BLINK: By William Pauley, III
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009Lisa Gale. Age eighteen. Captain of the senior varsity volleyball team. She had the body that every boy, man and woman wanted and she knew it, too.
After every practice, Lisa would strip the clothing from her body, sometimes pulling her top off, just before she’d enter the locker room, to give the boys in the bleachers a little show.
Lisa loved her body and damn near everyone else who saw it loved it, too.
But, as we’ve all been told before, most things are not as they seem. Lisa’s body is one of those things.
One night, just after practice, Lisa tossed her sweaty clothes in a pile in front of her locker, just as she had always done before. But this time, she noticed a faint pain pulsating in her left breast. She walked over to the mirror to check it out. Kneading her fingers along the pain lines, she tried to massage the ache away. It seemed to work. She walked over to the shower, not giving her ailment a second thought.
She squeezed a quarter-sized amount of shampoo into her left palm and gently worked it into her long blonde hair, wrapping the length of it atop her head in a swirl, making sure that she had cleansed every inch of it.
She had her back to the showerhead. She had always had a phobia of being splashed in the face with water. It made her feel somewhat claustrophobic, as if she were unable to breathe. She stepped back into the stream of hot water to rinse the lathered shampoo from her hair, but stepped back about an inch too far. A torrent of water collided with her forehead and branched off into four tiny streams. The water flowed over her eyes, blinding her - panic began to set in.
She shook her hands violently in the air, desperately trying to dry them so that she could clear the water from her eyes. In the process, she thumped a few of her fingers on the tile wall.
She opened her eyes.
That was when she saw it.
Looking straight up at her now was an eyeball, burrowed into her left breast and peaking out from a flap of skin where her nipple should have been.
She screamed, as any right-minded person would. But when she opened her eyes again, her nipple had returned and the eyeball was gone.
Nervously, she used her thumb and index finger from her left hand to try and pry the nipple open again, like an eyelid. The areola spread apart, revealing the anomalous eyeball underneath. The flesh strained and forced itself closed once more.
Panicking now, Lisa grabbed a hold of her left breast with both of her hands and squeezed with all of her might. Her nipple swelled and slowly parted as the eyeball began to surface. She then placed her right hand directly behind the anomaly and gave her nipple a taut pinch. Tiny red veins began to appear around the white of the orb, like little baby spiders emerging from their nests.
PLOP. The eyeball slopped out and rolled gradually to the drain. A tear of blood leaked from the tip of her nipple and traced down her abdomen, finally fading into the water.
Not wasting a second, Lisa checked her right breast and, sure enough, there was another eyeball roosting inside.
She squeezed her right breast, just as she had the left, but this eyeball was quite stubborn, it refused to budge from its nest. She pried back the skin of her nipple and dug her fingers deep into the socket. She discovered that the eyeball was trying to root itself into her through muscle and vein. She severed all connections with a pinch of her fingernails. She ripped the second eyeball from her breast and hurled it to the concrete shower floor below. The water collecting around the drain was tinged pink with her blood.
The two eyeballs were now looking up at her from the shower drain. She shrieked and stomped them down the pipe with her right foot, gooey bits of eye-flesh seeped up through each of her toes, until it looked as if she was wearing one of those white toe-separators the beauticians would use whenever she would get her pedicures.
She ran out of the shower and back into the locker room, trying to dry herself off, get dressed and get home as quickly as possible.
As she dried off her legs, the lips from between her thighs began to growl.
©2009 William Pauley, III
WILLIAM PAULEY III is an author of weird fiction living in Kentucky. He has been published in print and electronic publications in both the US and the UK and is the the editor of THE NEW FLESH blogzine: http://newfleshmagazine.blogspot.com
He also recently co-edited an anthology, with Brian Barnett, entitled “TOE TAGS”, featuring 21 spine-tingling stories from the best new authors of horror. It is available for purchase on Amazon.com
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See my interview with William Pauley, III here:
http://flashesinthedark.com/2009/09/13/sunday-special-william-pauley-iiis-livin-hell
