The ounce would appear usually overnight. It didn’t so much resemble a skin tag as a laundry detergent pod, the skin pulled tight around a sloshy bit of liquid. It would grow anywhere, but most often on her thigh and especially near her underarms, feeling like a package tucked away or an insistent friend. It would disappear at random, but not before the prospect of sleeping with someone presented itself to her. This had been happening for the past six years.
Once she got health insurance, she made an appointment with a primary care physician to ask about it. The air conditioner in the office was broken; her legs stuck to the vinyl chair and the paper lining. A nurse came in the room and asked the same questions she had answered on the mobile questionnaire and on the forms in the lobby. What was the date of her last period? How many drinks did she have per week? How often did she exercise? Did she have a UTI right now? The doctor came later and asked those questions again.
The doctor, blonde, looked at the taut little irregularity and lowered the t-shirt with gloved hands in one single breath. “It’s probably a gland thing, from poor hygiene,” she said. From twenty feet down the hall she said “I’ll do a blood test if it’ll make you feel any better.” A different nurse came in, took her blood, and asked her the date of her last period. When her patient felt woozy, the nurse gave her a juice pouch. Within five minutes, the patient was outside, blinking in the sun, the breeze cooling off the inside sweat, the ounce tucked in safely.
***
That night she had a date at a bar that served steak fries she liked. The price point of the fries did not induce too much guilt if a date got them for her. She was good and got there ten minutes early, but he was at the bar ten minutes earlier than that.
His name was Steve and he was not attractive. He looked like his pictures but animated in ways she could not previously imagine. He was a brand ambassador, a job he claimed not to like but talked about a great deal throughout the night. She drank a second glass of the second cheapest wine on the menu. The low red lights of the place cast shadows on the inside corners of his mouth, on the stubble around the dimple of his chin. He did an impression of Richard Nixon that made her laugh.
He knew a place down the street that had live music some days. His car had the chemical smell of recent cleanliness. As they approached the second location, they saw a crowd of about fifteen people gathered close in a circle. When they got closer, she saw that they were surrounding a man on the ground, semi-conscious, eyes slit. A woman kneeled on the ground next to him. None of them seemed to be speaking or moving. She paused at the edge of the group but Steve kept walking and so did she.
Her place was closer, so they went there. She turned on certain lamps and left others off to conceal thick slabs of hair and lint that collected along the floorboards. She kept her arms pressed to her sides as much as possible, until the inevitable pawing under her shoulders to unhook her bra. She felt his round fingers slide over the ounce, check back, and then quickly over the ounce again, to politely return to the task of fumbling. She kissed his neck without pause, eyes open to the blue-white streetlamp out the window. She heard someone opening the cover of the dumpster below. She blew him and then he fucked her missionary and then her on top and then him from behind and then he came at 11:31 PM. When he left she turned on the rest of the lamps and made some tea. Bottles tinkled outside.
The next day he texted her that he had fun but he wasn’t over his previous relationship. She thanked him.
***
A few days later she received an email from her doctor with a link to a patient portal. The patient portal asked for her password. It asked if she forgot her password. She received another email with another link. The password was her birthday.
In the patient portal was a note from her doctor that said: “TEST RESULTS NORMAL. IF DEFORMITY PERSISTS SEE DERMATOLOGIST.” Included was the name and number of a dermatologist. She did not see her insurer’s name on the list of plans the dermatologist accepted. The ounce felt smaller anyway.
***
She went to get gas that morning, felt the fumes mix with the shimmery humidity, the dark gray cast on the sky, sort of liked it. She had pulled her hair up into a chip clip and felt the little beads cool the back of her neck. A sticker on the pump informed her whose fault this was, though his face had been half torn off, jagged strips of textured white paper underneath. She went inside the station and bought herself a viscous sweet iced coffee.
When she got to the corporate park where she worked, she had to park on the outer edges, where a man-made lake sparkled. When she closed the car door she saw a man at the edge of the lake, his back to her. He wore a bright orange beanie and baggy dark sweats despite the heat, spackled with bleach stains and green paint. She had never seen a person near this lake before. His hands were hidden from view; she assumed he was pissing. She turned away and opened the back door of her car, gathering work shoes and packets of food that had scattered in the course of her drive. When she closed the car door the man from the lake was two feet from her, clawing at the hood to hold himself up, bending back the windshield wipers. Deep wrinkles rounded his cheeks and massive globs of spit and snot hung pendulously down to his torso. One string of it caught onto the front pocket of his hoodie. His eyes were blue. He reached out to her as he fell, throttling her ass down her legs through her slacks. His chin hit the asphalt. She fell too. He still gripped her ankles when she tried to kick herself back up, stared up at her, blood syrupy in his beard. His fingers were rough and warm. “Please,” he said. “Please!”
The rocks embedded in the asphalt scraped her elbows, her palms. She nearly lost a sneaker but she wrestled it free and scrambled away, limping, bag intact.
When she got into her office, she went straight to the break room, grabbed a light roast coffee pod and inserted it into the machine, the needle popping the foil cover. She saw violet spangles and stars dancing on the edge of her vision, dizzy. Her coworkers did not see her.
She didn’t feel like describing the snot. Nobody was around her car when she returned to it.
***
It was her friend Jennie’s housewarming party. The new apartment, in a new complex, had high ceilings and the cabinets stuck out at perpendicular angles, shadowed in blue-white lights from little pools on high. Small chicken wings grew soft and wet on their platters. She didn’t know many other people than Jennie, who was flitting around, making sure her gaggle of coworkers and neighbors from around the apartment complex and sorority sisters in town were adequately tended to. Her new boyfriend, pink and bursting, hovered behind. Finally Jennie sat herself down next to her on that tight leather couch, turned towards her cross-legged. She still sat next to her in the same way as she did when they were teenagers, long nights watching the strangest videos they could find online or talking shit about their classmates. “Oh my god, sorry,” Jennie said, turning, the heat of her body so close. “How are you? It’s been too long, I’m, like- life has been so crazy. Moving, and… have you met Jackson? And also,” she said, leaning even closer. The dimples near her lips went so deep, like a child’s, dark, infinite. “Look at my gums!” She lifted one of those lips. The gums were bright cherry red, the teeth a little larger than decent. “Isn’t that disgusting?” she asked, and threw her head back and laughed, a great honest peal that echoed off the slate shadows of the apartment.
The boyfriend, Jackson, hulked nearby. “The bathroom’s clogged,” he stated.
“Oh shit, already?” Jennie catapulted up. “Didn’t they just build it?”
She stayed for ten more minutes, watching one digit of the time increase glowing white on her phone. At the appointed time she looked for Jennie to say goodbye; she found her and her boyfriend fighting with the new stainless steel toilet, water splashing at their feet. Jennie was behind him, head hanging back and laughing still, and then her head lolled forward and rested on his back. She put her arm around his middle and kissed his flexing shoulder through his sweatshirt, which he didn’t feel.
When she went to open the door, a small man was standing there, dressed all in black, and wearing a visor with the name of a food delivery company screen printed on the brim. He was holding no bags.
“Who are you?” he asked her.
“Luis! You made it!” Jennie said behind her.
As they hugged and shuffled past her, he turned back. “Are you leaving now?” he said. “You should stay!”
***
When she got home, she put her bags down by the door and went straight to the bathroom. She lifted her shirt. The ounce had tripled, flanked by two additional developing ounces, forming a triangle, in the imperfect biological way. They were bright red, blushing with birth, the original ounce swollen and proud. Under her pants, spreading her legs apart, another ounce was growing in the normally smooth lane between vulva and anus. This had never happened before.
She tried looking online in as indirect methods as she could what her symptoms could mean. There were a few possibilities, between harmless cosmetic diseases, STIs, and rare cancers originating deep in the body, signs like these indicative of final, fatal stages. The symptoms of these afflictions and her own occasionally overlapped but none ever fully coincided. The advertisements between photos of her friends and on the edges of news websites began showing her creams, injections, pills immediately after her research. Doctors hated these simple tricks, these grainy, horrific photographs. A video of a plump woman in an athleisure suit and shiny skin posed under a caption that said “MEN WHO JUDGE MY OUNCE LIKE I EVER WANTED THEM.” Her ounce glowed plump above the spandex stitching of her bra. A comment under this video read “if you have something like that you don’t take care of yourself fr.”
She got a statement notification from her doctor’s office. Because she brought up an issue the visit was no longer classified as preventative, so she owed $120.89, with her insurance.
She went to bed. The ounces propped her up where they rested on the sheets.
***
Their first stop was at a falafel place that glowed fluorescent white inside. “These people always take forever,” Luis said, pulling into the strip mall parking lot. “You should come inside with me.”
After showing his phone to the harried staff, they sat down across from each other in a booth. There were four other drivers in the other booths and no one dining in.
“It’s actually a really easy job once you get the hang of it. Plus you get lots of time like this to think, or read, or talk to cute girls. Do you mind if I call you cute?”
She didn’t.
“It’s good to think. Good to, like, let your mind wander, you know? I get to see what’s going on in the kitchen. You see that old guy there? Sometimes his granddaughters are here doing their homework, when they’re with their mom for the week. He hates their dad. He never recognizes me even though I know all this shit about his life. That cook fights with his girlfriend on the phone all the time. That girl bagging everything… She’s kinda quiet. I don’t know anything about her yet. Shit, I’m not a detective.
“I’m saving up to move somewhere else, I don’t know where yet. Maybe New York? So I’m crazy busy right now. All my other hours are shit. Did Jennie tell you I’m in a band too? We got a show at the Olfactory actually, but it isn’t for a couple more months. It’s hard to get gigs now because a bunch of shit closed. You should come though.”
The old man gestured at Luis with pursed lips and handed him the food the girl had just bagged.
They crisscrossed suburbs throughout the night. She watched through the windshield many headless hands emerge from behind the front doors of households and apartment complexes. The plastic-bagged food rested on doorsteps or hung on fence posts. After he took his required pictures Luis always half-ran back to the car in the same way, arms and legs splayed like a starfish. The car would chime when he opened the door until he shut it and he’d put his arm behind her seat when he’d back up off the curb. She would look closely at the dark hairs springing from his neck, short lines in different directions. He’d sometimes play short snippets of songs off his phone but he talked over them anyway. If the restaurant took a long time he’d text her to come inside.
Once he looked up at the stars when they returned to the car together, badly balancing soup containers. “I only see seven. Sometimes I even miss the orange the sky used to be at night, even though that was fucked up too. But I don’t like the blue light. Don’t you feel that sometimes? The lack?”
“Yes,” she said.
***
He dropped her off after rough kissing. She didn’t invite him up.
There were a few new ounces under her arms, a new one near her left nipple, and perhaps the beginnings of one between her fourth and fifth toes. She looked through her medicine cabinet for some small scissors, opened them up, but they didn’t seem like they’d work. In a box far back in her closet there was an Exacto knife with other craft supplies from long ago, the cross-hatched handle heavy. That would do. She returned to the bathroom, shirt off. The original ounce had swelled even more; it had to hold several ounces now, at least. She paused, then struck it dead center. When she removed the blade, clear liquid tinged with blood at the edge poured down her side. The smell was sweet, like fruit left out on a counter. It dried quickly to a slight tack. The skin around it hung ragged and thin, pink meat underneath.
She made quick work of the rest of the ounces, except the one between her legs, which took some grit. She positioned herself over the toilet, knife underneath pointing at noon. She kept balking, until she popped that one too. When she was done with it her eyes stung and she spit up a little bit of tooth. A dentist appointment would have to wait for another day.
She put square and oblong bandages on all the places the ounces were, making a patchwork under her arm. The edges glowed pink. She washed her face and moisturized, flossed and brushed her teeth, trimmed her pubes.
***
When he came over to her house he looked at the decorations she had put up, which were not many. He stood in front of each one and rocked on his heels while she got seltzers out of the fridge. Apart from certain corners he’d have to be very curious to seek out, her apartment was clean. Her skin was perfumed and she had chewed many mints in case her tooth had started to rot. The ex-ounces were still under bandages except for the one between her legs, which had rubbed uncomfortably on the fabric of her underwear for the past week but now at least had a thin coating of papery skin. Her living room lights had blown out, so they sat on her couch lit by a distant kitchen. He looked around her place and said, “No pets.”
In her bedroom she blew him and then he fucked her missionary and then her on top and then him from behind and then he came. It only hurt a little and he didn’t see. Afterwards, he held her. His hand ran over the bandages under her arm.
“What happened here?”
“Nothing,” she said.
He then avoided that part of her body, stroked her hair, the top part of her thumb instead. He stayed a while longer and kissed her when he left. “You’re sweet,” he said.
***
The next day he said he’d been thinking about it a lot but he wasn’t ready for a relationship right now, since he was planning to move.
She thanked him for telling her that.
***
That night she woke up feeling strange.
When she went to the bathroom and turned on the light, she saw her body covered in ounces. They were bright pink and white, some congealing together in a massive way. New ones had grown under the bandages under her arm, leaving the patchwork hanging. Her hair hung in unusual waves from all the ounces on her scalp. There was one ounce on each pad of her fingertips. A few ounces on the bottoms of her feet had burst on her walk to the bathroom. Her socks stuck deep into her soles and smelled saccharine. She felt the ounces growing painful under nails and on her clit.
She held one side of the sink and then the other and stood in front of the mirror for a long time.
***
The man looked at the moon. It was big and white and rippled off the lake. Bright stars had come to earth again, traveling in one long chain, white as they came, red as they went. Their sound was like a wave that never crashed. More stars guided them a few feet above. A frog croaked forever.
He sat on a damp patch, knees to the sky, and fell asleep.
He woke when he heard a car. There was a single one in the lot. A stranger was standing behind the hood.
It came towards him, staggering. Soon she was near.
He knew harm. He would have moved if he thought she was real. But she seemed less so the closer she got. Her eyeballs burst with lumps but somehow there was also nothing there. Her naked body swung heavy with the lumps too. A person made of pockets, a human hive.
She pulled his leg so he lay flat on his back. It wasn’t hard to do. The jeans came off easy too, his legs pale bones. There were still strings of spit in his beard. The ends of his hair were floating in the water.
She knelt on top of him. A few ounces on her knees burst, the fluid mingling with the wet soil, small rocks inside her. When she straddled him she felt a ripping between her legs, dampness. He was already hard. Could fear do that? she wondered.
He struggled and was stronger than he looked, so she pinned his wrists to the gravelly soil. She noticed flakes of skin under each hair of the beard. They looked so delicate, tessellated. When he grimaced two little dimples formed in each cheek. She forgot what she was doing, wedged one ounced finger in both depressions. They fit. She started to cry.
He kneed her so hard in the groin she flew over him into the lake. One purple ripping pain shook up her in the mid-air arc. She landed on her shoulder in shallow waters.
She came up with her arm screaming in the wrong place, heard him scrambling away. There were ounces up and down the inside of her windpipe now, interlocking, so she couldn’t scream. She sat up in the water; the ounces on her ass and upper thighs popped silently in the silt.
She grabbed an ankle with her good hand, pulled at it. The salt in her sweat stung the open, ragged ounces. She swung her bad hand to help in the effort too. Finally three tendons snapped loose and the flesh stretched open. Liquid rushed out of her leg and floated scummy black and yellow on the surface, the smell of candy factories and roadkill cats. She lay back with her now-longer leg stretched out. The water came clear just over her eyes. She tried to look for stars through the rippling until her body ran empty.
— Alexa Palmero lives in Chicago, Illinois. She can be found at the club and on Instagram at @girsponge.