Unladen

CW: Gore, insects, discussion of mental health

It began when I started waking up at night. Almost invariably, I would blame my jolt to awareness on the weather – early spring storms that wept impotently in the sunken pre-dawn, the staccato of falling rain like an itch at the base of my skull. The watery morning light would bring little relief; only the realisation that I had somehow wasted time staring at my phone or a book or the insides of my own eyelids instead of sleeping and now I had to suffer the consequences. The day would pass in a kind of insipid haze, my eyes aching as if I’d opened them too long under water, and then I’d find myself standing at my bedroom door, yearning to be unaware again for more than four hours at a time.

Months slipped by. My skin became sallow and grey and my hair turned brittle and greasy. Boxes of sleeping tablets and camomile tea jostled for space in the kitchen cabinets and Jules started to make noises about seeing a doctor. I tried not to worry. I’d had fits of odd symptoms before and had trained myself not to respond, as if my body were a toddler throwing a tantrum and things would go back to normal if I ignored it. As autumn shivered its way into winter, I’d convinced myself I was coping, that four hours could be an optimal amount of sleep if I playacted at it. Then the swallows started singing.

When I was a small girl, swallows were my favourite animals. I remember almost bursting with anticipation each spring and summer, waking every morning and straining to hear their curious chittering calls, watching the wide blue sky for their forked tails and red throats. After the swallows arrived I’d spend my afternoons in the garden, lying on my back in the grass made prickly by the summer heat, entranced by the way they swooped and whirled overhead. They were graceful and beautiful, and I was neither, so I loved them. I resented the end of swallow season when it came; I could never identify a single bird just by looking, never knew if the same ones came back each year, and yet I felt as though a close friend was moving away to some distant and unreachable new address. For a time, I suppose that was closer to being true than not; a flock of birds can be a good friend when human ones are difficult to come by. Even as I got older and lost the depth of my obsession, swallow season still had its hold on me, and as regularly and unconsciously as the tides I would begin looking to the skies as the last scraps of winter vanished. This was how I knew that swallows could not be singing outside my bedroom window while I lay desperately awake in the small hours of a wet November morning.

The obvious first response was to dismiss it. I was sure, though I hadn’t done any reading on the subject, that poor sleep could cause hallucinations, and Jules really would make me see a doctor if I told him. For some nights after the first incident I heard nothing more, and it felt like a petty victory. It was only when I had heard the birdsong for three nights in a row and was getting up to check whether there really was something outside that I let the façade slip.

“What are you doing, love?” Jules’ baritone was thick with interrupted sleep.

I couldn’t think of a lie quickly enough. “There are swallows outside the window.” I stumbled over the words, a stage actor with the wrong script. “Can you hear them?”

Jules was silent for a moment, and in the murky darkness of the room I couldn’t tell if he was listening or had gone back to sleep. “No,” he said at last, and his voice was clearer now, more concerned. “Why don’t you come back to bed? Try to rest, even if you can’t sleep.” It was what he always said.

The next morning my eyes were different. I had grown used to the bags underneath them, the burst blood vessels that limned the edges of my iris, but now the irises themselves looked darker – a muddy brown where they had once been hazel. I resisted the urge to take this new malady to the internet. It would only confirm that I had something to worry about, something new to obsess over. Despite my good intentions, I still spent part of the day inspecting myself in the mirror the way an entomologist might study a particularly unusual insect, cataloguing the old familiar flaws and searching for new blemishes as yet unknown to science. The fifth time I left my computer to stare at myself in the bathroom, Jules sighed theatrically and asked me what was wrong.

“Do you think my eyes look different?” I felt ashamed for even asking, for admitting that I was already taking the first tentative steps down the panic spiral.

Jules moved me so that my face was illuminated by the office window. The light was diffuse and grey, and reminded me of old dishwater. Jules steadied my face with his hands and stared at me, unblinking. This close, I remember how handsome he was, with his high cheekbones and wide, blue eyes. I hadn’t thought of him in that way for a while.

“I can’t see anything” he said after he’d spent a full minute looking at me. “But if you’re that worried, you should see a doctor.”

I nodded, noncommittal.

Jules and I had lived in this house for just over four years. It had been his idea to move, and his career in salmon conservation that had determined our new home would be in Scotland. My bullshit admin job allowed for remote work, I had few friends who would miss me, and Jules had said that it would be an adventure, that a change of scenery would be good for me after my last episode. I didn’t have the stamina or the patience to argue. I had told him since in rare moments of passion that I hated it here, hated the cold and dark of winter, the way I never seemed to be able to get dry. He had told me that I would grow to love it, and I hadn’t, but I didn’t know what the alternative was, either. The irony was that Jules’ work was mostly remote too, so I was altogether unsure what I was doing here; couldn’t we have shared an office and avoided talking to each other for most of the day where we used to live, too?

The swallows were still singing, and Jules still couldn’t hear them, when my face began to change. This time I could feel the worry beginning to consume me, a black hole in my chest that threatened to suck the rest of me in. My jawbone felt harder, more protruding, my chin pointier and hook-sharp. I took endless photos of myself in profile, scrutinised them, then deleted them in disgust. When I couldn’t sleep at night I’d run my hands across my mandible, checking and re-checking for new growth, feeling the hardness of something growing underneath. In my weakest moments I let Jules do it too (the most intimate we’d been in months), only for him to insist I looked the same. In the end, it was the way he looked at me that produced a call to the doctors’ surgery; all I thought I could see was disappointment.

The consultation was an exercise in humiliation. By this point, my eyes were a dark, dappled brown with the pupil barely visible, and stretch marks had appeared on my chin and cheeks where the skin was forced to accommodate their new shape. The doctor, a genteel man in his forties, performed the usual checks while he asked about my past medical history. I kept my descriptions vague, even though I knew he could read the story for himself - all of the tests I’d had in response to some new neurosis, a farcical play written in medical notes. I don’t enjoy this any more than you do, I wanted to tell him, but talking more than was necessary made my jaw ache and my teeth clack together uncomfortably. I watched the doctor take blood, and for a moment was unusually pleased that it still looked red, like blood should. He explained what he was testing for as blood spattered from my arm, through the needle and into three different vials, and I nodded along, hoping that I looked interested but not too interested. It was always like this, a stilted performance to an audience of one where the goal was to come across as concerned rather than delusional. I sat with my hands in my lap and kept nodding while the doctor gave his verdict.

“It’s probably nothing,” he said, and I could tell that he hoped he’d reassured me. “The insomnia is my only real concern, and I can refer you for talking therapy if you’re happy for me to do so…” He trailed off, probably because I had started crying.

I gestured to my face with one hand while I used the other to swipe at my tears. “What about all of this?”

“I can’t see anything on your face that indicates any kind of growth or abnormality.” The doctor’s voice took on a gentle, avuncular tone. “I think this is something that talking to a specialist could really help with.”

I hiccupped, the tears coming faster. “I know something is wrong,” I said, and was struck with the sudden urge to take his hands and hold them to my face so he could feel what I did. Instead, I watched him make the referral and sloped out of the treatment room like a scolded child.

November was on its death bed and December waited in the wings. Driving rain made the entire house sound as though it was trapped in a washing machine. Black, patchy mould began its annual ascent of the bedroom wall; Jules said it was because that side of the house saw less sunlight, but I had a suspicion that it was my fault somehow. The swallows kept singing at night, and their crackling, trilling melody was clear to me even against the wind and the hail that turned the washing machine into a snare drum. I had shut up about my worries, and Jules seemed happier for it. The screaming toddler tantrum that was my body kept on getting louder, though. My skin was beginning to turn pinkish and raw-looking, spackled with goosebumps even when the heating was on and I sat next to a radiator. The only part of me that had taken a different path was my feet, where the skin had turned itself scaly and tough. I didn’t try exfoliating for fear that it wouldn’t work. My upper jaw had started to protrude to meet its sibling, and my cheekbones looked more sunken as a result. Worst of all, though, were the feathers.

I had thought them to be strange, aggressive pimples at first – raised, scabrous growths that erupted one morning along the backs of my arms. I had seen a video of a man removing a botfly once and I wondered if these spots were the signs of something similar, innumerable parasites bursting to the surface all at once. That night, before the swallows woke me, I dreamed of my abdomen caving in, a black abyss in my centre where the larvae were so thick that they formed their own writhing, pulsating mass, a surrogate stomach. When I checked myself in the wan December light, the growths had formed spines instead, and over the course of a day the spines emerged and unfurled like tiny newborn butterflies until I had a fine layer of gossamer blue feathers coating my triceps.

It took me a week to show Jules. I wore long sleeves in bed, undressed only when I was sure he couldn’t see me. I wasn’t sure which prospect was worse: that he wouldn’t believe I was growing feathers, or that he would. He had never really believed me when I felt ill before, I realised, even before the insomnia and the swallows, and the idea that he might start now was terrifying to me. In that week my skin continued to pinken, and more minuscule feathers clawed their way to the surface of my skin, itching the entire way. There would come a point, I realised, where I would no longer be able to hide what was happening.

I told him over penne arrabbiata. It was one of the rare meals I had had the energy to cook, though I had had to open the tiny kitchen window to get rid of the smoke from the onions I’d burnt, and I was so nervous that I poured too many chili flakes into the tomato sauce. While I waited for Jules to finish I ran my hands up and down my sleeves, almost enjoying the feeling of the feathers being bent this way and then that. The new feathers in the small of my back were still unravelling themselves and I worried that sitting would become difficult once they were stiff. It took me a long time to realise that Jules was staring at me.

“You’re doing it again,” he said, and I knew what he meant. He’d said it before, and more and more recently. I was ruminating, and now he would want to know what I was ruminating about.

“I have something I want to show you.” My voice had become hoarse from underuse and slightly slurred from the way my mouth had changed shape. If Jules had noticed, he hadn’t said anything, and he didn’t say anything now. I took that as a signal to get it over with, and pulled my top off over my head. “I’m growing something out of my skin,” I said quickly, and moved into the lamplight for him to see. My chest tightened to the extent that I was sure I was wheezing as I drew in a breath.

Jules peered at me, and I watched him, desperate for some sign as to what he would say next. He touched my arms and my back, running his fingers along the feathers. I stopped breathing altogether.

At last, he spoke. “The hair that’s growing on your arms is really weird. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He didn’t sound overly perturbed, and I half wondered if he was just taking the revelation well.

“It’s not hair. It’s feathers,” I rasped out.

“Margot. Come on.” The disappointed look was back with a vengeance. “I’m not saying you’re crazy, but it’s a good thing you’re on a waiting list for therapy. You aren’t growing feathers – it’s probably a side effect of the insomnia that’s made your body hair go all strange.”

I wondered if drowning felt similar to this, the immense pressure in my chest, the pain of the next inhale. The roaring of my heartbeat certainly sounded like the ocean. I could hear the swallows again too, as if they were in the same room as us.

“You never believe me,” I whispered, talking mostly to myself. I could feel an awful rippling beneath my skin, and wondered distantly if my grub dream had been a premonition, if I was about to fall into a pile of wriggling parasites and leave only my hollowed-out skin behind. My jaw ached ferociously and made an odd creaking noise, like the mast of a ship caught in a terrible storm. My toes were doing something awfully painful, as if my feet were being forced into shoes made for a different animal.

When the rippling sensation crescendo-ed, I expected to feel pain; the only thing I really felt was freedom, as if this form had been with me all along, from childhood, from birth. It was the delicious sensation of taking off a heavy, rain-sodden jacket at the end of a long and frustrating day and finding that your clothes beneath are still dry and comfortable. From somewhere within myself I watched Jules’ handsome face contort in confusion, then in horror. Everything seemed larger somehow, and it took me several moments to realise that I now occupied a much smaller body. An acrid, metallic tang hung in the air, and red, gory globs coated much of the floor and wall. I was perched – perched? – on the table where minutes ago I’d been eating pasta. I hazarded a glance at the dining room window, knowing what I would see reflected back: a small bird with a forked tail and a red throat. There was no fear, no lamentation for my lost form. Jules was screaming, but I paid him little attention. I flew for the kitchen window – and it was as if I’d always been waiting to fly – leaving behind the house, and Jules, and my own strange little cage.