She awoke again from another immemorable nightmare and reached for her phone. It was the first thing she did on waking. The blue luminescence from the phone lit up the black room and hurt her eyes. As she strained through her blurred recognition she could see there was something odd about the screen. It was shimmering a glitching rainbow of artefacts and distortions. She tried turning it off and then on again but reached an impasse when the controls were unresponsive. She then attempted to remove the battery: catching her nails into the tiny grooves and struggling off the back cover. Once the plastic outer cover was writhed away she could see inside the slim device. Inside was not the cold metallic battery or silicone circuit boards she expected. Not at all like the pictures she’d seen of computer interiors. Wires, etc.
Inside was a state-of-the-art organic, wet and irregularly pulsating sheet of flesh. Pink and twitching: at the centre of the phones sinuous back was a clenched hollow.
She stared a while into the tight opening. Pressed her finger round the hole, spiralling inwards as the orifice moistened and opened to her finger. Quite naturally she slipped her digit inside: pushing it through the flesh and deeper than the slim width of the phone should have allowed. Her finger did not come through the glass panel on the other side: it was somewhere else. It was warm.
When she slipped her finger out of the hole it was covered in a viscous fluid. The fluid had the same iridescent colouring the phone display showed. The fluid even twitched and distorted to the same rhythm as the screen display. Growing anxious with her inability to remove the fluid she woke her husband. “I have work in the morning. It’s probably nothing. It can wait till the morning”, he said without rolling over. In the morning he had gone. Left for work.
All day she held the phone habitually, staring at the corrupted screen and occasionally attempting to turn it off while the baby watched an ipad. When her husband came home
from work it was dark. He had with him several of his colleagues. They had been drinking. The fluid on her finger had spread to cover most of her hand now. Her husband re-emphasised that this was likely nothing to worry about and added that she could stop being a drama queen. She was getting more worried as the fluid slowly spread further up her arm. The colleagues refused to leave and played a type of loud music which made the baby cry. More people started to arrive.
Everyone at the party dismissed the fluid as being probably fine and talked instead about their favourite memes. She decided to call an ambulance when she found that the iridescent distortion had now spread across her entire back. She lay down in an empty room till the ambulance arrived. She tried not to hear the laughing coming from the rest of the house. When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics complained about being really very busy. They looked at her shimmering-mosaic arm with indifference. This probably wasn’t worth their time, they agreed. After much pleading they eventually decided the best they could do would be to put a bandage over the arm. It had spread across her torso by then. The paramedics stayed for a beer then left complaining about an indecipherable radio message.
The laughter from the party drowned out the sound of the music and of the baby as more and more people arrived throughout the night. She went again to the dark empty room at the back of the house and locked the door. People she didn’t know banged on the door and said they needed to be in there. In front of the full-length mirror she slowly removed her clothes one piece at a time. The fluid had spread. Intently she watched the reflection in the mirror, examining her body: now changed. The flesh glowed in the dimness of the room. Looking deeply into her skin she saw pulses of geometric bismuth patterns appear and disappear. She watched all this. She waited for the oblivion to come.