Something is sliding up to you. You stand still and shut your eyes tight, which is illogic since it’s pitch dark already, a perfect blackness all around you. Like, you imagine, inside the deep end of a coal mine shaft entombed beneath the earth. Or, perhaps, like inside a forbidden memory.
You shouldn’t have come here.
#
A soft current of air rustles the hem of your shirt ever so slightly. A draught? In here? You wonder. But the current is warm and humid, like breath. Then you feel it again. On your belly.
You try to calm yourself. In meditation class you were taught to inhale deeply, to relax your upper body. But in meditation class nothing ever slid up to you through darkness. Instead, your respiration is quick and shallow and doesn’t venture any further than the top of your tight chest. You’ve lost control over your body and wonder if your mind will abandon you too.
The warm and humid breath drifts around your torso and creeps upwards to the nape of your neck where it settles. A slow-moving tropical front causing low pressure with the cold sweat on your skin.
Stormy weather ahead.
#
Time passes in timeless measures, unceasingly brief and without flow.
#
Then, at last. Tentative contact that feels cool to the touch. On your leg, at the inside of your knee. Something—a tail? a tentacle?—slithers up your chest, stirs the thin fabric of your shirt and, where there’s a gap, momentarily strokes the flesh of your breast. An instant later everything is still again. But it is not gone.
#
Three boys stood before you, taunting you. An episode, long forgotten, buried beneath the sludge of suppressed recollections. One of them was the leader, the alpha boy, but you didn’t possess that vocabulary yet at the age of nine. The second boy was a follower, spineless, without the courage to admit that to himself—which, you now recognize, was at least consistent. The third stood a little aside and had gentle eyes, yet didn’t intervene. An observer who abided his time.
You knew all of that in one instant without having had much life experience to speak of. Instinct, you now guess. Or the intuition of a child. Or maybe, who knows, you were special.
You had always believed you were special. Because your mother never stopped telling you so. That you were more. That you were extra. Until the three boys made you see yourself as how they saw you. As less. As lacking. From then onwards, you would always carry it with you—your doubt and your dread. That everything you did, everything you said, everything you touched was insufficient.
Because you were less, not special.
#
It all happens fast now. Something wraps your ankle in a tight grip. A sharp end presses into your lower back and threatens to pierce your skin. A claw? A sting? A beak? Then the pressure eases like the echo of a warning. Something tells you it is insecure, but also mighty and powerful and could lash out at the slightest of provocations.
Just as with any being driven by fear.
#
The alpha boy had stepped closer, smirking, until he stood right in front of you, your bodies almost touching and his face mere inches from yours. His breath reeked of a mixture of paprika-flavored chips and cheap licorice from the candy shop. He called you names and casually ruffled your hair, flicked your ears, laughed a predatory laugh. A gathering potential formed into a dark cloud charged with pain and humiliation, terrifying you to the bone. Yet, you didn’t utter a sound and kept staring up at him, unblinkingly. Not that you were in control. You simply felt compelled to react that way, as if no other reaction was possible. Instinct? The intuition of a child?
Or maybe you were special.
#
All at once, it creeps up your legs and covers your buttocks and back with its damp body. It feels tense and muscular, and despite your terror you wonder how something so powerful can also be insecure.
#
You had caught glimpses of Alpha Boy’s soul through the beady portholes that were his eyes. What you caught glimpses of was ignorance. What you found traces of was angst. And most of all, what you felt was his fear. A fear of the unknown and therefore a fear misunderstood.
You then knew his fear was poisonous and dangerous and contagious.
#
A thick and fleshy substance sneaks in and out of your ear in a cursory exploration, while something else—a tail?—glides between your inner thighs. Something warm and oily trickles down your spine, moistening the fabric of your shirt, already clammy with sweat. The secretion is not yours. Saliva? Blood? Could it be wounded?
You wonder.
#
Alpha Boy had become unnerved. He knew that you knew. He could see that you had seen. He hesitated, spat on the ground and walked off with an unconvincing cheeriness, his pubescent cohort in tow. Spineless Boy looked puzzled. Observer Boy glanced back at you and smiled. You stood there trying not to weep.
Moments later they were out of sight, but the dark cloud remained.
#
It clings all over you now and you’re confused about where your bodies touch. You think you feel it everywhere on you and inside of you, but maybe that’s your terror talking.
Then it dawns on you. The insecurity that fills you up—it isn’t yours. It never has been yours. It belongs to Alpha Boy.
An alien image spins through your mind from out of nowhere, of something dense and wriggly covered in goo, and you wonder if you’re witnessing your own birth. An impossibly early memory, triggered by deep fear? Absurd.
Or maybe you are special.
#
The cloud would hover above you throughout your life. On some days it would unravel into thin shreds of white fluff, on other days it would darken and thicken into a heavy bundle of menace. Sometimes you’d fight it with the scientific logic of a meteorologist. At other times you’d try to make it disappear with the blind faith of a shaman. Yet, its shadow would always obscure your vision of the world around you.
And of yourself.
#
The thick and fleshy substance traverses your face and burrows into the shallow cavity of your other ear, and now you know almost for certain it must be a tongue. Your ear is warm and viscous, then hot, then feels a little painful, as if a low electrical current is running through it.
Your terror subsides, slowly, like water seeping from a cracked bucket. The crack, you realize, must be your ear. A supreme silence overwhelms you now. It’s everywhere, around you, inside of you. It is smothering the many voices that inhabit you, judge you, doubt you. The silence and you become one, and all of your anxiety dissipates. You imagine it has been sucked out of you.
#
Time passes in timeless measures, unceasingly brief and without flow.
#
The grip around your ankle loosens. The thick and fleshy substance retreats from your ear. The tense and muscular body slides off your back and buttocks with a dull thud. Then, nothing.
Your shirt, soaked with sweat and foreign moistness, clings to your body like a wetsuit. You keep still until you cannot sense its presence any longer. Yet, unlike after the episode with Alpha Boy and his little cohort, your stillness breathes serenity.
#
When you reopen your eyes, the all-encompassing darkness has softened, as if some celestial light dimmer has been turned one notch back up. An unfamiliar sensation of determination permeates every atom of your every cell and you catch yourself quietly weeping. The cloud above you has evaporated.
Your world has changed.
#
You wonder if it will ever return. You know you will always love it. You think it might have been you.
Johan Smits hails from Belgium (where waffles come from) and lives currently in China (where noodles come from). He’s a writer of fiction who likes to explore ordinary people navigating through the no-man’s-land between the commonplace and the bizarre, and how it affects them. He also writes nonfiction in the form of literary travel stories and contributes to news and human-interest magazines. Johan can often be caught worshipping inside the pantheon of Belgian and French graphic novels. Follow him at @johansmits.bsky.social.