I rummaged through the dumpster, looking for anything that could be useful back at tent camp below the underpass. Leaky milk cartons. Wet cardboard boxes. Moldy bread. Dirty diapers. Another wasted effort through the discarded crap. Until I spotted something rather unusual. A jar with a label on it.
Soothing Gel: Apply To Your Skin To Ease The Pain Of Being You
My nineteen-year-old body felt like it was sixty. Achy joints. The shakes. Sleep deprivation. All the joys of homelessness wrapped in a bow-tied life of misery and day-to-day survival. High school dropout, the only thing on my resume. No drug addiction or alcohol dependency though, so at least I had that going for me. My parents knew I was a loser. They kicked me to the curb as soon as I was of legal age. Told me to hold down a job for more than a week before visiting them again. But no company keeps you around when you steal from them. A habit of mine with no end in sight. Whether it was slipping a twenty in my pocket from the cashier drawer or grabbing my tent neighbor’s sandwich when he was sleeping, my refusal to follow the law kept me in my place on the concrete.
I sat cross-legged in my tent and opened the jar. Dug my fingers into the clear sanitizer-like gel and applied it liberally to my shoulders. That feeling you got when you were a kid and jumped into a ball pit. The overwhelming joy and bliss and ecstasy. That feeling coursed through me. I took another handful of the gel and rubbed it along my arms and legs and even on my face. Coated in euphoria, my eyes shut and soaked it in. All my worries just a distant memory of the past.
When I opened my eyes, I felt rested, re-energized, and at peace with who I was. But an intense feeling of hunger developed, causing me to jolt up and dig through my plastic bags for food. I downed the scraps, but the cravings remained.
The gel slid down my forehead and stretched across my eyes like a piece of gum. I floundered around trying to remove it, but it solidified over eyes, sealing them in darkness. The gel made its way into my mouth and wrapped around my tongue like a blanket. I chomped down on my fingers, biting into the bone, slurping up my human skin like it was a spaghetti noodle.
A neighbor heard me thrashing around and opened my tent, screaming at the top of his lungs at my appearance. My entire body in a cocoon of gel. I continued to stuff my mouth with myself, peeling skin and swallowing it down. The neighbor tried to wrestle off the gel, but I pulled him forward and took a chunk of his nose. He stormed out, yelling for help.
When I woke up in the hospital, forty percent of the skin on my body had been removed, digested. A well-dressed man walked into my room at one point and took a sample of the gel, placing it in a small canister. With a sly smirk, he assured me he would get to the bottom of this and find out what happened.
My parents moved me back in with them. They’ve been keeping me fed, but the hunger never goes away. I need more than they can provide. I need more of me.