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  “What more do I have to wait for? All of you are grown, and I want to move on. While your father is still waiting for me.” She took a breath, gathering determination. “And I’m going to keep him with me until then.”

  “But, Mother—” her daughter started to protest, until her brother shook his head. “Let her keep it. There’s no harm. She’s right. It can’t be too long, after all.”

  The next days were very difficult for Mrs. Vivian, even with the comforting presence of Gregory’s shell. Oh, if only he hadn’t gone on ahead of her! If only he’d waited SO they could be renewed together! He was waiting now, in his new form, she told herself, but inwardly she had doubts. After metamorphosis, a person was changed. In his present state, Gregory would be beyond such mundane concerns as food. Or sex. She could imagine his new body, pure, smooth, and unmarred by orifices or dangling sex organs. Next to him, she knew she would appear ugly and grotesque in her winkled, worn-out flesh. How she longed to cast it off!

  Without her husband to cook for, she had little interest in food. She lost weight, and her flesh began to sag even more. She pulled at the loose skin as if she could tear it away. Desperately, she took off her clothes and lay out naked and pallid in the sun, hoping to harden her skin, but the only result was a painful burn that made it red and tender. After a week or so, a thin layer peeled away in tissue-thin shreds, but that was all.

  Late at night she would lie sleepless next to Gregory’s desiccated remains and moan quietly to herself, “How long? Oh, how long?” Once, thrashing restlessly, her arm struck the husk on the other side of the bed. There was a sharp snapping sound and she sat up in alarm.

  A piece of the face had cracked. The husk was as thin and brittle as chitin now. She pulled the sheet away and glanced down at the fragile, shrunken remains of his penis, still intact. She wondered if he had regretted leaving this one piece of him behind to shrivel and disintegrate with the rest of his discarded flesh.

  And then it happened at last, what she had waited for so long. She woke with her scalp feeling stiff and taut. It hurt to blink her eyes, and she could barely open her mouth. Now she understood why Gregory had never spoken. But, oh, it was happening, it was happening at last! She would be with him soon, wonderfully transformed. Tears of joy ran unfelt down her cheeks, the skin already going numb.

  There was a sharp, tearing sensation as the back of her scalp split open. Eagerly, she reached up to pull it away. She could feel the edges starting to part, but then there came a terrible pain as it resisted, still attached to the flesh beneath. A trickle of warm blood ran down her neck. Alarmed, she realized that the process couldn’t be rushed.

  Impatiently, she waited while the split lengthened and widened. Soon her scalp had pulled away down to her forehead. She tore it down, stripping it away from her face, but the skin was still attached at the eyelids and it couldn’t be pulled any farther.

  The whole process was like reliving the births of her children, the long, slow hours of labor, the spasms as her uterus contracted and opened her cervix, wider and ever wider. There had been pain then, too, and blood. It had felt as if their emerging skulls were splitting her apart. Only now she was giving birth to her new self. She breathed in the rhythms she had learned so many years ago and waited for the next contraction. How had Gregory been able to endure it, she wondered, without the experience of childbirth to draw on?

  Inside her, transformations were occurring. She could feel her organs altering, preparing for her next stage of existence. Systems would atrophy, she knew. Her womb would shrivel and disappear. She would cast off her external genitalia, her dried-up, sagging breasts, with the skin already hanging loose between them.

  But why was it taking so long? What was wrong? It was past dawn already, and there hadn’t been another contraction for what seemed like hours. Surely it hadn’t been like this for Gregory! It was agony, crouching on her hands and knees, barely able to move. Her muscles were cramped and knotted. She shrugged her shoulders, and the split skin tore a little more along the line of her spine. How much longer did she have to wait? She moaned and wept through stiffened lips and tearless eyes.

  Daylight flooded the room, the sun rose high into the sky outside the window. There was a grotesque, contorted figure on the bed. Mrs. Vivian’s skin had opened from the crown of her head to just below the shoulder blades. Half of her scalp hung inverted over her forehead, the hair fallen into her face, stringy with clotting blood. She had torn away raw patches of flesh from the margins where it was still attached, desperately trying to pull it free. Her bloody fingernails had bent and broken off.

  Along her spine, the edges of her split skin were stiffening and turning dry, cracking a little as she writhed feebly, still struggling. Her contracting skin, refusing to come free, was forcing her body into a fetal position, knees drawn up against her chest. Her ribs heaved shallowly as she fought to breathe. Beneath her, the broken fragments of her husband’s crushed husk crackled under her weight.

  Systems had altered within her. Her larynx atrophied until her groans were no longer audible. Blind and mute, she lay trapped in her shrinking, stiffening skin, still breathing, still twitching occasionally.

  Her hearing alone was unimpaired. The birds sang outside her window every morning, cars passed by in the street, the bedside clock clicked as the minutes advanced, one by one, endlessly. A mosquito made its way into the room through a space in the window sash, and it hovered around her face, whining shrilly, for a long eternity before it settled on her eyelid to probe for fresh, unclotted blood. Voicelessly, unmoving, Mrs. Vivian screamed and screamed.

  After a number of days, new processes of transformation began. Bacteria began to multiply within the dead tissues, producing foul-smelling gases. Her abdomen swelled, distending her brittle skin until it split and cracked. Once the gases finally escaped, her body subsided and settled in on itself. Decomposition proceeded quickly in the summer heat. Liquids oozed through the split skin, staining the mattress.

  It was in that condition that her children found her, metamorphosis aborted, half remade and half unmade.

  “I knew we shouldn’t have let her stay here all alone,” her daughter said, holding a hand over her face and averting her eyes from the remains.

  But her oldest son shook his head. Nothing could have been done. If it had to be this way, it was better that she’d been here, where she wanted to be, at the end.

  He picked up a shard of transparent dry skin from the floor beside the bed and identified it as part of his father’s broken husk. He had known things could go wrong like this, everyone knew it. But to actually see the remains—

  The fragment crumpled to dust in his hand as he considered his own approaching old age with newly awakened misgivings. And then with dread.

  BREEDING GROUND

  Francis J. Matozzo

  Stories are often metaphors for larger themes or ideas. They are most successful on this symbolic level when they operate unconsciously—that is, without any upfront planning by their authors. The following novelette by Frank Matozzo is a case in point. The human mind and the human heart are the breeding grounds for most of the things which ultimately define us, and not always in ways that are pretty. In the following tale, Matozzo interweaves threads of emotional stress among his characters to tell a larger story. “Breeding Ground” is a complex, ambitious tapestry of pride and jealousy, fear and guilt, and ultimately, pure dread.

  1

  The only time the pain is gone is when I sleep at night. The physical agony is replaced with the dream, which only adds a new dimension to my wretched life, one of dread and paralyzing terror.

  At times, when the pain of the day climbs to new, icy heights of glory, I believe the trade-off to be fair. I’m a big boy—a nightmare, no matter how terrifying, is preferable to the reality of the flesh. But when I awaken in the middle of the night, it’s a different story: the terror flows like glaciers through my veins, oozing from my brain into the narrowest ventricles and
arteries of my nervous system. Then I would prefer to battle the pain.

  Angela does her best to cope, which is to say she does nothing at all. Dealing with reality, with life and all its ugly warts, has never, in twenty years of marriage, been her strong suit. Once she would have held me in her fierce grip, fighting this disease with all the passion of her being, but that was an eternity ago, when she truly did love me.

  Now I am an object of disgust for her. She buries her head in the sand, denying her deceit, her betrayal, staying with me only because of the money that keeps her standard of living.

  So I am alone, and the circle of my existence is unbreakable—the pain of the day roaring into the terror of my nights.

  2

  Angela Lynch sat uncomfortably in the waiting room, trying to shut out the droning voices of a morning talk show buzzing from the television in the waiting room. She wanted to turn it off, but a short, squat cleaning woman was sitting next to it, sucking on a cigarette, laughing loudly with every stupid joke from the show’s host.

  Angela left the room.

  She stepped out into the ugly, marble-green hail and walked to the nearest window; leaning on the sill, she looked down into the streets below. It was early November and the tree-lined streets outside the hospital were vivid with changing colors. Fallen leaves rested in haphazard piles, scattering along the sidewalk at the mercy of the wind. She should be out there, enjoying the beauty of the autumn day, not stuck in some boring, drab hospital waiting room. Doing nothing while her life fell to pieces.

  Out of control.

  She sighed, a long exhale of frustration. She had been sitting in limbo since 6 AM, when she last saw her husband being wheeled into surgery.

  “I love you,” she had managed over the gurney, squeezing his weak hand and planting a soft kiss on his dry lips. He had looked at her with eyes glazed in pain and fear and she was genuinely shocked at seeing him so helpless. He was many things—selfish, cold, brooding, and uncommunicative, but he had never been weak.

  And she was shocked, too, at her own lack of feeling; what an effort it had been to simply say those three words, to kiss his lips when everything about him repulsed her. Twenty years of marriage and she couldn’t work up more than a passing kernel of sympathy. It was horrible, but true, and she hated herself for feeling that way—and hated him for making her that way.

  She began to cry.

  She pulled a tissue from her handbag, dabbing her eyes: there had been no time for makeup that morning, which was just as well since she probably would have been a horror show of running mascara. Her black hair was uncurled, raining on her slender shoulders in straight lines, drawing out the thinness in her gaunt face. She was dressed in a pair of loose-fitting blue jeans and a thick green sweater that added some shape to a body ravaged by anger and endless nights spent baby-sitting for her husband. Listening to his screams as he pulled her into the madness of his nightmares.

  And yet she had no one to blame but herself—hadn’t she fought him to accompany her to Shelton? If she really hated him, why did she badger him to come?

  Because of the same reason I’ve stuck with the self-centered bastard for all these years, she answered herself—because I’ve no backbone, no guts to leave on my own …

  And what of Lee? He loved her, paid attention to her emotional needs, was gentle and passionate and kind. God, when they had started the affair two years ago she had felt reborn, beautiful again, the center of one man’s life … she needed that so much, to be the single all important, all consuming focus of another’s life. She needed that more than anything in the world.

  Sure.

  More than economic security? Social acceptance? The knowledge that a beautiful home always waited for her to crawl into, safe from the world … she could never give it up.

  And Lee didn’t have a pot to piss in. It was horrible to think, but money was the bottom line. And she almost lost it all that weekend in Shelton. A stupid mistake, a love letter she had forgotten to destroy, written at the start of their affair. How stupid!

  In one way, at least, Jonathan’s accident was a boon—it kept his mind off her infidelity.

  Christ, I’m a mess.

  She was so confused by her life that the world seemed to be a madly churning whirlpool, opening into a dark abyss that threatened to suck her down so that whatever she was, what little insignificant part of Angela Lynch actually existed, would be forever snuffed out, forgotten and buried.

  3

  Dr. Benjamin Rossini, head neurosurgeon at Montgomery Hospital, watched with quiet approval as Joseph Moyer, a second year resident, meticulously scrubbed over the stainless steel sinks in OR9.

  Rossini liked Moyer: young and aggressive, he displayed an inherent respect for the value of careful routine. So many of the residents were ready to march through the Hallowed Halls of Medicine while ignoring the details, and in brain surgery to ignore the details was to play Russian roulette—sooner or later you would catch the bullet.

  Rossini finished adjusting his blue scrub pants. Turning from the sink, he waited for the circulating nurse to dress him with gown and surgical gloves, his soft blue eyes surveying the room. As usual when he operated, the place was crammed with bodies. Grouped on one side of the tiled, windowless room was a trio of technicians who were carefully monitoring their vital signs equipment. The technicians were overseen by a fourth man, Dr. Philip Thomco, the anesthesiologist Rossini loved to hate. It was Giovinco’s job to bring the patient as close to death as possible without actually killing him, a job ideally suited for a Sicilian, Rossini decided. The pressures of an anesthetist were unique—they quite literally held life and death in their hands; a slight turn of a valve at the wrong moment could usher in fatality—and for this Rossini could excuse the arrogant, skittish behavior of most … as long as they did their job well. And as far as he was concerned, Giovinco was not only a lout, but a questionable man to rely on in the operating theater.

  He turned his attention to Robbin Lipinski, a short spark plug of a woman, his favorite scrub nurse. She was busy taking a physical inventory of every instrument and towel that would be used for the operation. He knew that she, at least, would provide a boost for the strange sense of spiritual malaise that seemed to afflict him from the moment he woke, wincing from the arthritic pain in his back, earlier that morning. Her professionalism and energy were contagious and on this day it helped to be motivated by those around him.

  Just inside the room, huddled in the background around a video screen, a half-dozen students and young residents gathered to watch the operation firsthand. To learn from the master, Rossini thought, frowning.

  Finally, Rossini looked at the reason everyone had gathered—the silent shape lying behind sterile green drapes. A face, a shaved scalp, a mouth bulging with a ventilator. A body, with clear plastic tubes extending from it, carrying urine away, bringing anesthesia in. A body that would, in a very short time, be further reduced to a small red hole in a white skull.

  Jonathan Lynch.

  Rossini’s mind drifted. A voice from the not-too-distant past rang coldly in his mind. “What came first, Benjamin?” his father asked. “The chicken or the egg?”

  “Are we ready yet, Doctor?”

  Giovinco’s impatient voice interrupted his thoughts. Rossini slowly rested his eyes on the man; there was something predatory about him. The sharp nose, the thick black mustache, the wet, slicked-back hair glued to a pointed scalp, the deep brown eyes like black ice. The man exuded hostility.

  “We have no music,” said Rossini after a moment. “How can we work without music, Philip?”

  The anesthesiologist glared at him. Rossini turned casually to the circulating nurse. “Judy, I’m in the mood for Vivaldi.”

  “Four Seasons?”

  “Great.”

  Seconds later, music filtered through the OR. Rossini nodded in Moyer’s direction and the two of them approached the still body on the table. Moyer positioned himself to the right of the
body. Rossini gave him a thumbs-up sign, then turned to the students and began his monologue.

  “Jonathan Lynch is a forty-year-old man in excellent physical condition who suffered a mild concussion from a freak accident in August. Almost immediately afterward he began to suffer from severe facial spasms of increasing duration and pain. In October he came to us after conventional treatment failed. An angiogram clearly indicated pathology of the right hemisphere in and around the area of the fifth carneal nerve. A classic case of trigeminal neuralgia.”

  As he spoke. Dr. Moyer cut into Jonathan Lynch’s scalp, his scalpel making an elegant slice—a gleaming, satin-red zipper.

  “Our job,” continued Rossini, “is to isolate the pressure on the facial nerve at the base of the brain stem and through vascular decompression relieve the cause of the spasms.”

  “How long does an operation of this nature last?” said one of the students.

  Rossini narrowed his eyes, the displeasure evident in his voice. “What time is it now?”

  “Uh … 8:20.”

  “Jot it down,” he admonished. “When we’re finished, look at your watch again and subtract. That’s how long it will take.”

  Everyone laughed and the student who asked the question shrugged his shoulders, embarrassed.

  Robbin Lipinski detected the cold edge in his putdown—she knew his work habits better than anyone. “How are we today, Doctor?” she asked, her lively green eyes staring a hole through him.

  He forced a smile. “Fine, Robbin.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.” Rossini turned back to the student who asked the question, deciding to soften the blow. He spoke in his customary soft voice, more for Robbin’s benefit than anything.

  “Every operation, like every person, is different. Some go by fast, without complications. Others last an eternity. The rule, no matter what, is to make sure what you do is right for the patient, regardless of time.”