Morning Shower

I opened the door to my bathroom, and the small creak of the old wooden door could be heard. Now that I'm thinking about it, my house could probably be in a museum. I'm not even sure how my parents got their hands on this house; it feels like an old antique store. The entire house has the same dusty, musty feel to it. Anyone visiting could easily spot the mold markings on the wooden floor, not just the floor, but the entire house has mold all over it. It's disgusting. It wasn't always like this, though. For the majority of my life, our family lived in a pretty standard apartment complex, near all of our friends and relatives. It was normal. Nothing out of the ordinary for a typical family. Actually, now that I think about it, none of the people I knew had ever lived in a 'proper' house before. After I entered the bathroom, I began to undress, piece by piece. After stripping down, I threw my clothes into a basket in the corner of the bathroom. Then, I stepped into the shower cubicle, turned on the water, and it started flowing through the showerhead. As the water flowed onto my hair, the built-up grease from the past month began to wash down my body. As the water continuously flowed down, I began to stare at the wall. Has there always been gaps between the wood? I wondered to myself. As I continued to stare at the gap on the wall, a massive swarm of insects started slowly crawling out of the wall. The insects were small enough that you couldn’t really tell what they looked like, but large enough to distinguish each and every single one of them. Their movements were synchronized as if they were all following a leader. The sound of their tiny legs scratching against the wall was almost deafening. As the insects slowly made their way toward me, I wondered, why are there such large gaps in the wall? Surely there doesn’t need to be a gap that large, right? The gaps weren’t that large, but they were definitely larger than they had to be. As I continued my thoughts, the swarm of insects continued their march towards my body. Before I knew it, the horde of insects started crawling onto my body, each and every single one of them. There were too many of them to count, but not enough to completely cover my body. As the insects continued to crawl all over me, they began to slowly bite my skin. They were definitely not strong enough to completely tear through my skin. With that realization, the insects began to move toward my underarms. Upon reaching my underarms, they picked off a piece of hair from my armpit hair, and then they all crawled inside of my arm. Slowly, they began to create a nest inside of my body, expanding their population. Eventually, there were enough insects to completely fill up my entire body. While all of this was happening, I wondered, why is there such a large gap between the wood? The gap wasn’t large enough to fit a child’s finger in, but definitely large enough to house an entire colony of insects. The thought of what could be inside of the gap inside of my wall grosses me out. So much could be inside of a tiny gap between two pieces of wood. I began to look around the bathroom, and I realized how many gaps there were. How many pieces of wood. What lay behind all of those gaps? It itches. My arm itches. My leg itches. My entire body itches. Without hesitation, I began to scratch. Innumerable crimson lines appeared on my white, doll-like skin, and from those lines sprung innumerable red-black blisters—but I continued to claw. I ran my nails across my face even as pus from the rupturing blisters began to cover it. I continued to tear at my body as the pus hardened and dried and the skin beneath swelled with inflammatory keloids. As I scraped, shards of my broken face began to flake and flew down all over the floor. I could see the dark red muscle fibers of my face between the fractures, their rich shine becoming more visible with each passing second. My face's skin fell away first, then my neck's, and soon only chunks of meat covered my skull, my hair dropping out with the rest of my skin. The water from my shower head continued raining on my body.