What Made You?

CW: body horror, forced surgery, loss of autonomy

You awaken. Or, more accurately, you are activated. 

Rise and shine, he says. A cruel joke that loses its sting only marginally every night. There is no ascension from this hell. No light. As your limbs twitch to life, muscles spasming taut against machinery, he gleefully describes your evening’s hunt.

Fit, tall and muscular, he says. Excellent stock. Rugby player, perhaps. With the boy is a girl, also at peak physical form. He considers the ways he can use them, harvest what makes them people and render them down to base parts. Pieces to be stuck together in abnormal ways. Inhuman ways.

You were once like them. He purges your memory semi-frequently, but certain elements remain; you were human. He made you into this. And you are so, so hungry. 

Go, he tells you. Bring them home.

You want to refuse. You want to scream. You want to die. But the things he has done to your mind render your desires irrelevant. You do not get a choice. You do not have autonomy. You are his.

The apparatus housed within your flesh churns and whirs as it pumps whatever vital fluids he has filled you with around your body. The internal scaffolding of your jaw clicks as hinges loosen and skin tightens around it. You no longer have fingers, just curled metal talons at the end of multiple—too many—sets of arms protruding from a bulk of torso that sits close to the ground. They rap greedily against the metal floor, hungry to skewer. To butcher. 

The shred of humanity that remains within you—the you of you—is powerless. It is a special kind of hell, the worst kind, to be forced to witness a body that is ostensibly yours bend to the will of another. To become a voyeur to violence inflicted by your own hand. To actively partake in the creation of more like yourself, however unwillingly.

You were a person. You were a human being.

Now, you stalk the young couple through the derelict building they had chosen to sneak into. You hang from the ceilings and skitter around corners. They clumsily haul themselves over toppled pillars and piles of rubble. You rotate and extend limbs to stretch across gaps. They struggle to clamber over a pile of demolished concrete, giggling and huffing. 

You were once like them. You weren’t quiet enough, either.

He wants them alive. He always wants them alive. If they are dead, then they are worthless to him. He doesn’t even use them for parts. Once, the sight of you caused a heart attack in your prey. You were punished thoroughly for it. For wasting good stock. 

The life in them is what he needs. What he wants. Snipping their tendons with scissors isn’t enough. Rewiring still-living nerves isn’t enough. Reshaping them—all of you—into pets isn’t just a physical process. He needs to break you. 

That’s why he does it.

The part of you that thinks—you—is still here, locked behind all of it. Behind the chemicals, behind the chunks of cerebrum scooped out and splattered onto the floor, behind the psychological conditioning. You. 

The couple have found a spot to settle on. You await an optimal moment to strike. You wonder who you were. Before it was taken from you. Before you were taken from you. Did you giggle like she did? Did you grin like he did? Did you love? Did you hold? Were you held? 

Does anyone miss you? 

He’s on top of her, so neither of them see you approach. You pull him from her quickly and withdraw him into the sinewy cage of your torso. He doesn’t have the time to yelp, but the sudden shift of weight alerts his partner. She opens her eyes and sees you. Her face is frozen. Her body is frozen. You cannot imagine what she must be experiencing right now. 

She doesn’t move. She can’t. Everything within her has seized up in abject terror. She chokes as the scream within her fails to break through the tensed-up muscles of her throat. Her eyes flicker to the boy within your chest cavity, slowly being subsumed into your flesh for safe transport. Her mouth is stuck open, lower jaw shuddering in terror. 

You realise that you should have scooped her up by now, too, yet you aren’t moving. A malfunction within your body? If there was one, you didn’t feel it. 

You still aren't moving.

Your vision blurs, and something falls from your face, landing square on the girl's chest and creating a little damp spot on her shirt. More follow in quick succession. Minutes go by. Her shirt is now soaked. More time passes. She shuffles, testing her limbs. Testing you. You do not move. She ekes away from you, tears flowing down her cheeks. You do not move. As she stands on shaky legs, your head does not move. Your bleary eyes are locked forward, staring at where she was, not where she is.

She takes off, sprinting as fast as she can. You cannot see her, but you listen to her panicked footsteps grow more and more quiet, until you do not hear them anymore. You feel the boy squirm within you, desperate against the clasping hands and muscular tendrils that ensnare him between your ribs. As if roused by his resistance, your body begins to move once more. There is no sensation of having lost control, no life returning to your limbs. Whatever happened—whatever allowed her to escape—was not a malfunction of the physical body.

You return to him and deposit your catch onto a surgical bed- the same one you woke up on all that time ago. He claps and grins and dances from foot to foot as he straps the boy down. He soothes the boy, telling him that nobody can hear him. Nobody will come for him.

But then he turns to you, frowning. There was another, he remarks. What happened? You do not—cannot—reply, but his question was rhetorical to begin with. No matter, one is enough, he says. 

He looks at you quizzically. Has something changed about your face? Had you made a noise? Let’s feed you, he says. You must be hungry.

You are. You are so hungry.

Joe Addison (he/they) is a queer, neurodivergent Creative Writing MA student living in York, England with his partner, three reptiles and a potent, lingering dread in his soul. Joe is currently writing his first novel. You can find more of their writing at joeaddisonauthor.wordpress.com)