A Porous Symmetry

I got bit, by something. Don’t ask me what, idk either. It’s just two bumps. Right on the inside of my forearm. They’re perfectly round, angry red, and hot to the touch. I slapped some hydrocortisone on them and tried to ignore it, but by midnight, the itching had turned into a deep, maddening throb. I was sitting on the couch when my roommate, Sarah, walked in from the kitchen. She stopped dead in her tracks, a mug of tea halfway to her mouth. "Whoa," she said, squinting at my arm. "That looks nasty. Is it a spider bite?" "I don't know," I muttered, trying not to scratch. "It just showed up." She set her mug down and leaned in closer. Too close. I could smell her lavender shampoo. Her eyes narrowed, studying the twin bumps under the harsh light of the living room lamp. "It's weird," she said, her voice dropping an octave. "Look at the texture. It doesn't look like a normal bite." I didn't want to look. But I did. Under the light, the swelling had flattened out into a smooth, tight dome. And right in the center of each bump... there were holes. Dozens of them. Tiny, perfectly uniform pinpricks. They were clustered so tightly together that the skin between them looked like pale, stretched webbing. My stomach dropped. A cold, sickening wave of revulsion washed over me—that deep, primal urge to flay my own skin off. It looked like a tiny, fleshy honeycomb. Like a sea sponge. I jerked my arm away, pulling my sleeve down over it. "It's just a weird reaction to the bite," I said, swallowing hard. "It'll go away." Sarah didn't say anything. She just stared at my sleeve, her face unreadable. "Yeah," she finally said, backing away slowly. "Probably." I went to bed early, desperate to sleep it off. I lay in the dark, the sheet pulled up to my chin, trying to ignore the phantom sensation of air moving through those tiny tunnels in my arm. It was fine. I was fine. Then, around 3:00 AM, I woke up. The room was pitch black. My arm was resting on top of the blanket, and the itch was gone. Completely gone. Instead, there was a new sensation. A faint, rhythmic vibration against my skin. And then, I heard it. It was so quiet at first I thought it was the house settling. A dry, hollow sound. Like a fine-grit piece of sandpaper being rubbed softly against wood. Shhhh... shhhh... shhhh. I held my breath. The sound was coming from the foot of my bed. The moonlight was bleeding through the gap in my curtains. I lay perfectly still, my heart hammering against my ribs, as a silhouette slowly rose from the floor. Sarah. She was standing at the edge of my bed, perfectly still, looking down at me. Her head was tilted at an angle that looked deeply wrong, like a bird inspecting a worm. Shhhh... shhhh... shhhh. The sound was coming from her. No, wait. It was coming from her hands. She was rubbing her fingers together, over and over. "Sarah?" I whispered. My voice cracked. "What are you doing?" She didn't answer. She leaned forward, and the moonlight caught her face. Her eyes were wide open, unblinking. She wasn't looking at my face. She was staring at my sleeve—at the exact spot where the bumps were. "I couldn't sleep," Sarah whispered. Her voice sounded dry. Scratchy. Like her throat was full of dust. "I kept thinking about it. The way it looked. All those perfect little holes." I gripped the blanket. "Sarah, you're freaking me out. Go back to bed." She didn't move. But her hand reached out, her fingers hovering just above my covered arm. "I couldn't stop thinking," she continued, her voice dropping to a raspy breath, "about how they need air." I froze. "What?" "The holes," she said, her fingers grazing the fabric of my sleeve. Shhhh. "They're so deep. I could see straight through them. If you cover them up... how do they breathe?" She reached out and grabbed my wrist. I yanked my wrist away, stumbling back against the headboard. "Sarah, get away from me! What is wrong with you?" She didn't flinch. She just stood there, her eyes reflecting the moonlight, wide and unblinking. "Nothing's wrong," she whispered, her voice dry as dead leaves. "It's just... the holes. They're so deep. If you cover them up, how do they breathe?" My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat. I looked down at my arm. The moonlight hit the two bumps, and my stomach lurched. The swelling hadn't gone down. It had stretched. The skin was pulled so tight it looked like a thin layer of parchment over a dark, porous sponge. And the holes... there were more of them now. They were spreading. Pop. Pop. Pop. It was a wet, tearing sound. Tiny, perfect craters were blooming down my forearm in a symmetrical grid. They weren't just on the surface. The flesh was falling inward, creating deep, hollow tunnels that spiraled down into the meat of my arm. I couldn't breathe. The air was moving through them. I could feel a cold draft whistling through my radius and ulna, out the other side of my arm. I reached out to grab Sarah, to beg her to call an ambulance, to do something. But when my fingers closed around her wrist, she didn't pull away. She just smiled. And then I felt it. A hard, unnatural ridge under my fingertips. I looked down at her arm. In the pale light, I could see them. A perfect, symmetrical honeycomb of tiny, dark holes clustering up her pale skin, crawling up toward her elbow. "Sarah," I choked out, my voice breaking. "You... you have them too." She looked down at her own arm, then back at me. Her smile widened, stretching too far. "I know," she said softly. "I think they're lonely. They just wanted a bigger nest." She stepped closer, and the air from the tunnels in my arm met the air from the tunnels in hers. It was freezing. It was wrong. I tried to pull away, but my arm wouldn't move. The holes in my skin were pulsing, expanding, drinking in the stale bedroom air. And for the first time, I didn't just feel the itch. I felt something deep inside those hollow tunnels shift. A tiny, scrambling movement, deep beneath the skin. They weren't breathing, I realized, my mind going completely blank with terror. They were hatching.

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