Boiling Point

He craned his neck, sinews straining uncomfortably. Twisting his hips like an arthritic ballet dancer, his pupils swivelling into the corners of his eye sockets until he could see it. The bare, pale skin of his arse, mottled like an alcoholics face. And there, halfway down his fleshy buttock, his tormentor almost winked at him.

The bulbous growth had gradually swollen over the course of weeks – months even. Initially it was barely noticeable – a pea sized swelling like many of the other pimples and zits on his dimpled cheeks. Only this one had staying power – and an appetite. He was sure that this one was responsible for the relatively clear skin he’d enjoyed lately. Whilst the pock marks remained, his arse-acne had cleared up at almost exactly the same rate as this one massive pustule had grown – like it was consuming the others.

He pushed it gently with his finger. It had the same rubbery feel as poking a squash ball. He ran a finger around its edge, imagining how much more of it was buried beneath his flesh. The size of a golf ball? Bigger? How far were its roots sunk into the meatiest part of his arse? With thumb and forefinger he grasped its edges – visually measuring the distance between his digits. Over an inch now – substantially bigger than yesterday.

He closed the gap between his fingers by a millimetre, squeezing the alien invader. Further still, pushing the two sides of his boil together. His neck ached by now, but just as he started to straighten up, he felt a slight give in his grip. An almost imperceptible noise – a tiny pop – was accompanied by a tiny dot of yellow-white in the middle of his cyst. Craning back around he pressed the pads of his fingers closer together. Like a maggot emerging from an apple, a thin strand of pus wiggled into sight.

Desperate to expel the poison from his body, he squeezed again. A thin coil spooled onto his thumb. He lifted it to his face to inspect it, snapping it from his skin. Far more solid than he expected, it looked like a worm on its first foray into daylight. Around half a millimetre thick, it was thin enough to coil around itself but brittle enough to be snapped with a clumsy poke of his finger. A thin smear of the rank material coated his fingertip. Moving it towards his nose he inhaled deeply. He wished he hadn’t. A regrettable stench filled his nostrils and snaked down his throat – a smell so thick he almost choked on it.

It smelt vile - like the worst human secretions you could imagine rolled into one rancorous odour and stored in an airtight container for years and years, festering and growing in intensity. Squeezing the boil was like bursting a balloon filled with the stinking stuff – and the fetid stench was so bad he could taste it.

The genie was out of the box now, though. There was simply no way he could stop squeezing. With his pants around his ankles he shuffled over to the mirror. Side on, he could see his arse without straining his neck. His right hand moved down to the boil and he pressed his fingers together again – harder this time. I thin jet of thick pus squirted onto the mirror. It slid down, a slick yellowy stain streaking the glass behind it.

The more pressure he applied, the more of the noxious goo splattered onto the mirror. And the more of it fell onto his threadbare carpet. There was no way he was gonna be able to sleep with that smell in his bedroom. He kicked the clothes from around his feet and removed himself to the bathroom. Perching on the edge of the bath he aimed his boil into the tub and resumed the grimly fascinating process of ejaculating sebum from a secondary whole in his arse.

The minutes ticked by, marked by the rhythmic dripping of the tip and the steadily growing pile of rottenness which collected in the bath. Like the cast of a giant lugworm it spooled around and on top of itself – too solid to pass through the hair clogged plughole. His fingers ached and his eyes began to scan the bathroom, noticing a patch of fungal mould behind the hot tap.

Glancing back to the exit point on his buttock, he saw that the ejaculate had changed nature. It had become increasingly watery – a thin trickle of pungent smelling water trickled down his cheek. Assuming his perverse pleasure to be over, he decided to give one last big squeeze – an insurance policy before searching the kitchen drawers for a plaster. Ripping off a piece of toilet paper (the cheap kind where the two sheets rarely line up with each other) he dabbed at his arse.

Lifting the soiled tissue to his face he saw that the wet stain was a pale pink. Looking back to the leaky hole on his buttock, a dribble of bright red blood was slowly making its way down his body. Unable to resist the morbid temptation he resumed the squeezing he knew he ought to stop. A tiny claret bubble formed like sputum on a baby’s lips, burst and gave way to a steady drip drip of watery blood.
Gripped by perverse desire he squeezed again, starting slightly as the expected bubble failed to form. Instead, a thicker jet of bright red plasma arced from his arse, splattering the side of the bath and splashing over his previous secretions. Again and again he pulled the trigger, eyes fixed on the blood he was forcibly expelling from his own body. But he could not stop.

Compelled by a combination of curiosity and childishness, he continued to ignore the inner voice telling him to slap some Savlon on himself and pull his pants up. With each purge his excitement grew – he could feel his heart beating faster and faster. The spilled blood was growing thicker and darker – a viscous, dark fluid which stuck to the smooth side of the bath rather than running down it. And then it began to change colour.

The change from dark red to blue-black occurred quickly. Like crude oil from an uncapped well, the sticky fluid flowed from the widening hole in his arse. Pulling his fingers away he saw it throb and drip from him in time with the accelerating beat of his heart. Every time his heart thumped in his chest, the oozing intensified, pumping the dark substance from the collapsed crater of his cyst.

As the fluid grew thicker, so the hole grew larger. What the fuck was happening? He daren’t move, was even less inclined to shout for help. Rooted to the spot, he stared down over his shoulder as a purple polyp popped out. Having nudged its way to the surface of his skin, it burst free, tearing its escape route wider still. Having extended an inch from his body it flopped wetly down as gravity took hold. The bulbous purple head dangled before slowly beginning a slithering descent. Wetly, it dragged a slimy blue cord behind it until it reached the flat surface of the bath. Like a thin black pudding it slopped over itself, spreading itself all around. It grew thicker and thicker, twisting over itself like a nest of eels.

An inch thick now, the hole in his cheek was looking increasingly green around the edges. Blood and brown goo seeped from it, lubricating the slimy pipe as it slipped effortlessly from inside to out. He felt a queasily empty feeling in the pit of his stomach and looked down at his tubby tummy. Except it wasn’t nearly so tubby now. His skin sagged and he could see movement through the translucent sack that remained where his pot belly had only recently been. He hugged himself, burying his pink arms in his pallid midriff, sucking his breath in and clenching his buttocks. Desperately he tried to hold himself together – literally and figuratively. His breathing was ragged, his eyes streaming with tears, his throat parched. Dry, soundless sobs wracked his shrinking body as his intestines unravelled before him.

With breath eluding him and panic seizing him, he attempted to stand. Weak with fear his left knee buckled as he placed his weight on it. Instinctively his right foot shot out to share the load – landing directly on his own bloody entrails. Still part of his body, the pain was agonising as his foot searched vainly for purchase in the wet tangle of his lower intestine. With a shriek he slipped backward, his head taking the brunt of the impact as he crashed into the bath – neck crunching and twisting as he landed face down in his own guts. As the life drained out of him he spluttered through mouthfuls of his own insides, twitched and groaned, feeling the temperature of his body fall through the internal organs pressed against his face.