Trembling With Fear 3-30-25

Carcinoma, by John Dougherty

It scared me how much I wanted to be with you.

Maybe all lovers feel that: the desire to sink into one another until your borders dissolve, until “you” and “I” are devoured by “us.” Maybe there’s something about an affair — the forced distance, the faucet either running at full blast or standing still without a drip — that makes the need sharper, more desperate.

I wonder if that’s why it started, if my need drew you like a wolf sniffing blood on the wind. We met at the university, where you strolled the archives like you owned them and I was a lowly research assistant specializing in occult texts. I was the only person you’d ever met who shared your peculiar interests; you were the only one I’d met who believed it was all real.

We were in the building named after your grandfather when you put your hand on my knee. I didn’t pull away. You said, We’re the same. Meaning: our obsession with knowledge, our desire to peel reality back and find what squirms in the darkness underneath. But it was more than that. You saw that we were lonely in the same way.

At first it was about knowledge, not sex. We’d both worked small magics before – mild divination, tiny curses on business rivals and dismissive professors – but feared exploring the deeper mysteries. Were you afraid? It’s hard to imagine, but there must have been a reason you never tried alone.

Even now, it stings to realize there are things about you I don’t know.

You’d tell your wife you were working late, and we’d meet in your apartment, the one with the real Degas and the chairs too expensive to sit on. I brought the university’s copy of the Liber Carneus, its leathery pages reeking with age and madness. You brought the sacramental objects, often wet and warm. I never asked how you got them.

And we would change.

It’s not easy or pretty: your bones creak and stretch or go hollow, your organs shift around, and itching patches of fur or feathers or scales sprout across your skin. But when it’s over, you experience the world in a whole new way. We scampered through walls on the nimble feet of mice, glided like shadows above the pulsing city as owls, stalked the alleys as cats, all muscle and teeth. We basked in music the human ear can’t catch, learned secrets that only the beasts know.

We had to strip before we changed, of course, to avoid being smothered by our clothes. I thought you wanted me. I knew I wanted you. In retrospect, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.

Once it did, we became more interested in exploring each other than the world. We made love as foxes, raccoons, falcons. We discovered new horizons of intimacy, unknown to human bodies with their clumsy limbs and dull senses. My favorite? I know it’s strange, but when we were banana slugs: folded into each other, nothing but atoms between us.

When you killed me, you were in your own body. Your hands around my throat, your muscles constricting to cinch off my airway, your fingernails digging crescents into my skin. Your wife had come by the university asking questions. I never would have said anything, but you’d never known consequences before, and you were scared. Your hands hurt me, yes, but even worse was realizing you didn’t trust me. After everything, you didn’t know me.

The apartment was prepared for the ritual, and I could feel the magical energies swirling. I groped around my brain, buzzing with frantic insects, for the words of the incantation. As my vision blurred, I mouthed them over the thinnest hiss of air.

After I vanished, you stomped around my clothes in a rage. Maybe you thought I’d become a mouse or a cockroach. Maybe that’s all I ever was to you: a pest that would eventually need extermination. But I wasn’t skittering around the floor, dodging your Louis Vuittons. I’d become much smaller.

I am a patch of cells, clinging to your left lung. I didn’t even know it was possible: to become something alive, but without a mind or a body. I was thinking small and I was thinking breathe, and now here I am. Maybe I could have changed back if you hadn’t torn apart our carefully-constructed ritual space. If I tried now, maybe I would kill us both, bursting from your chest in a horrible parody of birth.

Don’t worry. I have a better idea.

The cells I became don’t have thoughts, simply an impulse: to grow. I spread. I’m still spreading. I embrace your cells and then move on, leaving them gray and cold in my wake. With enough time, I imagine, I could replace every cell in your body, and then, maybe, I’d have the closeness I always wanted. But you don’t have that long.

You have a bad cough that won’t go away. You went to your doctor (I’ve taken enough of you that I can see through your eyes, hear through your ears). They scanned you, but when I changed I also thought invisible, and so they couldn’t see me. 

But I’m there.

This morning you coughed up blood. When you looked in the mirror, your eyes were fragile with fear. Maybe it was just finally encountering a problem you couldn’t buy your way out of. Or maybe you realized, at last, where I’d gone. 

Do you understand now? Do you realize that your body is a haunted house? And when you reach a shaking hand up to wipe away the bright red that speckles your lips, do you recognize it as my last kiss?