Gut Instinct

It started with a feeling. Nothing of note. Barely anything at all. Just a tingle really. A twitch of the gut, here or there. A sensation of bubbling, the odd sizzle of acid, flickering out from the stomach. Lizzie had never had issues with her stomach before, if you could even call it that, despite her rampant mistreatment of her digestive system up until now. She would be lying in bed, or relaxing on the sofa, just watching television or reading a book, and would notice a little rumble or gurgle, as though she had gas, but nothing would pass. Her mother or father would notice at times, and joke that Lizzie needed to eat more, else her stomach might start to eat itself. This was a long running joke in their family, though it was one that Lizzie had never liked, given her past struggles with anorexia. As a child she would have terrible nightmares of a monster or an alien chewing its way through her insides, and when she first saw the iconic chest-burster scene from Alien, she didn’t sleep for weeks.

The noises and sensations always got worse when Lizzie was by herself and as far as she could tell, food or the lack of food seemed to have no effect on them, despite her parents’ tired joke on the subject. Lizzie would know. If her parents were out all day, she would always take the opportunity to skip a meal or two, or three; making sure to make something anyway and feed it to the dog, so there would be evidence in the kitchen and rubbish bin that she had eaten. Her parents couldn’t understand why the dog was getting so chubby.

After a few weeks of little twitches, tingles and rumbles, Lizzie was enjoying a rare full weekend on her own, her parents having gone off to their little caravan on the coast. She hadn’t eaten since they left, quietly relishing in the feeling of emptiness that came after a full day of abstinence. She had noticed a roundness to her abdomen of late which she could not abide, despite skipping meals whenever the opportunity arose, and had begun resorting to hiding food during meals again, in napkins slipped in baggy cardigan pockets and squirrelled away up the sleeves of oversized jumpers. She reminded herself to empty the little bin in her room when she next walked Kojak, their squat little staffy mix. The food was starting to rot and smell and there was a public bin on their walking route; perfect for hiding evidence of unconsumed meals.

Kojak was snoozing at her feet as she laid back on the sofa, examining her hips, abdomen and chest. She walked her fingers up her ribcage and traced over her jutting hip bones, perplexed at what she found. She could have sworn that her ribs and pelvis were more prominent than they were last week, and yet her stomach curved outwards ever so slightly, in a way that it hadn’t done since she was ten years old. Her trusty measuring tape told her that she had in fact lost a quarter of an inch that week, but it must have been wrong, for do the eyes not see what they see? Her stomach was going wild that day, gurgling and rumbling and twitching away like a mid cycle washing machine.

At one point it almost sounded like something growling and when it was at its loudest, Kodak twitched awake and stared at her exposed belly for a few minutes, before slinking towards her on bowed legs and poking his wet nose into her stomach. He started sniffing and licking her exposed flesh, his rough tongue scraping along her skin repeatedly until she couldn’t stand the sensation anymore and pushed his blocky head away. He resisted the push, digging his nose deeper into her scant flesh covering, and she felt the nip of his teeth. Lizzie yelped and shoved him, harder this time, and he sat back on his haunches, a low growl slipping between his teeth, and stared at her midriff long and hard before slinking away to his water bowl as though nothing had happened.

Lizzie worked part time in a hairdressers, sweeping hair and sterilising equipment, and washing customer hair in busier periods. Her parents wouldn’t let her do any more than that, for fear that too much stress would cause her to relapse, and as they regularly reminded Lizzie, they simply could not cope with the stress of another relapse. Hadn’t they dealt with enough already? Did she need reminding, again, of the years of stress and worry she had already given them? Having to stand over her while she choked down her meals, weighing her every week, hiding the cotton balls and orange juice to prevent her from eating them, hiding the razors and medications so that she couldn’t harm herself? Placing her on suicide watch and removing her bedroom and bathroom door? Didn’t she understand how demeaning it was for them to have to watch her shower, use the toilet, cut her fingernails, change her sanitary towels and all the other, private things that no one should have to watch? Didn’t she understand the shame she had already caused them? The shame of being her parents? Next time, she was repeatedly assured, next time it would be the institution for her, and good riddance, for hadn’t they done everything in their power to help her? If she got sick again, it would be her own damn fault, that was for sure.

Lizzie was mostly just glad to be able to move her bowels in private again.

She was helping to wash a customer’s hair during the busy afternoon rush when the gurgles started again, louder than ever. It was audible even over the blast of the hairdryers and the thump of the popular music always playing in the salon, and Lizzie felt herself flushing when the client commented, making the same, lazy joke as her parents always did. Lizzie apologised, claiming hunger, but she was starting to question these strange noises, and her stomach felt markedly unsettled.

The day continued in a blur of sweeping and washing, and Lizzie began to notice a curious sensation of internal movement. The growling and rumbling became louder and louder, and with each new noise now came a little shifting, a little swirling, like nothing she’d ever felt before. She convinced herself that it must be gas, but gas had never felt like worms threading through her intestines before. The feeling was not painful, but undoubtedly uncomfortable, and Lizzie could swear that she could feel individual threads of movement, weaving in and out and round and round. When she used the bathroom she examined her stomach, and while still a little distended in spite of her weekend long fast, she couldn’t see any evidence of what she felt under her skin.

Lizzie made it to the end of her shift and stepped outside to wait for her father to come and collect her, rubbing her stomach and willing that feeling to just pass already. It only increased in intensity until it was akin to a mass of writhing worms, roiling and twisting in her gut. Images of a mass of seething maggots living in her gut invaded her mind relentlessly, until she was suddenly and violently sick, barely making it to the open bin outside the salon before she evacuated what little remained in her stomach from her scant breakfast. The malodour of the rubbish and the angered bluebottles zooming around her sweaty head only intensified the nausea, and Lizzie continued to purge until she was gasping for breath and choking on foul tasting bile.

She felt a rough hand clap on to her shoulder and yank her backwards, and there was her father, expression thunderous, jaw set like granite, cold anger emanating from every line on his hard face. He propelled her to the car, hand clasping her shoulder in a vice-like grip and seated her brusquely in the back, in the position of the naughty child to which she was accustomed, though she was now twenty two years old.

“I thought this had stopped Lizzie. This behaviour must stop, do you understand? In public as well! What. Were. You. Thinking?” he snarled at her, aggression punctuating every syllable like a slap to the face.

“Dad I was sick, that’s all. It wasn’t one of my behaviours I promise!” Lizzie replied, trying to keep the pleading edge out of her voice, and failing. Her father said nothing, setting his jaw and clenching his teeth.

“Dad please, I’m telling the truth! I’ve been feeling nauseous all day, I swear, I left the salon and it just hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn’t stop it!”

Her father scoffed, laughing without a trace of genuine amusement. “You couldn’t stop it. Just like you couldn’t stop starving yourself, and cutting yourself, and sticking your fingers down your throat every time you actually finished a meal. You have no control, so you have no responsibility, right? If that’s the line you want to take Lizzie, that’s the line we’ll take.”

Lizzie’s heart started racing, which only served to amplify the swirling in her abdomen. She hadn’t long regained her door privileges and she was terrified of the thought of ‘the institution’, that old weapon of her parents, oft held overhead.

“Dad I promise, I was sick because I’m feeling sick, not because I wanted to be. My stomach hasn’t felt right in a few weeks now. I think I need to see the doctor.”

Her father didn’t answer for a few minutes, and Lizzie’s anxiety increased until she could barely breathe, so tight was her chest and so fast was the beating of her heart.

“Fine. But your mother will hear about this, and we’ll be inspecting you tonight,” he answered eventually, and Lizzie leaned back and breathed out, both relieved and worried. She doubted her parents would be giving her much alone time in the immediate future and she hated their ‘inspections’, which started soon after they first caught her self-harming. They would make her stand naked before them and examine every inch of her for new cuts, burns or bruises, paying no heed to her pleas for dignity and privacy. It was for her own good after all. Didn’t she know that they felt nothing but disappointment and disgust when they looked at the damage she had caused to the perfect thing that they had made?

Later that evening, lying in bed after her inspection and thankfully still in possession of her door, Lizzie palpated her stomach and abdomen, trying to find the source of the alien movements inside of her. Just touching the surface, she couldn’t feel anything, but by pushing an inch or so down, hard enough to cause discomfort, Lizzie found she could just feel the elusive movement beneath her fingertips. As though in response to the intrusion, the activity increased, becoming more frenetic until it felt like a whirlpool inside her. Lizzie curled up into a ball, hugging her knees to her chest until a crescendo was reached, and she experienced what she could only describe to herself as a coagulation of sorts, the writhing mass collapsing into itself and becoming one, solid intrusion. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she did. As she drifted off to sleep that night, she heard from her own body what was unmistakably a growl.

Lizzie began to find that her sleep was disturbed. Her nightmares of childhood returned, violent, vividly coloured struggles where she wrestled demons, monsters and aliens from her body, some by way of tearing, rending childbirth, some which chewed their way straight through her defenceless body. Even grown in the intensely fertile fields of childhood imagination, her nightmares were never as real as these, these awful dreams, which were so intense and so vivid that even once she had broken from them into consciousness, she could still feel an echo of the pain from the nightmares, a throbbing in her gut which grew day by day. At times she would wake suddenly in the night with the lingering sensation of having been touched, a brush of the hair, a sweep of the cheek, a small arm sliding around her waist, accompanied by a creaking of the bedsprings that she was certain did not come from her own movements.

A week went by, agonisingly slowly, a week plagued with nightmares and night terrors, of gurgles and growls and the ongoing sensation of this...thing in her abdomen. By the end of the week Lizzie was down to two hours sleep or less a night, and it was starting to show. Lizzie found herself forgetting halfway through a sentence what she was going to say, forgetting what she was going to do upon entering a room. More than once when having a conversation she would feel like the other person was speaking or moving in slow motion and would find herself unable to understand what they were saying. When walking to the local shops with her mother she zoned out while walking and stepped out in front of an ongoing bus, her mother just about pulling her back in time. Her mother of course did not believe that this was an accident, and so the inspections started again, every day, and Lizzie lost her bedroom door, though thankfully not the bathroom door. Yet.

Lizzie’s mother insisted on taking her to her psychiatrist, remaining present for the whole session. This was Lizzie’s choice of course, as an adult patient, but Lizzie knew as well as her mother that there was no real choice there. These appointments had always been for her parents, not her. Lizzie was afraid to talk about the thing in her abdomen, which she was now certain to be something alive, fearing that they would think her delusional or lying, and merely shared that she was having trouble sleeping, nightmares and was experiencing nausea. Her mother informed the psychiatrist that she was suicidal and purging again, which Lizzie denied, but the psychiatrist simply scanned her with his cold grey eyes and prescribed an antidepressant and some sleeping tablets, warning her to start managing her behaviour before they were forced into taking action to protect her from herself.

That night Lizzie took her new tablets for the first time, hoping to at least get a good night of sleep and an escape from the unpleasantness of the day. Initially it seemed that her hopes were well founded. She drifted away on a cloud of warmth and light, and all of the tension seemed to leave her body at once. She hadn’t realised how tense she was until that moment, and relished the glorious feeling of calm as her muscles relaxed and she sank into her mattress. She waited for sleep, for the darkness to descend, but instead she gradually came to realise that she could not move or speak, but was fully conscious and aware, trapped inside her own body, a cage of her own flesh and blood. Her limbs felt weighted as though by lead and Lizzie could not move a muscle, or even twitch an eyelid.

She felt the thing in her wake and start to move around, felt the brush of fingers across her forehead, a lock of hair tucked behind her ear. She tried to cry out, speak, even to whimper, but not a sound came from her throat and still, she could not move. She felt the thing stretch its tiny jaws and begin chewing on her insides, tearing off chunks of her and gulping them down and still, she could not move. In the early hours her parents came into her room to check on her, standing over her still form while she was consumed from the inside, and still, she could not move.

By the time Lizzie found herself able to move again, the morning light was trickling through the gaps in her curtains, her face, hair and pillows were drenched with sweat and tears, and Lizzie was certain, certain, that the thing had entirely consumed her insides, because did she not feel it, the whole night, taking bite after bite from her helpless flesh? She realised she could move around the same time that the creature stopped chewing on her, and she bolted from her bed, running hysterically to her parent’s room. Had she not spent the whole night trapped in her body, with the sensation of being slowly eaten alive, she might have questioned the wisdom of running to her parents with this concern, but as it was Lizzie was desperate to get help before her traitor body trapped her inside again. She stumbled into their bedroom, sobbing hysterically and babbling frantically about being paralysed and eaten alive, waking them both from their slumber.

Lizzie’s mother settled her on the couch while her father made some phone calls, speaking to her in an uncharacteristically gentle tone and patting her on the back while Lizzie spewed forth her terrifying tale. Her mother examined her stomach, which Lizzie found to be very tender despite the calming of her inner turmoil. Lizzie advised her mother that it wasn’t happening right then, it never happens when people are around, and her mother nodded and smiled, pulling Lizzie’s jumper down over her prominent ribs as a brisk knock came at the door.

Three men entered the house and were ushered into the dining room by her father, giving her only perfunctory, detached glances before disappearing into the next room.

“Mum? Who are those men?” Lizzie asked, trepidation making her voice tremble. “Doctors Lizzie. They’re going to take a look at you and see if they can’t figure out what you need,” Lizzie’s mother replied, her usual cold tone creeping back in. The reassuring hand on Lizzie’s leg became a restraining shackle, gentle fingers curving into claws that now dug into tender flesh, rather than comforting that same flesh. There was no need for the restraint; Lizzie knew what was coming, but she could not run. Where would she run to? She had no money, no resources, no friends even. Her parents had seen to that when she had first started slipping off their predetermined rails.

The three men entered the room again and identified themselves to Lizzie, three pairs of dispassionate eyes taking in her thin frame and baggy clothes, the dark circles beneath her eyes, the scars just visible below the rolled up sleeves of her chunky knitted jumper, and the sweat still beading on her clammy forehead. Two doctors and a social worker. They didn’t send two doctors and a social worker to look at a painful stomach.

Lizzie wanted to take back the words she said to her parents but knew it was too late, they had already told these men everything, and at least if she was honest now, she thought, she would get some tests and scans done to see what was going on in this troublesome stomach of hers. So she answered their questions honestly, explaining when the sensations started, the noises, the distending of her abdomen, the dreams, the insomnia, and finally her experiences the night before. The men listened and watched, nodding at times and asking the occasional question. An hour after the three men arrived, Lizzie was placed on a section hold for assessment, and was admitted to her nearest psychiatric hospital.

Her first few days after being admitted passed in a hideous blur. Lizzie had hoped that going to hospital would at least lead to some tests being carried out, and was distressed to discover that this would not be the case. No one would even examine her stomach, let alone carry out scans or blood tests to put her mind at rest. Her brief meeting with the hospital psychiatrist upon admission cemented this quickly. He blandly informed her that it would be dangerous to take actions that fed into her delusions, and that negative tests rarely reassured those with issues such as hers.

She was placed in a room with no attachments or furniture, besides the bed and a desk bolted to the wall, and wasn’t even allowed covers on her bedding, as she was considered a high risk to attempt suicide. A member of staff was assigned to watch her at all times, even when using the bathroom, showering, eating or sleeping. She was sedated at night and her nightmares continued, trapped once more in an unresponsive body, unable to escape the torture inflicted on her nightly. She met with a psychiatrist daily, who felt her calm nights were incredibly positive, and refused to acknowledge that her experiences might be otherwise, instructing her to stop worrying about her ‘silly dreams’.

The other patients were terrifying to Lizzie. Slack jawed, vacant eyed men and women who shuffled around with a strange, restricted gait, as though they could not fully extend their legs to walk. Some of them would drool while awake, staring blankly as though into a distant landscape, when they were simply staring at a wall. Two girls, so thin that their bones seemed to slice through their skin from within, with tubes running up their noses and down the back of their throats, served only to remind Lizzie of her own failings where her weight was concerned, so she avoided them like the proverbial plague.

There was a young man with arms so scarred his skin reflected light like spider silk, who seemed to be placed in restraints several times a day, ostensibly to prevent further self harm. Lizzie entered the bathroom on her third day to find him hanging, face purple and swollen with blood, tongue protruding from between his teeth, the visible skin elsewhere still pink and to Lizzie’s horrified eyes, warm with life. The nurse assistant with her simply rolled her eyes and pulled an alarm on her belt, ordering Lizzie back out of the bathroom while the young man was cut free. He left the hospital on a gurney with a sheet draped over his still form, one arm dangling carelessly over the side. Lizzie was mesmerised by his dirty, blue fingernails, bitten to the quick and swaying gently as the apathetic attendants wheeled him out of the ward. She could have sworn that his fingers twitched.

She was forced to accept a strong anti-psychotic, which achieved nothing more than to slow her thoughts down greatly and increase her appetite to the point where she began to genuinely feel suicidal. She learned within a few days that the only way to escape this new nightmare would be to say the things that they wanted to hear, so began feeding them what they desired. Slowly at first, so as to not arouse suspicion, she began expressing what they called ‘lucidity and insight’. Though she still spent every night under torture, she would claim upon waking that her nightmares were receding, becoming less potent. No, she knows these things aren’t actually happening. Of course they’re in her head. How could she possibly have a demon eating her from the inside out? The medication is very helpful, thank you. Yes, she’s sleeping quite well, thanks for asking.

Twelve days later, Lizzie was standing outside the grim, stone front of the hospital waiting to be collected, an entire stone heavier, and feeling emphatically worse than when she was admitted. Her doctors considered her case a runaway success. Lizzie considered her doctors to be fucking idiots.

Lizzie’s father pulled up, his jaw set and his face dark. Lizzie inferred from this that her parents didn’t agree with the swiftness of her release back into society. Lizzie seated herself in the back without being told and her father held out an expectant hand.

“Medication Lizzie. We’ll be holding and monitoring it until we’re satisfied you can be trusted to take it yourself.” Lizzie handed over the boxes without protest. She had been practising cheeking her medication, and had hidden them successfully these two days past.

They returned home and Lizzie saw, to no great surprise, that her bedroom door had been removed. She was displeased to see that her sheets had also been removed, and her parents had combed through her belongings, removing anything that could be used as a ligature. Fools. The young man had hung himself with his own trousers. With enough determination, someone can always find a way.

Laid later beneath her bare duvet, atop her rough unclothed mattress, Lizzie pretended to be sleeping when her parents performed the first of what she suspected would be several checks on her through the night. She had cheeked her meds with ease earlier, and stashed them in an old pair of boots, her preferred hiding place. She also kept her razor blades and lighters there. For all of their no doubt thorough searching, her parents had completely missed them, so Lizzie felt comfortable continuing to use this cache.

When she heard them retire to their bedroom, ten o’clock sharp as usual, Lizzie turned on the little lamp at her bedside. They missed the cord on that too. Amateurs. She pushed the duvet down to palpate her stomach, a habit that she’d gotten into doing whenever she was left alone now. The movement beneath her fingertips had receded since being in hospital, but Lizzie could feel it again now, as though a tiny hand was pushing back against her fingertips. She felt vindicated. A seed of doubt had crept into her mind when after a few days of her admission she could no longer physically feel the entity inside her, and she felt almost...reassured by the returned pressure. She wasn’t crazy after all.

Lizzie let her hands drop, and was about to pull the lamp cord again, when she caught movement at the periphery of her vision. Something was pushing out against the skin of her stomach, distending and distorting the usually smooth surface. Something which, from her angle, looked an awful lot like the hand Lizzie had felt pushing back against her when she palpated her stomach. A tiny, perfectly formed hand. Lizzie closed her eyes, taking a deep breath in through her nose and out through her mouth the way she was taught in hospital. Eyes closed, she brushed her fingers over the protrusion. It moved with her.

Adrenaline flooded her and she bolted from the bed to stand before the mirror, ignoring for once the extra padding on her thighs and hips, attention focused absolutely on her abdomen. She could see the outline of that perfect little hand, see the miniature fingers curling into claws and seeming to strafe their way down her middle. She felt the drag of those fingers, a discomfort that bordered on pain but didn’t quite tip over the edge. A pressure started building, just north of her navel, and her skin seemed to almost be rippling as something started pushing its way to the surface. Lizzie felt her insides parting under the pressure, and dropped to her knees at this new pain, clenching her teeth to prevent the passage of the cry building in her throat.

As the pressure and pain peaked, Lizzie began to make out the shape forming beneath her skin. First a nose, then a chin, a brow and eye sockets, and a gaping, stretched mouth, complete with tiny, sharp teeth. The features were human, and yet not. They are all a little too sharp, too exaggerated. The gaping maw snapped shut, stretching to the side instead, in an impossibly wide grin, mocking Lizzie from inside her own damned body. Lizzie, it was safe to say, lost her mind at this new horror, and her sanity sheared in a snap that was almost audible as she raced to the wardrobe, digging around in her old boots until her probing fingers grasped the cold edge of one of her razor blades.

When she returned to the mirror, the face was no longer visible, seeming to have withdrawn into her, but Lizzie could still feel it, shifting just beneath the surface, and she knew exactly where she needed to cut. She made a two inch wide slit just above her navel and cried out from the staggering pain. Knowing her cry would have roused her parents, she dug in again, as swiftly as she could, cutting through the layers of skin, fat and muscle ruthlessly. Blood rose, welling at first and then pouring, blinding her to her purpose, and Lizzie could hear her parents now, voices raised in alarm, heard their bedroom door slam open, so she dug in with her fingers, dropping the razor and parting the wound she has made to better see, hooking her fingers under her own flesh and pulling hard. Just before her father leapt on her, pinning her blood slick hands to the floor, Lizzie spied what she was searching for. An open, bright blue, eye. It winked.

Lizzie howled and wrestled with her father, screaming at him to look, just look, couldn’t he see there was a fucking demon inside of her? There’s an eye, there’s an eye, just look in there please, there’s a fucking eye in there! Her mother was frantically attempting to apply pressure to the now gaping gash in her stomach while she thrashed and twisted beneath them, and her father growled for her mother to just call a fucking ambulance she isn’t going to bleed to death just yet. Lizzie began hammering her head against the floor, shrieking like a banshee until she saw her father’s fist descending, rendering her world black.

Lizzie woke feeling surprisingly well rested, warm, comfortable, and astoundingly relaxed. Her abdomen was sore, but not enough to cause her pain. She touched the area, or at least she tried to. Her hands were shackled to her sides, her feet also immobile. Lizzie opened her eyes to take in a blank white room, the bed she was pinioned to comprising the only furniture, besides the beeping monitors to either side of her. Her heart rate began to accelerate, reflected by the monitors, and a white clad woman with a smart cap and a stern face strode briskly into the room. The twist to her mouth clearly showed her disdain of Lizzie, though the rest of her face was kept carefully blank and neutral.

“That was quite a fright you gave your parents Lizzie. Do you want to talk about why you did that?” Her tone of voice was flat, disinterested in any response Lizzie might give. She had already written Lizzie off as crazy.

“Did you get it? Did you take it out?” Lizzie croaked, desperation leaching into every syllable.

The nurse regarded her for a few moments before answering, sadness and a distinct lack of surprise in her eyes.

“There was nothing to take out Lizzie. We’ve stitched you up the best we could; you cut right through your stomach wall so we had to use a few staples. You’ll be pretty sore for a couple of weeks, and pretty itchy as it starts to heal, but you’ll be fine soon enough.”

Lizzie closed her eyes, defeated. She’d cut right down to the damned thing and still no one would believe her. What did she have to do to get taken seriously? The monitors started beeping rapidly again as Lizzie became more angry and agitated, and unable to move her hands or legs, Lizzie thumped her head against the hard bed beneath her, again and again, as hard as she could, until the nurse called for a doctor to sedate her. This stuff must be stronger than the tablets they gave her before, because Lizzie slipped instantly, blissfully, into calm, quiet darkness.

Six months passed, as slowly as stretching molasses and as swiftly as a speeding hawk. Lizzie lost more and more of her sense of self, time and being, as medication after medication is trialled, with little to no success. Lizzie is diagnosed, first with treatment resistant schizophrenia, for which she was prescribed Clozapine, a dirty, awful drug, which made her shuffle blankly like the other long term residents at what was now her home, the psychiatric unit that she may as well have never left. She would lose huge chunks of her days and nights, and wake to find herself covered in the gossamer sheen of her own saliva and sweat. Her muscles stiffened and cramped, her abdomen and thighs distended more each day as she gained pound after pound, stone after stone. Still, she professed, she could see and feel the demon inside her, which grew as she grew, swelling alongside her rapidly bloating gut.

They changed her diagnosis then, professing her to be suffering from bipolar disorder with strong elements of psychosis. Since rapidly changing mood was less of an issue for her, and anti-psychotics had been of little benefit, the decision was made to treat Lizzie with electro-convulsive therapy, and Lizzie lost what little of herself she had managed to hold on to. Days stretched into nights, weeks stretched into months, and most days Lizzie barely knew her own name anymore, knowing only pain and fear and confusion.

She became vaguely aware one day that she had been vomiting blood. She no longer knew how much time had passed, only that time had passed. A nurse spied the bloody remnants in her toilet bowl and Lizzie was subjected to a whirlwind of tests that she did not understand or want. Tests that a year ago, in her coherent mind, she was desperate for. As it was, she was barely aware of the soft tones of the doctor, as he departed the news to her and to her parents.

“Stage four stomach cancer, spread to the liver, lungs and brain. No longer operable. Had we caught it earlier…well...maybe. The best we can do now is try and make her comfortable. Presumably this...psychosis, was a neurological symptom of the tumours. Given her history...well I’m sure any doctor would have made the same call. Still, I am very, very sorry.”

If only Lizzie was still able to comprehend that she had, in fact, been right all along.