Ad Nauseam - By C. W. LaSart Page 0,9

hand across the wound. “Nothing. It’s just a spider bite, that’s all.” She turned so he couldn’t see. “It doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

“Well, you need to go to a doctor tomorrow. It looks awful!”

Susan knew Bill was right; but, she wouldn’t be going to see any doctor. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she felt oddly defensive of her spider bite. She should’ve been more disturbed by the fact that the crater had doubled in size, now big enough to admit the tip of her pinky finger, its edges grey and withered. But the flesh around it had turned a mottled black and green that she found strangely beautiful.

“All right,” she said at last, humoring him. “I’ll call first thing in the morning.”

***

The next day Susan ate a fly.

One moment, it was just flying around, and the next it was crunching between her teeth, bitter guts bursting on her tongue. She hadn’t even realized her own intentions when she plucked it out of the air and popped it into her mouth. She waited in horror for the nausea to come, but it never did. Instead, to her amazement, her stomach growled and her appetite returned with a vengeance.

What at odd development, she thought, though she felt no real alarm. Indeed, her nerves seemed more steady with every hour that ticked by. So what if she had enjoyed eating the fly. Many cultures ate insects as a staple of their diet. She had read about African villages where kids carried around enormous roasted grasshoppers on sticks, licking and crunching them like lollipops. She spent much of the remainder of that afternoon hunting and consuming bugs with the same vigor that she had cleaned the house the day before.

She searched every corner of the house for insects, looking in all of the dark places that they liked to hide, even eating the dusty remains of long-dead moths, littering the window-sills. The dead ones were tasteless, but fresh moths had a wonderful plumpness to them, their guts sweet and gritty in her mouth.

The next day, some of Susan’s teeth fell out. Just the top canines, but it was still a bit frightening at first. They came out bloodless, replaced by sharp, dark fangs curving out from her gums, which excited her for reasons she still didn’t understand. She found that if she concentrated really hard, she could make a clear fluid shoot out of them. When she bit her tongue, it went numb and functionless for over an hour.

Fascinating!

The changes came fast over the next few weeks, but Susan was able to hide them from Bill with ease. He was spending more time at work everyday, and though they still slept in the same bed, they no longer made love. This absence of intimacy allowed Susan to hide the changes to her body by sleeping in her housecoat. She grew more detached from her old life as the days passed. She found herself hurrying off the phone whenever one of her daughters would call. Only a few short weeks ago these same calls would have been the highlight of her day.

Susan knew she should be afraid of the changes, should be seeking help for the uncontrollable shift in her nature, but she had a hard time feeling anything but joy and excitement. The sheer exhilaration that she felt overshadowed the lesser feelings of anxiety and concern. A curious detachment, supplementing the joy, made it impossible for her to worry about such things.

She found she just couldn’t be bothered by the more mundane aspects of life. All Susan wanted to do was lay in the empty tub, naked, and stroke her changing abdomen, giddy with excitement when she first felt the hard ridges wriggling beneath the skin, waiting to emerge. The foreign parts hiding beneath the surface of her skin, felt sharp and restless, eager to complete the metamorphosis. Her skin was becoming transparent, allowing hints of black to show through as the appendages pressed against her flesh from the inside.

Her new legs emerged early one evening. The skin of her abdomen had stretched tight and shiny, before it split with a sound like cloth tearing. It was extremely painful, but Susan was brave, clenching her teeth as well as she could around the oversized fangs in her mouth. She barely made a sound as each pair of black, chitinous legs erupted from her sides. There was no blood, only shriveled flaps of white skin left hanging like streamers.

She was becoming complete. She knew the