Tweezers

You remember when they thought you weren't tough enough. | Psychological Horror | Flash Fiction

Dec 25, 2024

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

I was planning to take this month off. However, I saw that

was starting a Christmas Fiction Gift Exchange and I wanted to participate.

Each participating writer was assigned to write a story for another participant. No one knows who is writing for them and we were challenged to write a story we think the person assigned to us would like.

This is my story for

Jude Mire

. I wrote a dark and short (815 words) psychological horror that I hope brings you a morbid sense of joy on this Christmas holiday.

You bring flame to the metal tips and let the fire sterilize.

It reminds you of the time sharp grey pebbles were dug out from your kneecap and shin when you were a kid, the consequences of an ill-advised slide into second on a baseball field that was not properly maintained.

You didn’t want to continue playing. You thought baseball was dumb, but you hadn’t yet learned how to quit, and the embarrassment in your father’s eyes and the annoyance in the coach's stare, both thinking you weren’t tough enough, convinced you to gut it out.

That didn’t stop them from believing in your weakness.

Satisfied with the countless deaths of microbes, you remove the tweezers from the flame and look out the kitchen window, another Christmas without snow. Even worse than that, a Christmas filled with rain and gloom. You cannot recall the last time snow covered treeless branches and browning grasses on a day that was invented to be celebrated.

You remember days long past when a fresh coat of powder brought joy to your childish smile. Its bright white against a winter sun would cause your tiny eyes to squint as you quenched your thirst with fistfuls of slushed ice while lying amongst it.

The joy you remember and how you’ve forgotten it.

All you feel now is the buried object under your flesh: aching, hollow, and stubborn. An annoyance that won’t let you forget about it, so you dig.

First, you probe the epidermis and notice how much your skin has aged: sunspots, moles, and wrinkles. You puncture it with the tweezers’ steel tips and hope to quickly pull out the source of the disturbance and relieve your symptoms. When you come up empty-handed, you dig deeper.

Into the dermis, you encounter the pins and prickles of pain, blood, and hair follicles. You remember the years you’ve spent loathing your hairy back, cursing the gorilla you evolved from as you scourge for what still evades you. A bone-tingling need to root it out, deliver yourself from its weighted presence, and feel relief.

Deeper you go.

You encounter the fat and blood vessels now uncovered in your hypodermis. The tip of the tweezer strikes a nerve. You stutter, tighten, and wince in response, though it does not assuage you.

How deep does it go? Will you tear through muscle and carve into bone? Find it attached to a vital organ? How much blood can you lose before you pass out?

There was the time you shot a deer and missed its lungs by mere centimeters. You watched it bleed out as it squealed and panicked, kicking its legs at brush and sticks, desperate to cling to air and life as it agonized its way to death. You forgot to end its misery, so shocked you were by life’s precious lack of grip.

Did it take two minutes? Three? Five? It doesn’t matter.

You must remove the object. You cannot bear to coexist with it. Too many decades have passed, and your willingness to abide by and tolerate it no longer exists. The mess on the floor can be cleaned up later. The hole, once a gouge, now a wound, can be repaired.

Like when you mended the relationship with your father before he passed, reset your brain with the Lexapro prescribed by your psychotherapist, or reignited your will to live with therapy. There is always a fix for everything, even if it takes three easy payments or a monthly subscription. Never mind the seventeen years you didn’t speak to him, the tens of thousands of dollars not covered by your insurance, or the fact that nothing you ever did or were ever given got to the root of the problem.

Because no one ever really wants to get there.

You stop digging. The faded gray and black linoleum floor stares up at you from the other side. Its color and pattern hidden by the contents purged from your body.

You removed all that you could. A weight lifted. A conscience cleared. All it took was the carving of a giant crater. A shaft to a mine that reached beyond you. A portal where the tweezers lay on the other side, among the remnants of you decorating the stick-on tiles you haphazardly installed twenty years prior.

Death is certain. You think you always knew this would be the result. There is no time for regrets, only patience as the rest of your blood drains out.

You imagine the bacteria in your gut arguing that you wouldn't have done this if you ate less processed food and exercised more. You laugh at the personification of microbes.

You think the mail carrier might notice something’s off a few days after New Year's.

You won’t be there to know. You just hope they say how tough you must have been to have gone through with it.

If you like this idea and my story, please check out the other participating authors in the list below:

Subscribe to This Nick Writes

By Nick Buchheit

NICK AFTER NORMAL

Discussion about this post