Gunk

by Alice Goodrich

In the hallway of my parent’s house hangs my secondary school portrait; the last known photograph of me in human form. The face peering out from behind the glass is blotchy, red and covered in pustules. My alarming appearance wasn’t caused by heartbreak, arguments or bad grades. I was sick from just existing. When my parents moved us from the city to a farm, I was suddenly surrounded by threats that couldn’t be seen by the naked eye. Things that floated through the air and snuck into my bloodstream. That was the start of my twisted puberty, one that turned my body into a living suit of armour that kept the bad things out.

My eyes were the first sign that something was wrong. One hot summer morning, I tried to open them but couldn’t. I raised a hand to investigate the blindness and felt a thick barrier of jelly covering my lids. They had sealed shut, turning my sockets into tombs that had locked my eyes inside. I crawled towards my parents bedroom, clawing at the dusty floorboards, banging my head against the furniture. They found me at the foot of their bed gurgling, sputum streaming from my tear ducts and into my mouth like thick, gloopy tears.

At first we thought it was just the flowers. There were many, surrounding the house like a crowd of silent faces. My mother said that killing them would ruin the aesthetics of the house, so they tucked me away in my bedroom with a hoard of tissues to catch the slime that my body relentlessly produced. Usually, I would spend my days sitting in a rocking chair listening to a droning radio, but sometimes I would hear my little brother in the garden and would call out to him, yearning to play like we always had. But instead of inviting me into his made-up worlds, he would scream and throw rocks at my window until I retreated into the darkness, my sticky body concealed. 

Eventually an allergist visited to explain what was happening. She planted tiny samples of different allergens under my skin, took my blood and told my parents I was sensitive to everything. At the site of every scratch, gooey bumps protruded. She prescribed me drugs that made me dozy, made me see things even though my eyes never reopened. We could only sit and wait to see what my body would do, she said. Every day it reacted to something new: bees, bananas, horses, even my own hair, which fell out in clumps.

I have heard voices outside my cell debating what caused my full transformation. After my eyes, it was my nose that closed, repulsed by the grass pollen that floated in from the fields. Next came my mouth, which locked itself like a Venus flytrap after a breakfast of freshly harvested berries, sealing in all the juices. Then a build up of wax clogged my ear canals, erasing the steady hum of the radio and replacing it with dull vibrations. From then on my world was permanently dark and sticky, the main gateways to my body sealed so nothing could enter. When the maid was too frightened to clean my bedroom, it quickly filled with an itchy layer of dust, which made my skin form a thick layer of gunk that had the texture of snail slime. That was when people stopped touching me, which I guess was what my body wanted. All that remained were my thoughts, the only things that didn’t break me out in hives.

I was moved to a wooden enclosure near the stables when I became allergic to my brother, his mere presence sending me into fits that would only cease when he stepped outside the front door. One time, my jerking movements knocked him to the floor, covering him in a hot layer of my bile. My parents whisked him away to the bathroom, scrubbing his skin to prevent the disintegration of another child. In the end, they decided to keep him over me, the one that still looked human. They hauled me into a wheelbarrow and bounced me down the garden, my body writhing in pain from the pollen that attacked me from every direction as we travelled.

Now there is only darkness, and the unsettling vibrations of the radio that gently pulse from the corner of my new home. There have been no visitors and my brother no longer plays in the garden. Sometimes I wonder if my picture still hangs in their hallway, or if they have erased all evidence of my existence. When I hear the sounds of their lives moving on, echoes of laughter drifting down the garden, I wish I could still cry.