I hear breathing in my shower drain. It has been days, weeks maybe. I have been losing track of time as I spend most of it dreading the next faint, echoing breath roll down the hallway. It’s insistent, a toothache rooted in my ears. I have looked down the drain over and over and again and there is nothing there but hair clumping around the edges. Like something afraid of the dark descent. I still hear it. At first, it was just when I showered. I thought it was rumbling pipes, an old house, with old groans. It wasn’t until it started to follow me from room to room, no longer the echo, no longer distant. Like a lost puppy it would not leave me be.

The first thing to suffer was my sleep. It kept my eyes peeled open as if my eyelids were sewn to the skin below my brow. a fear I can only ever feel in the dead of night. Of course, as sleep waned, paranoia waxed. Further doubt, that what I was hearing was real at all. Or was it just slivers of insanity that dug deeper, slivers that were always there, slithering ever inwards until they could control the mind they lay within?

I was sent home from the office, they could see the bags under my eyes, the dirty clothes I had failed to wash and I am sure I didn’t smell fantastic, having limited my showers to once a week out of fear. It would help. My once cheerful demeanor had eroded into an irritable person that I now was trapped within. Of course, missing work had only made the problems worse. As I spent more time around the breathing, so close to my ears I could swear I felt the hot exhale of a gaping mouth releasing putrid breath across the helix of my ear. Not only did it drain me like a leech, but it felt as if it pulled everything around me to a halt. There was only the breathing and the sparse moments of silence it afforded me.

Despite my efforts to live in this house and pretend the bathroom was a far fiction, I would try my best to bathe. Though sparingly as I could stomach. the hyperventilating breathing would always stutter to a stop when I entered the shower, like a peeping tom about to be caught just out of sight of his prey. In those moments of silence, I found myself staring down that hair-ridden porcelain throat. My heart would nearly break my ribs it beat so hard within it. It wasn't the fear the breathing would come back, it wasn't an “if”, I knew it would. It was the thought of a hand reaching out for me at my most vulnerable, dragging against the rusted metal ring by any appendage or loose skin it could grip, until my rigid body gave way to something much stronger, shifting into a grotesque mixture of liquids and solids dripping down that dark, slime coated throat.

On a night that grew to be all too commonplace, I watched a spider drift down on a web. Dangling, spinning from movement in the air I couldn't feel, just see in Its desperate clinging to its safety line. A nasty fat thing I’m sure would have popped like a grape under any pressure, where this a normal circumstance and it was the biggest problem I had. I could see its eyes as it dropped lower and lower, between me and the showerhead. As its descent came closer and closer to the water streams, and violent torrential steam, it began to panic as errant droplets sprayed nearer, a downpour it couldn’t fathom, or escape. I could only stare, my mind long gone. Maybe I should have felt bad for the creature, unknowingly drifting closer to its end, just like me. I didn’t feel bad for the creature. I understood the fear it felt. Infinitely small, floating towards a lingering doom that has far more patience than you.

It only took a moment or two before the spray of steaming water overwhelmed it and it fell. Landing with a sick little thud against the white porcelain just at the edge of the drain, swiftly washed down its gurgling throat.

I stared at the black hole no more than a foot or two from the tip of my toes. wondering what it felt as the black enveloped it, to live in primordial fear up to the last seconds of your life. Like a lighting strike it hit me, It was quiet. Nothing. Not a breath except the ever-increasing rapidity of my own.

Overtaken with an ecstatic energy I had not felt since the torment had started. I slid the dingy glass door open and grabbed a towel, running it over my body as I could feel the smile on my face hurt the corners of my mouth.

It was just a few seconds, a slight escape from the pain of a toothache, only for the throb, the breath to bear down on me again.

With one large breath to punctuate its reemergence it sounded like an asthmatic struggling for breath that was sorely disappointed in me. Maybe it was, to think it would leave so easily. Without a struggle.

I collapsed to the bathroom floor. Naked, every ounce of happiness pulled from me. I wept for hours that night. Huddled on those cold sterile white tiles, I tried everything to get up, to move from this horrid spot but I was rooted in place, fedal and wanting something, anything to come end it.

Through all this turmoil in my life, I had neglected my family, far more than what is considered usual for me as I was struggling to survive a hell I didn’t feel I deserved. It wasn’t long after the night with the spider I heard a knock on my door. I raced to the door. Anything for a moment of reprieve, to perhaps beg whoever it was for help. I didn’t know who it was, and I didn’t care. I was prepared to throw myself on the floor and beg for help. However, when I opened the door I froze, Not in fear, in relief. My mother stood in the doorway, with the concerned look every mother has mastered like it was issued at the time of their firstborn's emergence. I knew I didn’t look well, though I didn’t have to for her to notice something was wrong with me. As she came in I watched her for any reaction. Any indication if she heard what I did? As she spoke to me, so nonchalantly without any more concern than a mother's concern for their child that had fallen off the face of the planet. I knew I must be insane. She heard nothing. Still, as she spoke I heard it rumbling in the distance, Like thunder oscillating through a tired, worn house.

We spent hours talking. Though I managed to say nothing of substance during this time. How was I to talk about what was ailing me? “I missed you so much, by the way, I am being tormented by a noise in my pipes”. While that sounded fine, I knew only tears and begging, pleading would come regurgitating out of my mouth. At this point, I was certain I was insane. That something snapped in me and it left me hearing things. Perhaps I wasn’t in my house at all. Maybe I was in some sort of medical coma, trapped in purgatory, In hell, or some variation of that.

I kept asking my mom about the rest of the family, things to focus on. I sat close to her, attempting to anchor myself, to prove what I was seeing was real. Using all the information she was giving me to cement that where I currently sat was reality, and not just a waiting room before further torment slid its fingers under my skin. I wanted to tell her. Wanted to spill the demons in my drain out of my mouth like sour vomit. If anyone were to help me it would be her. Moms would move the earth for their children.

Though each lul in the conversation I wasn't able to say it. Like I had a nail embedded between my jaw and the roof of my mouth. I couldn’t do it. Despite hearing it through every pause, every space between every syllable, breathing.

As the frustration grew I couldn’t take it. I broke down in my mother’s arms. I cried as I did when I was a child. Instead of me being scared of the dark I had much worse things in my head, in my home. She held me close through each tremor of emotion. Every ounce of snot and tears poured from me. Her hands rested on the back of my head, a calming touch. One that even worked now, of all times. As the crying gave way to a pathetic sniffle, I heard the rumble again. The breathing. It was echoing through my house like rats in the walls, thin fingers scratching on the old wood and plaster, just to get to me. I pushed my ear against my mother harder, drowning out the noise with the sound of her heart, her gurgling stomach, her breathing. Was it her breathing? Or it’s?

Each moment I kept my ear to her, the breathing flowed into the pattern I had grown to fear, the heartbeat just behind it, and the gurgling shifted to those tiny little fingers, just behind skin and fat, reaching for me.

I pulled away from her, tripping backward on the coffee table. She sat in shock at my recoil. Her eyes filled with tears she shed with me. Her face was the most comforting thing but I knew that noise, It was unmistakable and it was growing louder, embedded deep within her guts.

“Mom you need to leave.” I pleaded with her as if her very presence were causing me harm.

“You aren't well. You need help.” I knew she was right and I wanted so badly to accept. To tell her to call an ambulance to rip me out of this house like a tumor out of a suffering man but as my mind raced with these thoughts her voice cut through them all.

“You need to kill me.” it was hers. Laced with that hyperventilating breath, trotting behind it like a little puppy dog. My mind ceased any thought that wasn't on those words. I had spent months questioning my reality and now something was standing in front of me. An aberration of my failing mind? Was she here and I was just imagining the words? Or was she not here at all?

“Please leave.” I stood and retreated to the connected kitchen. Though she followed my steps, not as a predator would follow a prey, no. as a mother would a sick child. It didn’t match, the words with the woman in front of me. Uncanny, but familiar.

“You need to kill me, honey. Butcher me, feed me to it in pieces.” the tone was an encouraging one. No malice or villainy. Just my mother.

“You need to kill me. It needs my guts, My puss, and blood.”

I stared at her approaching. Between each subsequent deceleration of death and mutilation, I could hear that terrible fucking breathing from the bathroom and from deep within my mother, snaking out her mouth between words.

It was getting louder, more piercing each time she said those disgusting words. I couldn’t think. Couldn't feel anything.

I just wanted it to stop. She would have wanted me to listen to her. The tears in my eyes obfuscated her, a blurry blotch of color, nothing more. With one hand on a kitchen knife, the other pushing her to the ground. “You need to kill me.” her voice pleading now, she wanted me to do it. This was her way of saving me from my torment? “Split me open, please honey. Feed me to it in pieces.” Her words repeated, over and over again, through each stab of the knife, as the meat was pulled away from the skin, and white bright bone contrasted with deep reds. The breath repeated long after she was incapable of speech.

It wasn’t quick, I stabbed her until she ceased being my mother and the white tiles became a crimson still sea, her at the center and a smeary mess as it radiated outward. Each entrance and exit of flesh took her farther from what she had been for twenty-five years of my life and brought her much closer to the strips of steak you see at the grocery store. A stringy mess of meat and fat.

With her deterioration, my feelings too subsided. Laying against the oven, my knees pulled firmly to my chest. The rumbling was still a horrid dinn in my ears, drilling into my mind. Rational thought was miles away from this scene, but right then I remembered the spider and the rest of her words. I remembered how it was quite after. If a spider stopped it, even for just a few moments, then I had something that would stop it longer. She knew what to do all along, like every mother does. She always knew how to fix things. I dragged the body by its ankle, it left a paint stroke of red across the tile and onto the carpet. As I got to the bathroom I stopped in the doorway, staring past the frosted glass sliding doors into the infinite black of that drain that was as clear to me as ever.

I would have thought it would be a struggle to mutilate my mother, to cut her up as you would beef for a lion. Maybe I am insane, or maybe I needed this breathing to end. I started with the softest pieces I could find. Shaving meat from bone at the fattest parts of the body and jamming it down the drain it just looked like any butcher's table by the time it slid down that metal gullet. Pushing it farther down with two fingers like a teenage boy inexperienced and eagerly finger fucking the cheerleader on prom night. My tongue sticking out in concentration, going back and forth from the body to the drain, feeding it all the pieces that would fit, that I could cut from from her. She was always so stingy. She would want this, wouldn’t she? To help me?

By the time adrenaline dwindled in my bloodstream and exhaustion was taking over, I noticed it.

Silence. Quite.

I fell to my back next to what remained of my mother, as we did as kids when she would read to me. Despite the realization of what I had done, I had never slept so soundly. So perfectly peaceful.

I woke as the sun peaked through the tiny window in the bathroom. Radiating off the coagulating smeary mess of my mother. A smile crept across my face, the warming sun seemed to warm me from the inside out. Unfortunately, as I sat basking in the rays of light like a snake across a rock. I could feel it rising as a sound from below miles of water. Shattering into my ears like a toothache radiating across my skull.

“No, no, I fed you pounds of her, I can’t fit the rest. Is that what you want? The rest?” My voice ached, I hadn’t spoken since the night before and dehydration was setting in, drying my throat. I closed my eyes tight and pleaded for the breathing to stop, having tasted the quiet I wanted more and I knew in every bit of me I would do anything for it. As I lay there, hands clasped and prostrate as one would begging forgiveness from god it started to ease away.

I raised my head from the linoleum and the half-dried slop of fluids to see the drain was quite a bit larger than it had been before. Like staring at something you aren't supposed to, nothing felt right. I would rub my eyes to see if it would revert to its original size, but as I did, as I focused more it could be seen pulsing just slightly but moving nonetheless. Small cracks had formed around the edges of the stainless steel ring that was now the size of a large man's waist. My eyes widened with a morbid excitement. Not at the prospect of feeding it further, I despised what it was forcing me to do, but if it had even the slightest chance to quite it for good, I had to take it.

Dragging what remained of my mother to the edge of the gaping black void was surprisingly easy, without most of the muscles and fat she was no heavier than a large sack of flour, like the ones you get at the grocery store. I sat kneeling staring at it, waiting, watching for anything to change, an invitation of the waiting flesh. I imagined it a mouth, teeth lining its winding, hair-covered slimy throat and a beckoning tongue at its deepest point, flicking at the prospect of further satiation.

The blade I used to start the entire process was dulling, making separating the joints a slog. Seconds, to minutes. An escalating noise of frustrated grunts and groans. The sound of popping joints from their home, wet meat, and cartilage snapping. I was so far gone from the daughter that once held this woman in esteem, I was a slave to relief, to the idea that this would bring it. How was she to matter when the breathing wouldn’t stop. When it would keep tightening its grip around my mind. My mother would want me to do all I could to be free of this torment, she would have happily given herself to the drain if she thought it would free me.

I separated the pelvis from the rest of the torso by bending it back and forth like a child might a shitty plastic spork cafeterias hand out. Forward and back until the spine separates just below the ribs. The last piece was the head. Mutilated, more skull now than person. The remaining eye looked at me with deep concern, a look only a mother could conjure. She was so worried about me.

“I’m sorry, mom. This will make it stop. I’ll be okay.” It sounded as if I was the one in that state, peeled from my shell and more parts than person. She would want this, for me. I slid each piece down the drain, it gobbled them whole like a dog with a treat. The sound of each piece hitting the sides as it descended impossibly far. With each bit, the breathing faded to a whisper, then to nothing.

Exhausted I sat staring at it at the edge of the abnormally large drain. The blood and bile, the leftover undigested food from punctured guts all smeared into a slurry across the inside of the tub. It had taken hours of hacking to get to this spot, and my eyes heavy as my arms, I fell asleep again in that bathroom, in that rot-covered tub. In the respite of torment, another dreamless night.

I would like to think I expected the breathing to continue, but in all honesty, I had clung to the hope that it was over. I woke up, startled and hyperventilating as you would a feverish nightmare in the dead of summer. Covered in sweat and remnants of my gore-laden sin. A hot torrent of breathing coming out of the manhole-sized gape in my reality. Like a breath in the dead of winter, I could see the steam pulsing from the opening into the bathroom, rendering the air a sickly type of muggy.

I didn’t think, I just started pushing the leftover half-sticky and half-dry and crusted liquids toward the drain like a human squeegee in desperate hope that it would do something, anything. Ringing out the bathroom mat yielded next to nothing. As I fumbled around the bathroom my hand pushed against the dull, stained knife. Drawing a flesh, almost pristine drop of blood across my palm. I was made of the same meat as my mother, the idea was swelling in my mind like a tick safe to feed.

I grabbed the knife, slid back into the tub, and scootched as close as I could to the drain. My legs spread wide on either side keeping me from sliding any further down the slightest incline the large hole had. With swift and decisive movement I pulled the knife across my fingers first knuckle. just slight stinging sensations and a pop as I saw the finger slowly fall down the drain, swallowed by shadow instantly. Which seemed to satiate it to some extent. If only for a moment. The breathing slowed, and the steam lessened.

“Was that not enough? I can give more.” I had no inclination of what I was talking to, or if it was more for my faltering rationale but it didn’t matter.

Another few cuts and the fingers across my left hand were all falling, consumed by black. That and the stream of blood running down it seemed to only tickle its appetite.

“Please, take more,” I said like a host desperate to impress their guests.

Though I started with fingers I wouldn’t finish until I wore almost no skin. My stomach opened, and my insides slid down its gullet like my mother's before me, like a slop of spaghetti down an eager throat. I hardly felt a thing, I had hoped the shock would take me earlier than it did. It wasn’t my intention to die there. I just wanted the breathing to stop, to go back to my life before it. It didn’t want me to die there either.

I wish you could have seen my face as I woke up, my body no longer in the state it was, but still surrounded by the telltale signs of gore I had left the bathroom in. The drain now more a sinkhole then a drain taking up half the tub, with long flesh-colored appendages flowing out all around it like a flower in bloom. Reaching beyond the confines of the tub and into the rest of the bathroom.Infesting the area, reflecting the evil that had been committed here. A cover was over the hole, like stretched skin. A faint bioluminescence green emanates just under the thin veil.

“I gave you all I have!” My screams barely left my lungs, my body was dying a much slower death than I had already tried to give it the night before.

Nothing responded, beyond the slow dragging air exhaled under the flaps of flesh that covered the drain. I looked for the knife that had tasted of myself and my mother to give it more. It lay next to me still, cuddling next to my bare thigh.

With it clasped in my hand as if in prayer, leaning forward, I was pleading.

“Please take what I have, please I need this to stop.”

I righted myself onto my knees and began to stab wildly at my stomach, pulling and ripping like a child would a present on Christmas. Not wasting any time getting myself into the open, rank air of that infested hot bathroom.

As I once again slopped onto the porcelain my vision darkened, I slipped away yet again and I hoped the black would not release me into this things care once again.

I was sorely disappointed.

My eyes opened to an infection of reality that had spread further and further all but obfuscating the bathroom that lay underneath the spreading flesh. The soft flesh near the center of its growth is now a hard-ridged, pot-marked structure. At my feet, the drain once covered by a soft fleshy canvas, now a hard chitinous door. Slightly ajar, long twig-like structures peaking out at its edges, and dozens of glinting little lights staring directly into me.

“Why can’t you just take what I have and leave me.”

The twigs twitched as I spoke to it, I realized they were its fingers or something like them, dozens of them fluttering against the rocky surface.

“You give too little.”

A voice that mixed layers of my own and my mother's like an orchestra it sounded from not only the open trap door but from every hole that spread across the room.

“What do you need for this to be done with?” the desperation in my voice wasn’t anything I could hide. What I was willing to do for this to end was horrid. Even beyond the mutilation of my mother and myself. I would feed the world to its growing gullet if it just offered me peace. What’s worse, this thing knew it but I do not think it wanted anything beyond the confines of this room, it was mine to satisfy. The sounds of pulsing flesh between each breath were the only silence I was offered as it stared back at me. Its long spindly fingers turned and made a beckoning sickening motion, bending at more knuckles than I had fingers. As it sunk below the drain’s horizon. It didn’t want pieces of me, it didn’t want my mutilation or my blood. I had carved my mother open without anything close to hesitation, I ripped my guts out and watched them slide down an unnaturally large shower drain to that which plagues me. It knew my devotion, knew I was stuck within its prison, now it wanted it all. This sunk the fear that had gestated in my chest since the beginning into the lowest reaches of my gut. The idea of pushing myself forward and sliding down that drain. It could end. My peace could live just beyond that horizon where the monster retreated, expecting me to follow. I had no strength to even attempt the same self-sacrifice I had done before.

I pulled myself across the hard, rock-like surface to the waiting trap door.

It made a sickening crack as I lifted it, like a clam being wrenched open. Strands of what could only be described as tendons hung free from the agape doorway. The edges were unrecognizable, resembling a hole in a cave more than a drain. While I could only see the faint green glow from below, the black that lived within this hole comforted me. Maybe this time it wouldn’t let me go. It might let me stay. My stomach churned as gravity took me. I could feel myself falling, though could not see a thing around me. I touched no sides or hit a single thing on my descent. The breathing started to quiet as I fell, leaving space for blissful silence. Enveloping me like a cold blanket I waited for all day. I could feel a new feeling, something adjacent to fear. Excitement.

Photo by Nik on unsplash and edited by me.