He Tasted Fuzz on His Tongue
November 2019 | Horror, Flash Fiction | 360 words
FIRST PUBLISHED IN RED WEATHER, 2019
He tasted fuzz on his tongue. Like his lips were a spider’s abdomen and his hands were its incessantly winding hind legs, he slid the imperceptible fiber out, an endless trail. The wispy texture, coated in the slime of the cherry Dum Dum pop she’d been sucking on, tugged at each of his taste buds. They were bulging now. He could feel how the taste buds expanded as he rubbed the roof of his mouth to dispel the threads caught in the moist cavern behind his teeth. At first, he thought she didn’t know her mouth was full of fuzz. When he pulled away from the kiss, she was smiling broadly, the white tufts poking out between her teeth, all yellow in comparison. When he looked again, he realized there weren’t just a few stray tufts. Fur, like a cat’s unkempt coat, upholstered her mouth and tongue. His step backwards and his desperate attempts to pull the fuzz out of his mouth seemed to amuse her. She smiled broadly. He coughed on the strains of shedded fur. She whipped her head back and laughed. In that brief moment, he could peer inside her mouth. He marveled at how little space there was for air to escape her throat—the fur, even matted down with spit, threatened to flow over her bottom lip, onto the carpet. It seemed to grow like a bubble bath under running water. He continued to pull threads out of his mouth, but where he pulled them, they disappeared from his fingers. They existed only in the fine, irritating sensation they left on his taste buds. The sensation intensified, and soon he couldn’t find the roof of his mouth with his tongue. The tendrils of fiber thickened and rolled over themselves, quadrupling in size, forming a rug for the entrance to his throat. He fell over the couch behind him in search of a mirror, to know for sure that there existed what he felt. But in the mirror above the mudroom bench, he couldn’t see a thing. A sharp pain exploded across each of the bulging taste buds. He spat on the ground—the blood, he could see. Her voice, high-pitched and cackling, he could hear.