legs under me to sit beside her. She sniffed. “It was… perfectly timed. I knew it would happen tonight.”

I picked at the shedding rug beneath my legs. Bundles of fibers came away at my touch. They always did this. It was her rug, she brought it, and its primary role was spreading its fur throughout the room.

“It’s been rough since my last breakup…” She says thoughtfully, extending a single leg towards the air. Her face is pensive, distant, like a man reflecting over his journey home from prison. The hard lines on her face could carve sandstone.

I collected rug-fibers from the ground, compacted them together. I created a pretty sizable fur-ball. It looked like a tiny owl pellet.

“I needed this.”

I flipped my rug-owl-pellet around in my fingers, noticing that long strands of bright hair kept it bound together. I looked over at her, watched the hair splay around her head and pool on the floor. I set the pellet down carefully in our pristine trash can. She was looking at me again.

“Can I be honest?” She went on in the same breath. “I’m shocked it took him so long. He’s wanted me since last year.”

I raked my nails through the carpet, watching how they leave neat lines in their wake. I feel like a farmer plating lines of crops. I imagine myself living in a small town as a farmer. I image the townsfolk in the surrounding areas turning to me for food. They need me so much to survive – their very lives are in my hands. I imagine leaving them – driving away, staring at the betrayed face of a starving young girl in my rear-view mirror.

“He’s been waiting at the periphery of my life for ages. All those little gazes…” She sits up finally, begins to talk with her hands. “We were never ‘friends’. He knew what he wanted from the start.” She twirls her index finger around in the air. “Never a gender-neutral conversation.”

I now begin to draw designs in the rug. My illustrations came at the same speed as her narration. Her voice filled the air, my ears, discordant and dishonest and both without meaning to. Under my hands, figures were drawn. Bold, humanoid figures with no expressions. I erased them with a pass of my palm, drew again. A flower this time. Six petals. I looked at it for a moment and after some consideration, drew a pot leaf next to it.

“It was like he bookmarked me. He knew I was special. Since our first conversation, I’m sure, but the real changing point was during our last class together.” Her lashes dipped down to touch her cheek as she closed her eyes, dipping her head back. “He was quiet. He always was. Isn’t that always the way? You can’t be attractive and substantive. If it wasn’t for me he wouldn’t have said anything – waited until we both had graduated and kids to tell me he was attracted to me.”

I proceeded to lay my body out on the floor. Moved by forces outside myself, I arched my prone body into odd sharp angles, extending my legs and spreading my fingers to grasp the ground. My fingernails broke and bled under the force with which I scrabbled at the earth. I writhed, bones creaking and snapping as I thrashed on the floor. She had pulled all her hair in front of her face and was speaking through it, her voice vaguely muffled, but not enough.

“He always stared at me when I spoke during our speech class. Thought he was being sneaky at first, but I’m perceptive. So of course I bring this up to him – if you’re not going to buy anything, why go shopping?” She huffed out a breath, thinking of all the half-assed boys in her life who have wanted her, but never done anything about it. How she was always there, always aware of their attention and waiting for her suitors. How she conceded that they did have cause to stare, but at least have the moral decency to admit this and make her an honest woman. “I approached him and told him that yes, he could take me out.”

My jaw flapped open and shut, creating a series of awful, boney staccato sounds. I could feel my bones grinding together uselessly, unable to become the tools that I had used them as – now they existed merely as a means of causing me pain. My left leg shot off the floor and my kneecap shattered backwards. Distantly, I felt the tops on my toes touch the base of my torso.

“We mostly hung out at his place. He’s not as interesting as me, so we didn’t have much to talk about – we mostly watched movies. He had a Netflix account. He liked a lot a patriarchal thrillers, but he had a holistic understanding of how they were problematic, so there’s that at least.”

I screamed, looking down at my navel. The flesh of my stomach shook and turned red before my eyes. Visions of molten rock, cherry-red metals and volcanic eruptions filled my eyes. Through tearful eyes and a wall of shock, I watched a portion of my insides melt away. When my flesh cooled, I noticed the odd insignia that remained. It kept an odd red glint, and I felt the heat and the pain distantly. She continued to speak to me in the meanwhile.

“But after a while of just me in his room, looking at his gentle-but-dumb eyes, I knew it was time. Well – that’s tonight. Who would have guessed that we would be out at the same Co-op as him? The odds of this occurring must be very slim. I think it was meant to happen.” She looked up at the ceiling and sighed. She thought of how she protested when I suggested going out tonight. She thought of the bottled up words about my work ethic that very nearly slipped out. She thought about how I had been out nearly every weekend since school began, but she very much deserved a night off. “But then – the two of you are very similar, huh? In the way that you both tend to goof off – well, often. I guess him being there wasn’t that special.”

I felt my tongue scrambling out from behind my closed teeth, worming its way past my lips. I heard a wet pat as it fell from my face and hit the floor, in the same moment that blood began to well up in my mouth. It was at this point that I thought to ask for help. The broken, gurgling sound that escaped me wasn’t quiet. She went on.

“I’m just glad he wasn’t a coward, in the end. I’m intimidating to men – I can smell it on them when they’re afraid of me. It’s such an odd thing – after all, they’re attracted to strong women. Look at my ex – scared away by the very same attributes which once lured him in. Ha – I bet he thought I’d be ruined without him. I’m showing him, huh? I don’t even need to try, and they’ve got eyes all over me.”

She paused to laugh, and good timing, too – in this moment my head creaked back and my jaw locked into place. I resembled human origami, or some kind of organic blood fountain. Blood dripped down my chin still, heavy enough in flow that I could only manage successful breaths through my nose every once in a while. My vision dimmed.

“Listen, before you say anything – I know I’m out of his league. I’m very much aware, so you can stop holding your breath thinking ‘you’re settling, girl!’ because I can assure you that I am not. Certainly, I’m going to explore this wide world – but that doesn’t mean I’m buying property at every stop of the way, you know? Sometimes small towns are nice to stay the night in – not your whole life.”

From beneath the shedding rug I saw the tips of black claws emerge. She trailed off, fingertips massaging at her closed eyes, sighing deeply between every few words, as an entire monstrous hand surfaced from beneath me and wrapped around my torso. Everywhere it touched me burned. I screamed, but it was a barely audible series of strangled noises. I was being dragged, down down down. The fur around me swallowed me. It was up to my neck, now, god - so bristly and scratchy and suffocating. No longer fuzzy, no longer an irritant – a seas of needles that was consuming me. I felt the demon’s grasp of me like a leaden belt. I took a last gaping breath through my nose, and plunged beneath the surface. As I plunged ever-deeper into the heat, the pain, the suffering, a last series of vibrations touched my eardrum.

“And – she’s gone. I swear – she can never just pay attention to me for even five minutes.”