Poppy, 23, in her apartment living room watching The Omen on Netflix, suddenly felt an urge to take a shit.
She paused the movie, just after the nanny, during Damien’s fifth birthday party, had finished calling his name from the window ledge. Poppy hurried over to the bathroom.
It felt urgent.
In fact, what was presumably a long, thick turd felt as if it were fidgeting in her rectum.
Please, God, she thought as she entered and approached the toilet. Get me there on time. I don’t wanna shit myself.
She pulled down her track pants and panties, sat on the seat, and let it out.
A huge plop splashed toilet water all over her ass. She felt too relieved to care. She let out a huge sigh.
Then something in the toilet water jumped up at touched her right labium.
“Ah!” she screamed, then jumped up, pulled up her pants, and looked back in the toilet bowl.
That was no brown log.
It was a slightly bluish-skinned, four-month-old fetus.
“What the fuck?” she said in a trembling voice.
It was growing, too.
Within seconds, it looked like a five-month-old fetus, having grown from six to ten inches long. It was male, with what looked like an upwardly-curved spike for a penis, and he was looking up at her with…hungry…eyes.
It kept growing.
How is this even possible? she wondered.
And those eyes with which he stared up at her just got hungrier and hungrier.
“I’ve gotta call Peter,” she whispered, then ran out of the bathroom to get her cellphone. She dialled her 24-year-old boyfriend’s number as she rushed back into the bathroom.
When she returned, she saw what now looked like a newborn baby trying to crawl out of the toilet.
“Oh, my fucking God!” she gasped.
As her phone rang for Peter, she’d put it down and picked up her baby. She put him in the bathtub, set the water to a comfortable warm, and cleaned the bits of her shit off of him.
Then she remembered to wipe her own ass.
Why won’t that bluish colour come off of his skin? she wondered as she, looking at the baby, washed her hands.
“Poppy? Poppy!” Peter’s voice shouted from her phone.
“Oh, shit,” she said, reaching for a towel to dry her hands. “Just a minute, Peter!”
As she was drying her hands, the baby let out a piercingly shrill scream. It was so loud, and unnatural for a baby to make (it sounded more like the shriek of an alien bird, or something), she was amazed the windows didn’t break. Her ears were in pain from it; she dropped the towel and plugged them with her fingers.
“Just a minute, Chet,” she said to the baby. Wow, she thought. How quickly I came up with a name for him.
“Poppy, come on,” Peter shouted from her phone, loud enough for her to hear. “What’s going on over there? What was that scream?”
“Just a minute, Peter!” she shouted back.
“What was that noise?” a woman shouted from next door, her fist pounding on the wall.
“Sorry, Mrs. James,” she shouted to her landlady. She picked up her phone. “Hello, Peter?”
“Finally!” he said. “What’s going on?”
“Get over here, now!” she said.
“OK, but what’s wrong?” he asked.
“I can’t talk about it on the phone. Just get over here. Now!”
“OK, OK,” he said, then hung up.
He arrived at her apartment in ten minutes.
As soon as she heard the doorbell ring, Poppy, still in the bathroom and holding Chet in a towel swaddled around him, called out, “The door’s open. Come to the bathroom. I’ve got a big surprise for you.”
No sooner did he open the door than Mrs. James shouted, “Keep it quiet in there!” across Poppy’s bathroom wall from her apartment.
“Who was that shouting?” he asked as he approached the bathroom.
“My landlady,” Poppy said. “But check this out.”
When he reached the wide-open bathroom door, his jaw dropped open.
“So, this is the big surprise?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Where’d the baby come from?”
“My ass.”
“C’mon, don’t joke around. And why is it…kinda blue?”
“I haven’t any less foggy an idea about that than I do that I gave birth to him by shitting him.”
He looked at her with a sneer. “Umm, Poppy…are losing your fucking mind?”
“Probably.” A tear ran down her cheek. “All of this is…just…too fucking much for me to handle.” She began sobbing.
“You aren’t on drugs, are you?”
“No, I’m not fucking on drugs!” she bawled.
“Hey, take it easy, Poppy. I’m just trying to understand…”
“Keep it down in there!” the landlady shouted.
“Seriously, where did this…bluish baby…come from?” Peter asked, looking down at his crotch as if he could anticipate the answer for some mysterious reason.
“I told you,” Poppy said in sobs. “Look, nobody’s more aware of how crazy this…anal birth…sounds than I am, but I swear, that’s what happened. I can’t explain it, but that’s what really happened. Speaking of anal, remember what we did three nights ago?”
“Yeah,” he said with a sigh and a smile. “What fun.”
“For you, not for me. I agreed to it ’cause I love you and I wanted to please you. Did anything out of the ordinary happen to you by chance, just before we did that?”
His smile turned into a frown. He looked down at his crotch again. She looked at her smiling baby and smiled back at him.
“Well?” she asked, looking back at him.
“I, uh,…” he began. “On the way here that night, I stopped to take a piss at a tree about half-way between your home and mine. I couldn’t wait. As I was pissing, some glowing…blue…gunk dropped on the tip of my dick. I looked up and saw more of the gunk hanging on a tree branch.”
“Blue gunk?” Almost all the whites of her eyes were showing.
“Uh, yeah,” he went on, still looking down at his crotch with shame. “It didn’t hurt, but I couldn’t get it off while I was pissing, so I had to wait ’til I was finished. When I was, I shook my dick and the gunk all fell off, but where it had touched my dick, there the skin was…bluish…like ‘Chet’ over there.”
She looked at her baby. They exchanged more smiles.
“I heard you say ‘Chet’ on the phone,” Peter said.
“Yeah, that’s his name,” she said, still looking at her baby with a loving smile.
“Why’d you name him ‘Chet’?” Peter asked.
“Well, he came out of my ass–and I suspect I now know why–and ‘Chet’ is the closest-sounding name to ‘shit’ that I could think of, without, you know, being mean.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“Do you think that blue gunk was some kind of alien? Something from outer space, or something like that?”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“I guess that makes sense,” she mocked. “Then you decided you wanted to fuck my ass without a condom?”
“I didn’t want you to see the blue spot on my dick.”
“Of course not! Getting off is far more important than showing consideration for your woman, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s just that…your asshole is so pretty-looking.”
“Aww, how sweet. Well, you’re a cute little asshole yourself, you know that? For fuck sakes, why do men have to be such perverts, wanting to stick it where I poop? Well, now you’re the proud anal father of a part human, part-alien baby!”
“How many times do I have to tell you to be quiet in there, Poppy?” Mrs. James shouted. “Maybe the threat of an eviction will do it! It’s past midnight!”
“Sorry, Mrs. James,” Poppy said. “What are we gonna do, Peter? We don’t make enough money, between the two of us, to raise a baby.”
“I don’t know. How can a baby gestate in a woman’s rectum?”
“Well, I guess glowing blue alien gunk can do that, Peter, especially after selfish guys fuck their girls in the ass when the blue gunk is on their unprotected dicks.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, still staring at his crotch. “I guess a screw tonight is out of the question, right?”
“Take a wild guess, Einstein!…Oops, gotta keep my voice down. What are we gonna do about Chet, though?”
“Well…I know this isn’t a very nice thing to do, but…couldn’t we just…expose him? I mean,…”
“What kind of a monster are you? I’m his mother…his anal mother, but still his mother. We’re Chet’s parents, whether you like it or not. His birth may have been…well…”
“Monstrous?”
She slapped him. “Peter, we should love him, in spite of how he came to be.” She looked down at smiling Chet, and smiled at him. “Look at his eyes. You love Mommy, don’t you?”
She saw his eager eyes looking up at her.
“Are they loving eyes…or hungry eyes?”
“Peter! He loves me.”
“I’m not sure of that, Poppy. Those eyes look creepy.”
“You’re just finding excuses not to take responsibility.”
“And you’re letting your maternal instinct blind you.”
“Blind me? To what?”
“To a danger,” Peter said, shuddering. “Something in his eyes.”
Now Chet was looking at him…hungrily.
“You’re imagining things, Peter. Just ’cause he’s part alien…”
Chet opened his mouth to reveal not only teeth with serrated, sharp edges, but also a long, snake-like tongue that flew out and wrapped itself around Peter’s neck.
Poppy screamed.
Chet’s tongue tightened around Peter’s neck with amazing strength. He choked and gasped for air, his fingers trying to get Chet’s tongue off of him with desperate futility. In fact, the tongue was so strong, it was pulling Peter’s head closer and closer to those sharp teeth.
“No, Chet, no!” his mom screamed. She had no way to deter or punish her son; hitting her baby was unthinkable…but what could she do?
Besides, Chet might attack her next.
She put the baby down and reached for Peter’s neck. As she tried helping Peter loosen the tongue on his neck, she looked back at Chet.
“Chet, stop it!” she said, remembering to keep her voice down. “This is Daddy. You mustn’t hurt Daddy.”
She couldn’t believe how strong Chet’s tongue was. It remained crushingly tight around Peter’s neck.
A few seconds later, it crushed his neck and snapped it.
Peter’s body fell to the floor.
Poppy gasped, then stopped herself from screaming just in time. Her hand was on her mouth; her eyes agape.
Chet’s tongue slithered off Peter’s neck and recoiled back into his mouth. Chet looked down at Peter’s bare left arm. He opened his mouth to bare those saw-like teeth again.
Poppy was frozen in the same position, except for her ceaseless shaking.
Chet took a big bite out of that arm. Blood sprayed in all directions.
Poppy yelped and ran out of the bathroom. She shut and locked the door. Sobbing, she put her ear to it. She winced as she heard his gluttonous chewing.
This isn’t happening! she thought. How could this be happening? Am I dreaming? When am I going to wake up from this?
After several more minutes of chewing, which sounded like a ghoulish mukbang, it stopped. Poppy listened more intently. Her heart was pounding.
Silence.
Her face was soaked in tears. She kept listening.
Silence.
Then she heard the pitter-patter…of big feet?
More like pounding than a pitter-patter.
Had he grown quickly again?
The powerful first banging on the door suggested a yes answer to that question.
She backed off as she saw the door shake with each hit the boy gave it.
How could a baby get so strong so quickly?
When it’s part-alien, turd-baby. That’s how, apparently.
Poppy moved a big chair from the living room over to the bathroom door to keep Chet from ramming it open. He kept bashing at it, though. He was relentless.
She ran over to the kitchen and got a big cleaver from one of the drawers. The bashing on the bathroom door continued. She was convinced that Chet was getting stronger. As she walked out of the kitchen, she heard a ramming that sounded unmistakably like the breaking of wood.
Had he broken through the door?
Was Chet outside of the bathroom now?
Poppy ran for the bedroom, hearing his thumping footsteps from…somewhere. She got in and locked the door. She stood at the door and waited in the darkness.
There was no banging on the door.
Was he there, or…
…in here with her?
She looked around the room slowly, dreading what she’d see. The light was off, but enough light from an outside street lamp, combined with her eyes’ adjustment to the dark, allowed her to see what was in the room.
She looked down behind her.
She saw a naked boy with the appearance of a one year old. Standing, and with his face soaked in Peter’s blood, he looked up at her…lovingly?
She screamed and ran into the closet, closing the doors behind her. She heard the approach of his thudding feet.
His hand pounded, again and again, on the left of the closet doors.
Stupid! she thought as the pounding continued. He broke through that strong bathroom door. He can break through these doors so much more easily. I should have run outside and called for help. But I’m freaking out so much that I can’t think straight.
He punched a hole through the closet door.
She screamed.
He reached in, searched for her, and found her left leg. He grabbed it, just under the knee.
“No, Chet!” she screamed. “Don’t hurt Mommy!”
His strong grip on her leg was tightening. His other hand grabbed the door he’d punched the hole in, his little fingers slipping through the crack between this door and the other, and yanked it open with amazing strength. The yanking back, however, meant he’d hit himself with the door, making him let go of her leg and knocking himself to the floor on his back.
The pull of his hand on her leg before letting her go made her lose her balance and fall on the floor beside him. Before she could get up and run, he grabbed her by the arm and held her with a bruising tightness. Then his serpentine tongue flew out, latched to her T-shirt, and pulled at it.
“Chet, no!”
Again, with that superhuman strength, the tongue tore the shirt open, revealing her bra-less breasts.
The baby pulled his tongue back in, stared hungrily at that pair of large, shaking beauties, and licked his lips.
She just looked at those carnivorous, sharp teeth and thought, and to think I was planning on breastfeeding him before Peter got here.
Chet pulled on her arm to draw her chest nearer to his hungry mouth. She resisted with all her strength.
“No…Chet…please…Don’t bite…Mommy’s…tits off.”
The infant’s tongue flew out again, wrapping itself around her other arm and pulling her closer.
That other arm had the knife, though.
Those serrated teeth were inching closer to her right nipple.
She knew what she had to do.
But she just couldn’t kill her baby.
Chet’s mouth was just a few millimetres from that nipple now. Those sharp teeth of steel were almost touching it. He took a few hard bites in the air, just barely missing it.
She raised the cleaver, ready to stab…
…but she sliced off the tongue instead.
Blue blood sprayed everywhere. Chet let go of her other arm and rolled back, smacking into the far wall by the window. The severed tongue still clung to her arm like Krazy Glue.
Chet let out another shrill scream; her eardrums felt as if they were being slashed open.
“Goddammit, Poppy!” her landlady shouted. “This is your last warning! Be quiet, or I’m kicking you out of this building!”
Poppy ignored the warning. All her attention was on the look of malice in Chet’s eyes. It was unmistakable.
He hated her.
He wanted to kill her…and she knew why.
She’d rejected him.
She’d hurt him.
She didn’t love him (or so he thought).
His tongue was still dripping blue blood.
His eyes were locked on hers.
“Baby,” she pleaded between sobs as she held that knife firmly in her hand. “Please, don’t make Mommy kill you.”
Chet ran at her, his mouth wide open to bite.
She raised the cleaver.
Using it on him was still the most hateful thing in the world to her.
Should I just let him kill me? she thought. Better than me killing him.
He was halfway at her now.
But if I’m dead, who’ll take care of him? she thought.
Close enough to her, he let fly what was left of his still-long tongue and wrapped it tightly around her neck. Her hand, on his torso, kept him from getting any closer…except for that amazing strength he had, forcing her to bend her elbow and let him inch closer and closer.
That tongue’s pressure on her throat was painful and bordering on crushing. The hand that held the cleaver made it impossible to hold the tongue and loosen its grip.
She had no choice.
Those teeth were getting closer and closer to her face.
He was taking bites at it, the teeth making a sound like clapping pliers.
She plunged the knife into his neck, spraying blue blood all over her and making his body loosen and slump. The tongue let go, too, falling limp on her chest.
She coughed for several seconds, needing a while to reorient herself and stop from shaking all over. When she did, her heart having slowed down and stopped pounding, she finally looked down at Chet, splattered with blue blood, lying sprawled on the floor between her legs, his tongue hanging out like a dead snake from his wide-open mouth, and his open eyes looking away from her, seeing nothing.
She picked up his lifeless body, cradled it in her arms, let a few tears roll down her cheeks, then took in a deep breath. Her bawling came out in scream after scream.
“That’s it!” the landlady shouted. “I’m coming over there!”
As Poppy continued bawling, her teary eyes squeezed shut, she never noticed the tiny, blue, insect-like things crawling out of Chet’s neck wound. Her grief made her oblivious to the tickling sensation of hundreds of those little aliens crawling up her arms and onto her exposed breasts. Only when she felt the sting of thousands of little bites did psychological pain change to physical.
Her screams were so loud that she couldn’t hear Mrs. James’s fist pounding on her front door. Yet even if she could have heard the pounding, it would have made no difference, for those bites had already cut deep into her chest and arms, annihilating her breasts and exposing her arm bones and rib cage.
The mixture of his and her blood poured a lake of purple all over and around their dead bodies.
The landlady stopped banging on the door. “So, the noise has finally stopped, eh?” she shouted, fumbling through her keys. “For the moment, anyway.” She found the key to Poppy’s room. “Well, I’m gonna find out what the hell’s going on in there…” As she fit the key in the keyhole, she turned the doorknob, only to find it unlocked. “Oh, I didn’t need the key at all.”
She opened the door to find no one in the living room area. She walked in and looked around.
“Poppy? Where are you?” She noticed the paused movie on the TV. The nanny had hanged herself, her body crashing against the window. “Oh, how horrible.”
Mrs. James walked through the living room area over to where the bathroom and bedroom were. She saw the chair pushed away from the bathroom door, where she naturally took notice of the hole punched through the bathroom door. She scowled at the sight.
“Poppy, you’re gonna pay for my door!”
Then, she looked through the hole and saw some blood on the floor.
“What the…? Poppy, what are you doing in…?”
She put her hand through the hole and unlocked the door, then after opening it, she saw Peter’s bloody body, with bites all along his arm and a few bites from his stomach.
“Oh, my God!” she screamed.
She listened for several seconds in the ensuing silence.
Did Poppy bring a wild animal in here? she wondered.
Now she heard faint shuffling noises from the bedroom.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered as she crept from the bathroom to the bedroom with the most reluctant dread.
She tried opening the bedroom door, but found it locked, too.
Good thing I have all the keys to the apartment with me here, she thought, fumbling around for a skeleton key on the keychain. Or is it a bad thing?
She couldn’t have unlocked that door with any more reluctance.
She looked around, hearing the shuffling noises. The light was off. The darkness hid Poppy…and whatever else was in the room. She saw only Poppy’s hand lying on the floor; only it wasn’t shrouded in shadow.
Mrs. James reached for the light switch, knowing she wouldn’t like what she was about to see.
CLICK.
The only flesh remaining on Poppy’s skeleton was on that hand.
A colony of hundreds of creeping, blue, ant-like things was all over the floor around Poppy’s skeleton and Chet’s corpse.
Mrs. James let out a scream so loud, it made all the noise Poppy and Chet had been making seem like whispers.
A few neighbours called out to tell Poppy to be quiet.
They got their wish soon enough, though.
The first of the bites were on the landlady’s throat.
Infinite Ocean 