Metastasize 

Caleb Hipple 

David closed his eyes hard enough to see colors. All stimuli. Almost no presence. Measured breaths between sips of lukewarm tap water. The heat of vomit rose from the sink and worked into the sweat ringing his neck.   

The vault opener had marked the coffin’s end with mud to indicate where her head pointed. The pipe behind the faucet grunted.  

  The motor whirred. His wife lowered into the ground. He pressed his finger against a nick on his chin. Behind a sweating pane of glass, the sky, a slate sidewalk, beckoned the idea of slick steps, of falling down the hill and rolling until his neck could not unturn. He poured the cup into the sick. His sick formed a ring at the sink’s edge.  

  The pastor hemmed and nodded. “Give her, o Lord, your peace and let your eternal light shine upon her.” David flipped the switch and darkness snapped back in. Lightning severed the sky.  

  When their daughter died, almost two weeks ago, she was barely noticeable beneath the daisy-addled sheet. While Leah sobbed, David smiled and pursed back the tears; he needed everything to be a joke, for her to jump from beneath the covers and try to scare him. He had watched the attending physician stare at the clock and write on a chart. His ears beeped less as he exited their house.  

Light bled through the sky like wet charcoal. Helicopter seeds flitted from a red maple. He reached for one and past his fingers and the horizon, he saw the back of his head. The dry mulch crunched and frayed around his feet as he propped a photo, edges fluffed with wear, against the tree. Heat wrapped around his bare ankles, yet he felt immensely cold. In the picture, Leah held an impossibly large stomach, with Madeline inside and then something smaller than an eye’s sparkle in her. He’d wrap his arms around her from behind, squeezing her hand three times. Rub her belly to produce a kick. Maybe he’d brush his teeth and wide-mouth blather through a conversation, or nod minutely at her while shaving. Razor blades from his subscription service sat open by her, and she laid open by him. He adjusted a kitchen chair beneath the tree’s largest limb.  

A few steps forward; they weren’t real, just tests. His toe lost the pressure of earth beneath it—is this one tight enough, giggle. Sitting on the chair, he held his phone and watched a video on how to tie a noose. He struggled, even after clicking through the multiple suicide hotline warnings, to make an efficient knot. If he jumped up from the height of two chairs, he’d maybe reach the branch. Tie the knot. Throw it; an adventurer exploring bravely into the new world. History in the making. Mosquitos buzzed. The loop felt like a child’s arms around his neck, and he felt like dying so he stepped off.  

Peacock-brilliance. Like welder sparks, like struck matches, veins in the back of your eyes. All David could think of was how to justify what he had just seen pierce the sky, something beyond a super-heated lump larger and larger as it tailed towards his house, his tree, him, but at the same time, just that, and the oxygen jammed in his neck and rushed through him, anywhere but his lungs. Everything squeezed. He held his own hand. Whatever it was came crashing, shining like a snowball locked in a sun’s ray, grazing the rope and David’s leg. He fell, and a few teeth dislodged into the soil.  

Each synapse fired, comprehending something he hadn’t seen in all the thirty-four years. A cannonball, then a child splashing; frightened pigeons with puffy wings, smoke rising from where it shouldn’t be. Memories paraded his head in infinite speed to mark what he had seen. So, he breathed. His chest pierced itself with a fear not unlike falling. The dewy grass steamed, vapors escaping and screaming.   

His arms could do nothing but hide his head. Chemically blood, salt and heat in his mouth and the fright of no stop in bullet-speed; oh, he hated himself for killing himself without even a real try. Leah’s death had a purpose, had some thought behind it. He regretted ever being a father, regretted that thought, and wished his daughter would be behind an open eyelid, that she was swinging from a tire attached to the rest of the rope and unafraid. These thoughts leaked out from his lips, from the gash in his leg. The piss soaking into the wound.  

He coughed, a tooth dangling in his mouth. Motes of ash rose and smeared against his face. The heat wavered from the meteor’s surface and like a pressed hand on television static, stopped. Around a blob. A clump of seafoam, mossing the photograph that drifted at its surface, gathering scum. The air thickened with heat yet thinned without oxygen. Seagulls hovered nearby. Heat lightning cracked against large stones, miles away. The birds fled. He stood and thunder ricocheted along the cape and his eardrums throbbed and blood stuck to his leg hair.   

His stomach made no movement, no feeling came but for the superheated queasiness surrounding his organs. His house is 2560 square feet. He has a Honda Civic with 170 thousand miles. His wife and child are dead. Why is Madeline where the blob was. “No.” No.  

  It crawled lizard-like, arms and legs working on sides rather than upper and lower halves, up the tree and wrapped the limb. No belly button. Her hands pawed at her stomach as she struggled to stay put, but no scratches surfaced; the creature lacked fingernails. Her breasts, the size of daffodils, bared no nipples, and her eyes registered only fear. With shoulders broader than an eleven-year-olds. Hair tangled around wafer-thin seeds and the burgundy leaves. It smiled without teeth, then strained its neck so hard, forceful enough to make other facial movements, oh it flicked between every emotion he could register and ones David had only ever felt, had been unable to show. It looked scared.  

David fell to his backside, and the child struggled to stay in the branches. The sky crackled. She screamed and dropped against a rock, stood slowly as if to test her asleep limbs, her knees unbending until the rigidity lessened. Crawling from the all-surrounding sound and now a few paces from David, she leaned in and reached for a gash at his head, twitching forward with minute motions. Looking side to side, full-faced and stiff, she flinched as David met his face with her palm.  

Deerlike, mouselike, whatever animal David thought of was and was not this thing, but she removed her bloody hand at the same pace she had approached, and squeezed her eyes shut; up close, both eyelids, vertical, rotated to horizontal as her proboscis snaked and wrapped her hand. He could not tell if she looked like Madeline or if that’s what he wanted. But wasn’t it just close enough…? From her collarbone, the torn edge of a photo poked from inside her skin. She did not see the rock David picked up with his other hand to crash against her skull.  

She nursed her palm. No resistance when David scooped her up. In the dark of a tarp, tied close with a charred rope, this was when David realized as he carried her to the kitchen table, he had felt the bundle lighten until she was the size of Madeline. The Before Madeline.   

After Madeline?  

  Red brine leaked from within and onto the wood. Inside her head, he imagined nuclear reactions occurring at the speed of light within and without one another, green tadpoles chasing each other and nibbling Polaroid fragments and oh-negative donuts. What had he bore witness to? Created?  

Blood pasted his legs together. He undid the noose but did not open the bag; if she was awake, she’s old enough. Jesus Christ. Her skull cracked, the sound low as a campfire. The little helixes wriggling, filling her body like solemn nurses do hospital rooms. He hoped she knew that the darkness wasn’t something to be afraid of. Her shoulders had narrowed. Her hair reached her belly button. David took a knife from the kitchen sink and slit his palm, holding it over the bag and waiting until he had dripped enough blood to make an alien human.  

The tooth in his mouth had ceased bleeding, and David didn’t know whether to worry about that or not. He watched himself in a homemade-knickknack mirror atop the mantle and plucked the nerve like a harp, then ripped the fucker. His head hit the coffee table’s edge as he fell. On the rug, in a pooling warmth, he allowed himself to rest.   

The daughter-thing peeked from the table, leapt, then straddled his chest. She took the tooth and placed it in against her tongue and swallowed, grinning far too wide. Tongue-proboscis wrapping the inside of her mouth like cucumber ivy. She grinned and shifted her cheeks side to side, finally spitting something between the spots in David’s vision. His mouth felt hot and wet again. Teeth pushed through her gums as she studied his face, most likely continuing to even after his eyes shut.  

He dreamt about a cat burglar coming into the house and stealing his daughter and his cat. Everybody laughed in the end. Sensations role-called. His temples pounded him into alertness: a mouth on his. He pushed her from his chest and wiped his lips, expecting blood but seeing only black spots, like confetti. The blood must have dried into little fish food flakes.   

“Daddy,” she said, tilting her head to the left. It cracked eight times. “Can I have some milk?”   

  David nodded, for his own sake, and crawled behind the couch then ran to the basement.  

With the door pressed against his back, he slid and pounded his fists against his skull. In rapid movements he slammed his thighs and balled his muddy shirt, biting and sobbing into it. Blades of grass rubbed into his sore gums. Footsteps, creaky ones from the hallway, so he ran down the stairs and paced, focusing on the dryer, all he could think about was the loose change that had rattled inside the day prior because that was the only thing that made a fucking iota of sense in this situation. It didn’t. He should have just died, right?  

His tooth. In crime documentaries, they find you with your dental records. How much information is in a tooth? How much of David is in his molar—in the daughter-thing? He shook while filling a laundry detergent cup with water, then dashed it lethally to the side: it hadn’t died in the atmosphere, so a splash of water to its face wouldn’t fix anything. Knock. This isn’t a movie. He skirted to the other side of the room, clutching a claw tooth hammer.   

“David?” The doorknob at the stair’s top jiggled.   

A half-window, one that Leah snuck through in their early years when they couldn’t remember keys, framed the wall above the sink. David knew he couldn’t fit. “Yes?” He scrubbed his face into the shirt. “Yes, honey?”  

“I’m sorry I asked for a drink.” He listened to her press against the door and slide to the ground. “When are you and… Mommy, gonna make dinner?”  

David bit into his knuckle and rocked against the dryer. “I don’t know.” He repeated this to himself, faster and quieter each time. He knew he could never hurt her, running upstairs to watch her through the crack.   

“Oh. I’ll wait.” Her fingers wiggled beneath the door, and before David could move his foot, her pinky tapped his shoe. She giggled.  

David left, and opened the cabinet, and poured some Borax, beating the box to loosen the clumps, into a cup. He mixed this with water and stirred it with two fingers, then swallowed it. His throat burned and he gagged.  

“Daddy,” she said, inquisitively. “Dad?” She tapped the handle, then rattled it in a rhythm. Slow, then. Little locks wriggled in the door. She made no more sounds because the door opened.  

David retched into the sink. Outside, the sky had cleared some but oily darkness spread in the clearest parts. His eyes closed, throat burned and blood fringed the bile. Madeline hugged his leg.  

She squeezed him tight enough to make his knee crack. Each cough took away more and more until an overwhelming neutrality settled into his chest. Within this, hangnails of thoughts boomeranged, and David wondered why he couldn’t be with his daughter again. She whimpered into his groin. He listened to her inhale.  

“I’m here, Madeline.” His jaw tightened around her name. “Here.” David bent and took her into his arms, ready to live or die.  

“Madeline? Madeline.” She smiled. Her teeth all reached the same length. She looked behind him. “My clothes.”  

“Your clothes.” David hesitated, reaching above, on top of the dryer, to the pile he never thought he’d search. “Get dressed.”  

“Okay, David.” She licked her canines and clapped.  

“Please call me Dad.” Then, “I’ll get you a bath.” The lights in his head hummed. He took her hand, clammy but smooth, and guided her upstairs at a distance. She sat on the toilet lid while the bath filled, and David pressed into the wall. He wanted to ask her, like a stranger, where she was from. “I’ll be out for just a bit.”  

“Why?” She was in front of the door. A spider dangled down from the ceiling between them. David instinctively clapped it.  

“Why would you do that?”  

“What? Oh. I, I don’t know. We just… we do that. Kill bugs. Not anything bigger than a bug, though.”  

“Oh.” She smiled and grabbed his hand with more strength than needed and licked off the guts. He opened her mouth immediately and scraped it off her tongue, then fell to the floor. This is not Madeline; I can’t treat her like this.    

“We don’t kill bigger things, but farmers and hunters do. We eat those, like chicken. Not spiders. You remember that, right?”  

Her stare felt empty, and behind it a desire to be full.  

“But there’s nobody big that kills us.” He felt like he was lying. “So if, if you’re worried I’m going to leave somehow, don’t be worried.” She twitched her lips until frowning. David took her hand, clasped it, and kneeled. “If you think I’m going to leave. If, you think I did leave, or that you left… I’m going to be around. We will.” He realized this moment was real, very much so happening, and the water trickled over the tub’s edge.   

With the drain unplugged for a moment then stopped, she settled into the water until only her nose broke the surface. From the wavering lens of dirt and blood inking towards the top, he watched her. Steam hid the mirror and David felt scared without his reflection. Within the space between her fingers, a filament, billowing like sediment in tea, stretched across the gap and formed a web. Water poured down her nostrils. He felt sick, imagining the swishing of water within his own stomach. She paddled and sent small waves against the faucet, then traced the outline of her hips.  David left to give her privacy.   

  

In the backyard, smoke billowed from the porous surface of the meteor. Something between spent charcoal briquettes and well-used pumice stones, sitting on the tub’s edge in mildew, by an almond-scented shampoo.  

He gave it a wide gait. Through an orifice, the inner core, blinking like the lapse after a yellow light. The tarp from inside fit almost halfway over its top. He washed his hands and the scummy sink. He heard a shower running upstairs and, of all things, worried that Madeline had flooded the upstairs, found some way to ruin things like kids do. Like trying to shave.  

Droplets clung to the plastic liner. Behind it, a figure much larger than Madeline pumped a bottle and reached for its head. David pulled the curtain open, afraid to be fast or slow.   

Leah stared back at him.   

He shut the curtain and left. From his, his, bedroom, he heard the water stop and the rings travel the curtain rod. It entered the room wearing Leah’s clothes and fell on top of him. It placed his hands on its breasts and squeezed control of his hands. David struggled enough to move away but hopefully not to insult. He wanted to know why she looked wrong; she smelled exactly the same. This was the worst part.  

She did not relent. Beneath her sundress was skin as smooth and malleable as an earlobe. David grazed the line where her thigh and groin met, and it too was indistinguishable from the surrounding flesh, the texture unchanging. Images of his daughter’s Barbie came to his mind. He pushed her and rolled to the bed’s edge, flexing his calves enough to induce a Charlie horse, pressing his legs together. The lamp beside them illuminated a picture frame. He saw his wife. The creature grabbed his crotch and squeezed. He felt heat, choking pain of teary God-awfulness in his throat rising against his tingling brainstem. He no longer wanted to die except for the small part of himself that enjoyed this.  

“Now, I’m Leah.” Her eyes flitted across him as if a teleprompter were there, checking him for an understanding. “You want this. I don’t know your thoughts, I am them.” She fell forward against his shoulder, her cheek brushing his. “This is love. I am love. I am yours. I am you.” She rolled in the sheets and waited, burrowed in the duvet.   

She frowned, her face shifting in parts: somewhere, Helen Hunt met Lucille Ball, her lips for a moment Marilyn Monroe’s then tight as Dreyfus’. “I watched you, David.” The alarm clock by the bed crackled. The indicator diodes matched its solid red hue. “I watched everything, for a moment.”   

Behind the eyes she had taken from David, that David had taken from Leah, stars fought their way forward. “What you saw when I crashed, I saw. Your world is, our world is… I can’t be her, exactly. I’ve been trying, though.” An over-boiled pot of expression, she simmered into Leah. She inched towards him, and with teary eyes, smiled. “There’s these little thoughts. Smaller than big ones, and they wriggle around until I give them attention, David, they’re bubbles that gather but won’t pop. I can’t stop thinking, and what I’m thinking is how much you, in human and in animal, want her back.” She traced the veins of his arm.  

“I know.” He didn’t and did, angrily, then fell into her arms. “I know.” He didn’t fear her and couldn’t place why. “We could make this work, though.”  

With her face pressed into his hair, she inhaled.  “Let’s pretend, David,” she whispered.  

A pillow-fort future, but it could be reinforced with the ends of couches, coffee tables, outstretched arms. “Pretend. Even… what all do you know? Remember?” His vision couldn’t steady itself. “You were Madeline, and that’s okay.” David ran his fingers through her hair, the shampoo slick. “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay. You can learn. Did you learn about Leah from my tooth, or the blood, or what—”  

“Leah. I could really be, I really could. There’s much more than man in you, David. I was nothing hours ago, but with your help, your guidance, oh, David, I am her.” Her neck twitched.   

A clock downstairs chimed. “Do you think I deserved what happened?”  

Smiling, smiling smiling smiling; she grinned as if that could be an answer, then opened her mouth and looked down at him with her arms spread in a lack of knowing. In doing so, she knocked a bottle of perfume from the nightstand. To think by himself, at least feet away, he mopped the spill with a pair of underwear. The smell of alcohol and roses made him vomit.   

Inside the pile of undigested church cookies, ink-black tadpoles wriggled. One screamed like boiled lobsters as he pressed it into the floorboard. Leah rolled in the bedsheets and looked at him. She shook her head, and stood. Stepping on the glass and next to David. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Pressed a finger to the nape of his neck. “You killed our kid, David.” He fell into the mess and gave himself permission to go away.  

  

Sunlight settled on the staircase’s landing. Around the corner, she fried bacon on the stove. Clicking the tongs around a flimsy piece, trying to flip it, she worked but each attempt was unsuccessful. She turned toward the table and reached into the pan; her skin sizzled as she adjusted the slice. Satisfied, she sucked her fingers and faced David.  

“Oh. I didn’t even see you there.” She placed her palm on the counter, under a kitchen towel.  

“I don’t remember sleeping.” He settled against the fridge and slid to the floor. “Did you? You did. Well, did you sleep well?” He tucked his foot under his thigh, stomach bulging from last night’s dinner. Couldn’t remember things too well. Backyard Mount Rushmore. Madame President peeling fatback off cast iron. His nose ran.  

She fell beside him, uprighting, then forced her face into his shoulder. “I can’t believe you forgot what today was.” The words ran muffled through his veins as she spoke into his skin.  

David ventured his hand up her neck. The edge of her hair felt like milfoil, slick and fibrous. She hadn’t dried from the night before, the shampoo still oily. “I think we need to talk. Nothing major, just need to go over some things.”  

“It’s not your birthday, is it?” She smiled. When he didn’t return, she tilted her head and smiled larger. “And it’s not my birthday!” She leaned in, kissing him. Pill-like objects rolled from beneath his tongue.  

“What the fuck was that?” He spat onto the floor. “Oh. Oh oh oh.” Notes of vomit worked through his throat. Roses. Screams. His neck ached.  

“David, dearest, dearest David. You need to calm down, you’re right. Let’s talk. Honesty is important in a marriage.” Each word felt tailored. “I didn’t mean that. I know I’m not quite Leah but I’m trying, goddammit, and that’s what marriage is really about, isn’t it David?”  

“No, no. No. I, I never fucking married you. This isn’t you, isn’t cute, you were a ball of fucking slime—”  

She pushed off his chest. “We take offense to that. Those, what did you think, tadpoles? Yes, those are almost near-perfect combinations of your DNA and your perception of”—her face shifted to Madeline’s for a moment—“us.”   

David walked around the counter, Leah opposing him. He ran his tongue against the back of his teeth and felt holes lining the inside of his gums. “That doesn’t matter anymore. I didn’t ask to have kids. I didn’t ask for a second chance, I really didn’t.” His throat hurt for too many reasons. “Even if I did, she wouldn’t do this to me.”  

Her lashes, full, caught tears, yet nothing else changed.  

  “You aren’t even good at being her.” His teeth throbbed. “What the fuck did you do to me? I don’t”—he sucked in breaths—“deserve this.”    

Leah leaped to the countertop. “And why would you say that?”  

David stared at her, and for a moment, it really was Leah. She could be waiting for breakfast as he finished the eggs, contributed to the family… He knew if he just accepted whatever happened now, he could maybe make it out. “She knew things. More than that. Things change. And she knew I changed with them. I sometimes like my bacon chewy.” The smell of burning meat continued to increase. “I am not the same as I was yesterday, but I bet you need to suck the life out of me to figure that out. Some sort of backwards, update? You need me to be anything and pity you. I didn’t let go but I should have.” He felts his bowels loosen.   

“You and I aren’t very different, David.” She sat on the counter, legs spread. “I need a child, too. And you—” She grabbed his throat, pulling downwards. Oblong masses worked through his neck and blocked enough air to scare him. “You got your kid. And you wouldn’t let go. You got your wife back and wouldn’t even sleep with her. You could just accept things as they are. I know what you’re thinking, and I mean that more than others do. I know what you’re thinking. At all times I’ve operated with a David in the back of my head, like… a tumor.” She stepped back. “You can’t get to the knife that fast. I put them in the dishwasher.”  

The green light on the rinse cycle said about twenty-eight minutes left. She shook her head. “David, this all happened so suddenly. So very sudden. We could have made this work—I was willing to make it last. You could get me, and I’d get a chance at having a family. I don’t even want to hurt. I just want to spread. You aren’t some bug that I’ll kill. Your body won’t rupture. It isn’t going to be pleasant.” She clicked her tongue. “And that’s honesty. You’re going to shit your whole insides out, and I can fix that! You have water, hydrogen dioxide, enough for me to fucking bathe in! The things I can do, the magic I can create.  I’ll take care of you, ways people on your planet can’t. You have a cold, dark place just downstairs for us to snuggle up and work through this pain, together. Though, it can’t be worse than what us women go through.”   

David hated how she tried to be some bastardized version of Leah, a woman, fading further and further as much as he tried to hold the photos and make them talk back, but this was the plug to be pulled, goddamnit. The veins in his neck thickened. The smoke alarm went off, and the sound pierced through him but halted at the now egg-shaped mounds in his chest. A cookbook caught fire on the back burner. The open window sucked fluttering ash towards it. “Why can’t we go back,” he coughed, pivoting on one leg.   

She saw this and looked into his eyes, shaking her head. Veins rose to her skin. “You did. Oh, David. I get it now. All humans do is fake, and pretend. I learned from the best pretender there is, the one who pretends he can work the courage up to even kill me. To kill himself.” She tipped the pan to the floor, and grease splashed into his pant legs. The scream reached the bottom of his throat and burst one of the things within him. “You didn’t die last night. This isn’t… what, heaven or hell? I think that’s what you thought.”   

“I can try again.” He scratched the floor. A page tore off and rubbed against the wall. The fire spread to the curtains.  

 “David, you’re dying. Here and now. Want to know why things would have been easier if you did just kill yourself?” The rest of the polyps burst inside him like overboiled eggs. She stood over him. “Because I wouldn’t have had to take a rock to the head. Rather, I’d be in your basement using your body as my breeding ground. I wasn’t lying, by the way. You could have made it. We could have.”   

His veins wriggled. A fire raged at the stove, wallpaper peeling from the room. Sirens blared across the city.  

“Could you stay with me?” He knew something moved inside his chest. “I don’t want to die alone. I don’t want to, want to, want.” The smoke burned in his throat, and the skin from his neck hung.  

She laughed and stopped smiling. Shook her head. Knelt and brushed his hair. “No, David. You’re coming with me.” Before she could lift him, David used everything in him to pull the fridge onto both of them. His ankle cracked. Her’s burst.   

“You. Oh, oh you you you David, we could have been different and better and I’d be her her yes and you’d be David Daddy Dad dead. Stay at home dead.” Flames from a smoldering rug seared her cheeks, which grew back to only liquefy again. “This was all too rushed. Kid back and me back and you a crisp—” She wheezed. Fat streamed from her skin and she lost shape, seeping into the cracked floorboards. “I never lied to you. I wanted so many things, everything you wanted. Fall is coming closer, with trees breaking apart but they come back.” She stared at something he couldn’t see. “I don’t want to die either, David.” She held his hand. “I never did.”   

  

When Leah, Madeline, and David had moved into their new home, their first actual house, they finally had reason to unpack all of the things they neglected to do between each move. In one box, Madeline found a dead mouse but protested it could still be saved. When David elected to bury it, she watched in silence. He pressed a hand to her shoulder and squeezed. A lump on her collarbone. Leah looked at it, too. That night, Madeline took a hot shower and cried, though David could never tell if it was over the mouse or what they had convinced her was as normal as a skin tag. A dimple. Something we could worry about tomorrow.   

A week after the doctor’s appointment, test results showed the mass to be cancerous. Then, the lump left and reappeared twice-fold. While Leah stayed with her in the hospital, David went to church after twenty-three years of absence. He prayed for her to die soon so that she wouldn’t suffer and immediately recanted. She died after eleven months, without thought.   

In David’s arms, in the heat only burning homes can produce, she died again. Inside David, pollywogs swam and waxed into themselves. Each one fought his DNA which only boiled. He continued to stroke Leah’s hair as her body melted, benign as lard, even when his arm stuck to the floor. Leah burst open. The house topped in on itself and oxygen poured over its skeleton, the flames pricking the indigo sky. One last creature wriggled out of her stomach, and David held it against the floor as it shrieked, until docile as a child’s hand. Men yelled in at the front door. The fire crackled, whistled, orangish-reds falling over the family, leaf-like; David fell into the pile and waited to open his eyes again.