Page 11 of Spread Me

Mads takes charge. Kinsey knows she should be thankful for that—she’s in no state to decide what the team should do next, can’t be even the slightest bit objective about Domino. But she’s not thankful. She’s embarrassed. It’s degrading. She’s supposed to lead this team, she’s supposed to know what she’s doing. She’s the one who decides their next steps.

But she can’t right now, can she? Her legs are shaking and she can’t feel her fingers all the way and every time she looks at the freestanding kitchenette in the corner of the canteen, some part of her insists that she should stick her hand down the drain and turn on the garbage disposal. She knows that pureeing her hand wouldn’t fix anything, but it would create a new problem, and at least if she’s dealing with a new problem she isn’t dealing with this problem.

“We need to find out what’s happening to Dom,”

Mads says, tugging one of Saskia’s many blankets across their shoulders.

“We need to know what’s causing the … the symptoms.”

“The eyes,”

Jacques corrects. He stands up abruptly and walks over to the kitchenette. Kinsey thinks for a moment that he might be about to do the garbage disposal thing himself—maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all?—but then he opens a cabinet and removes a half-empty handle of white rum. He sloshes some of it into a mug without pretending to consider how much he’s pouring.

“The eyes,”

he says again, ripping open a packet of powdered apple cider mix and dumping it into the mug. He stirs with his finger, then takes a long drink.

“That can’t taste good,”

Kinsey whispers.

Saskia frowns.

“I don’t think it even dissolved all the way.”

Nkrumah leans forward and slaps her palm down onto the coffee table.

“That’s why we have to figure out what’s wrong with Domino.”

Everyone looks at her with equal confusion. “What,”

Saskia says.

“because Jacques is drinking sludge?”

“Because maybe it’s not dissolved all the way,”

Nkrumah says. Her eyes are alight with hope.

“Maybe whatever’s in them, we can get it out again.”

“You’re not getting the powder out of this rum,”

Jacques says, licking his teeth.

“It’s not dissolved all the way, but it’s not the same as it was, you know? They’re part of the same fucked-up thing now. We have to accept it.”

The ceiling overhead rattles and all of them look up, startled.

“Can’t be another sandstorm already, can it?”

Kinsey mutters.

“What’s Weatherman say?”

Saskia asks.

They all look at each other, blank-faced. Jacques sighs and walks to the door with his mug of sludge.

“I’ll just take a look outside.”

“Be careful,”

Mads says, running their broad, blunt-fingered hands across their face.

“Nkrumah’s right,”

they say.

“We gotta see if we can help Dom. They have to be hurting right now. Kinsey, I know you’re upset,”

they add.

“but you and I both know that none of this is how Domino would act if they were in their right mind.”

“I know.”

She’s not sure if that’s true or not, but she knows it’s the right sound to make, so she makes it.

They all sit in silence until Jacques returns to the room, his now-empty mug hanging at his side in one slack hand. His face is grim.

“It’s another one. And it looks big.”

“How big?”

Nkrumah asks.

Before Jacques can answer, the ceiling rattles again, harder this time. It sounds like a giant is banging on the roof with one furious fist, trying to get inside.

“No fieldwork for the next day or so, that’s for sure,”

he answers.

“It’s still on the horizon but the wind’s already here, so I figure it’s a big one. Can’t imagine it’ll be gentle.”

“So we’re stuck inside. Wi-Fi and phone lines are still down, and nobody’s going to come fix anything with another storm rolling through. The only person who can read Weatherman reliably is covered in eyelids, so we can’t risk fieldwork between storms, either. That makes this an easy decision—we’ll focus on Domino, since we can’t do shit else anyhow. We’ll go back to the exam room and get some samples from them,”

Mads says. They sound so reasonable. It makes Kinsey want to hit them.

“You all do what you do best. You examine, you study, you identify, you catalog. And then I get to do what I do best. I treat them.”

“And then they’re back to normal,”

Kinsey says, trying not to sound regretful.

Saskia nods.

“And we all forget this ever happened.”

* * *

When the team returns to their vantage point outside the exam room window, Domino is sitting cross-legged in the center of the room. They’re wearing their button-down again. It hangs open in the front, loose. Kinsey scans what she can see of their skin and spots no eyes, no mouths, nothing out of the ordinary. Panic flutters briefly beneath her collarbones—what if her team rescinds their belief in her, what if they decide it was all just a moment of shared delusion?—but then she looks up at Domino’s face, and her worry vanishes.

There’s no denying that something’s wrong with them. Their expression no longer has the open, earnest guilelessness it had before, when they were insisting that Kinsey was imagining things. Now, their typically animated face is utterly still, their eyes flat as dropped pennies.

Jacques shakes his head slowly at the sight of them.

“Something’s not right,”

he mutters.

“That ain’t them.”

“So,”

Domino says to the gathered team.

“That was embarrassing.”

Mads addresses them first.

“No need to be embarrassed, D. You’re sick, that’s all. Can I come into the room?”

“Nah.”

Their mouth snaps into a too-wide grin. Kinsey counts three canines on each side.

“But Kinsey can.”

Nkrumah grabs Kinsey’s arm down low, where Domino won’t be able to see. “Don’t,”

she whispers through clenched teeth. Then, louder: “I’ll go.”

“No,”

Domino and Mads say in unison.

Nkrumah leans across Kinsey to glare at Mads.

“What the fuck,”

she hisses.

“You can’t go in and neither can Kinsey,”

Mads replies levelly.

“Neither of you knows how to take a tissue sample—”

“We do so,”

Kinsey says, momentarily more indignant than she is afraid.

“—from a living person,”

Mads finishes.

“Domino’s not a specimen you found out in the field. They’re alive. They can still feel pain.”

Saskia scoffs.

“If they could still feel pain, we would have heard them screaming when they grew eyes on their stomach.”

Mads frowns.

“We can’t know what that felt like. Best practice in a moment like this one is to assume—you know what? I don’t have to explain this to you. I’m the doctor here.”

Inside the exam room, Domino pushes themself to their feet. They stretch, yawn, scratch the back of their neck. Sand falls from their shoulders as they move. Kinsey can’t tell where it came from. They move toward the exam table, leaving a trail of grit behind them. They look down at the specimen, which is still sprawled out on top of the tarp on the floor.

“Not my best work,”

they mutter. Then they stoop and lift the specimen—the specimen it took three people to lift just a few days before. In their arms now, it looks like it weighs nothing at all. They heft it easily over one shoulder, then drop it onto the exam table.

A gust of wind shakes the wall of the corridor behind the team. Sand whips against the building, making a sound like a thousand fingernails tapping impatiently. Everyone turns to look except Kinsey, who can’t take her eyes off Domino. They glance up, see her staring. Their mouth twitches like they’re holding back a smile.

“I’ll go,”

Kinsey hears herself say.

Domino’s mouth barely moves, but she can hear them anyway.

“Attagirl.”

* * *

She adjusts the wireless headphone in her ear, even though it doesn’t need adjusting. The feel of the smooth plastic under the pad of her finger reminds her that she’s not alone. She pulls a handful of gloves off the wall, double-layers just like always. Tightens the nose bridge on her facemask.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,”

Domino murmurs.

“You don’t need gloves. Not with me.”

Kinsey clears her throat, turns her back on them, double-checks that the walkie-talkie clipped to her belt is on.

“It’s procedure.”

“Please. You don’t know what procedure is. You’ve never done anything like this before, have you, Kinsey?”

There’s a beep in one headphone. She presses her finger to it again, harder this time. A soft click, and then Mads is in her ear.

“You okay?”

When she doesn’t reply, they clear their throat. She glances over to see Mads watching her through the window, their face tight with concern, the walkie-talkie in their hand just out of sight below the windowsill.

“Right. Let’s take some samples.”

She’s already got most of what she needs. But Domino is right: she’s never used these tools on a living creature before. It was strange, removing them from her field kit to bring into this room. It’s stranger still to think that she’ll be using them on a member of her own team.

“Kinsey, will you look at me?”

Domino’s voice is terribly gentle.

“It sounds like there’s another storm coming. Is that right?”

“Seems like it.”

“Hard to get details when your Weatherman interpreter’s locked in the nurse’s office. Best to stay inside.”

Domino’s mouth twitches, like they’re about to kiss the air.

Kinsey swallows around the painful lump that’s forming in her throat. That’s the second time Domino has suggested that everyone should stay inside.

“Give me a second.”

Mads comes to life in her ear.

“For what?”

Kinsey gives her head a minute shake.

“How should I start?”

After a moment’s silence, Mads answers.

“Ask Domino to take the shirt off again.”

“Shirt off,”

she says, turning her back on them. She hears the sound of Domino’s shirt shushing across their skin, then hitting the floor. After a second, she hears a zipper too.

“You can keep the pants on,” she says.

“Why? Don’t you need to inspect all of me?”

There’s a playful tilt in Domino’s voice.

“Don’t be scared to look, Kinsey. I promise not to make eyes at you again.”

Kinsey isn’t an angry person as a rule. She tries not to get angry now.

“No jokes,”

she says.

“Please. I need to concentrate.”

Then, before she can hesitate a second longer, she picks up a sterile large-gauge needle and syringe. She turns and forces herself to look Domino square in the face, holding the needle aloft like the weapon it might need to be.

They look exactly the way they’re supposed to look. They look like her colleague, like the person she’s spent years laughing with and digging next to and falling asleep on and teasing and snapping at and showering with. Every part of them looks perfectly normal.

But the way she’s seeing them isn’t normal. Not for her. Her eyes trail across their skin and she can feel a lift in her belly, the rise of goosebumps across her arms, the prickle of rising hairs on the back of her neck. She runs a tongue across her lower lip before she knows she’s even doing it.

Kinsey grips the needle tighter. She’s sure of it now: she wants Domino. She wants to grab them and sink her teeth into them. She wants them to pin her wrists above her head and have their way with her. She wants to know the taste of their sweat and their blood and she wants to scream their name so loud it makes coyotes twenty miles from here start to yip in response, she wants them to—

“No,”

she says aloud.

“No?”

Mads and Domino say, one in her ear and one in the room.

She clears her throat.

“No, I don’t need to examine all of you,”

she says. Against her will, her eyes drop to the tight boxer-briefs Domino wears.

“Just the areas where the symptoms occurred.”

Domino winces.

“I’m sorry about that,”

they whisper.

“Really. I’m mortified. It’s just—I’m not used to being like this yet, and it’s confusing, trying to figure out where everything belongs.”

“You’re not making any sense,”

Kinsey says.

“Aphasia,”

Mads says in her ear.

“Could be a mini-stroke, could be some kind of brain damage from that fever. Encephalitis, maybe. Keep your mask on just in case.”

Kinsey knows what aphasia is. She still remembers when her father lost the power of coherent speech after his last stroke. It didn’t sound anything like this.

“Gotta be something like that,”

she says anyway.

At Mads’s instruction, Kinsey sets the pre-wrapped, single-use syringe down on a tray alongside gauze, medical tape, a pile of pre-packed alcohol wipes. She asks Domino to lie flat on the exam table. She positions them carefully, handling their limbs as gently as she knows how, avoiding their gaze for as long as she can.

After a few minutes of Kinsey’s bustling, Domino speaks.

“Hey. Can you look at me? In the eyes? They’re up here this time,”

Domino says, a joke hidden somewhere in the recesses of their voice.

“No? Kinsey. Come on.”

She shakes her head, picks up the syringe, drops it again when the wind makes the building shiver.

“Fuck. I’m doing this all backward.”

She tears open a foil packet with a large alcohol swab inside.

“I need to focus, okay? You have to let me pay attention to what I’m doing, or I’ll hurt you.”

“I promise you can’t hurt me,”

Domino murmurs. Kinsey flinches as they reach up to her. They press their index finger to the underside of her chin and tug gently, pulling her chin toward them until she can’t help but meet their gaze. “There,”

they say.

“That’s better.”

“What are you?”

Kinsey whispers. Her voice doesn’t tremble, but it feels like a voice-trembling question all the same.

“I’m yours,”

Domino replies.

Kinsey’s lips part. She doesn’t mean them to, but they do. She presses them back together hard, jerks her head away from Domino’s hand.

“I need to take this sample,”

she says stiffly.

“You don’t really want to do that,”

Domino says.

“I do.”

“You don’t.”

They stretch their arms up over their head, languid.

“I can tell when you want something. You soak yourself with your own perfume. When you’re eager and ready and dripping—I can taste it on the air, Kinsey. Everyone can. So sweet.”

They lick their lips, their eyes falling to her beltline, their voice going flat.

“But I can’t taste you right now. That needle doesn’t excite you at all.”

“Don’t let them get to you,”

Mads says in her ear.

“Shut up,”

Kinsey snaps. Domino’s head tilts to the side—they thought that was for them—and Kinsey decides to run with it. To let them think she’s shutting them down.

“Of course it excites me,”

she tells them, picking up the syringe and giving Domino a dry stare.

“Didn’t you know that about me? I drench my panties every time I think of performing a core needle biopsy on one of my colleagues.”

Domino doesn’t seem even a little bit chastised by this. They look her over, considering. “Really?”

Kinsey huffs out a laugh.

“Oh, yeah. Nothing gets me hotter than the idea of jamming a needle into you and yanking out some of your tissue. And smearing the sample onto a slide?”

She pretends to fan herself with one gloved hand.

“Don’t get me started.”

Domino gives a slow nod, their mouth spreading again into that too-wide grin. Only two canines on each side this time.

“Okay. Let’s do it, then. But I have a condition.”

“That much is obvious.”

“No, I mean—I have terms. You have to do something for me if I’m going to do something for you.”

Something has been picking at the edges of Kinsey’s thoughts for the past couple of hours. It’s a thought Jacques already put voice to, and now is the moment it chooses to assert itself in her mind as loud as a scream: this isn’t Domino. She could have chalked everything else up to them acting strange, feeling sick, having some kind of previously undiscovered illness. But there’s nothing in the world that would make the Domino she knows fail to laugh at a stupid joke like the one she just made.

Whoever—whatever—is lying in front of her, it’s deadly serious about the demand it wants to make. And it’s not her colleague.

“What are your terms?”

she asks, and even she can hear the chilliness in her own voice.

“You have to talk me through what you’re doing,”

they say. “Slowly.”

She waits for them to add more. When they don’t, she shrugs. “Okay.”

They grin, give a sinuous little writhe.

“Take whatever you want.”

Mads becomes brisk after that.

“Great. We’ve got consent. Let’s get this over with. Open a fresh swab, the one you opened a second ago has probably dried out by now. And try to stop touching everything, would you?”

Kinsey tries to see the person on the lab table in front of her as just another specimen. She imagines that she’s explaining her actions to a student, a grad student maybe, who needs to learn the process.

“I’m going to sterilize the surface of the skin with alcohol.”

She reaches for Domino with a fresh square of damp cotton. She’s not sure where to start—they don’t have eyes or mouths on their body anymore, and she isn’t totally confident that she remembers where those things were located before.

Domino notices her hesitation, points to their armpit.

“I’ll always show you where to take what you want from me,”

they whisper, their gaze locked onto her.

Kinsey swabs the area, uncomfortably grateful for the guidance. The building shivers around her again, and this time it doesn’t stop.

The wind isn’t coming in gusts anymore. The storm is here in earnest.

It’s only on the second pass with the swab that she notices something odd. There’s no hair in their armpit. Domino usually shaves their body hair, which is why Kinsey didn’t notice anything strange at first. But now, upon closer inspection, she realizes: there are no razor bumps, no stubble. There are no creases. Domino’s underarm is as smooth as a doll’s.

“I’m going to let the alcohol dry a little,”

she says a little too loudly.

“Then I’ll insert the needle, uh—”

“You’re doing great,”

Mads murmurs through the earpiece.

“You’ll put the needle in by about a half inch, then take it out again, easy peasy. If you’d listened to me about getting the supplies for a punch biopsy, we could have—”

“Mads.”

“Right. Never mind. Look, you’ll just be punching out a sample for us to look at. Like taking a core sample from a tree. Or maybe more like a hole punch, at that depth. Don’t say hole punch, though, it’ll freak them out.”

Kinsey nods to show them she’s got it.

“I’ll insert the needle, then remove it again. Like a tree.”

Her voice is shaking. She clears her throat.

“Like taking a core sample from a tree. Okay?”

“What are you doing?”

Domino asks.

Kinsey freezes.

“I’m taking tissue samples, so we can—”

They reach out and touch her wrist. Gentle. Solicitous.

“No, I mean—look. I know I’ve come on strong. Maybe I’m still over the line. But—”

They study her face with wide, worried eyes.

“I only want this if you want it. If you’re sure. You don’t seem sure. You seem nervous. Are you nervous?”

Of course she’s nervous. She’s about to jam a needle into her coworker’s armpit. But she shakes her head.

“Not nervous,”

she says in a low voice. “Excited.”

“You’re sure?”

She can’t bring herself to say yes, so she just nods instead.

“Okay.”

Domino reaches up with their opposite hand, gently takes her wrist.

“If it’s just nerves, that’s fine. I can help. Let’s do it together.”

She lets them guide her. They go slowly, their eyes flicking back and forth between Kinsey’s eyes and her hand in theirs. They pull her wrist toward their underarm, pausing only when the tip of the needle is just barely denting the skin.

“Are you ready?”

they ask. The lights flicker overhead as the wind outside picks up, a little at a time, hitting faster and harder every few seconds.

All Kinsey can feel—all she can think about—is the feel of their fingers on her wrist. She takes a deep breath, then nods.

Domino pulls on her wrist, angling the needle up toward their collarbone. She lets her arm move with them, sliding the needle into the taut skin of their too-smooth armpit. They don’t flinch, but they do draw in a slow, steady breath. Their chest expands on the inhale, seems to engulf the needle.

“Wait,”

Kinsey says.

“Wait, don’t breathe so deep. I don’t want to go in too far, Mads said I could hit an artery if I’m not careful.”

“I want you to go in farther,”

Domino whispers.

“I want to take you deeper.”

“Kinsey?”

Mads asks through the earpiece.

“What’s going on? Can you move so I can see Domino? Remember what I said about the axillary artery, you really don’t want to hit that.”

Kinsey realizes that she’s got her back to the observation window. She tries to shuffle to one side, but Domino holds her wrist tight.

“Don’t go,”

they breathe.

“Give me more.”

“I can’t,”

Kinsey says.

“I’ll hurt you.”

“I told you, you can’t hurt me.”

They tug on her wrist again. She doesn’t have time to react, to resist—her hand surges toward them, and the needle plunges deeper, until it’s in them all the way to the hilt. Domino pushes her hand away again, letting the needle emerge by a full inch before pulling her back in.

“Like that.”

They sigh as the needle plunges back into them.

Kinsey jerks her hand away, stumbles backward.

“What—what are you—no,”

she stammers.

“Kinsey? Kinsey, what’s happening?”

Mads is borderline frantic in her ear.

“Are you okay?”

“I thought you liked it,”

Domino says. Slowly, so slowly, they pull the needle out. A high, breathy moan slips between their lips as the point of the needle emerges. A thin trickle of sand follows it, streaming out of a peppercorn-sized hole in their skin.

“Will you tell me what I’m doing wrong?”

“All of this is wrong,”

Kinsey breathes, her stomach clenching at the sight of that sand. The lights flicker again.

“Where is that sand coming from? What’s—what’s happening to you?”

“Kinsey,”

Mads says urgently.

“Talk to me.”

Kinsey pulls the earpiece out and tucks it into her pocket. She doesn’t think about why. She can’t seem to think about anything. Her heart hammers in her ears as she stares at that small black hole in Domino’s body.

Domino stares at Kinsey intently, their face a mask of concentration.

“I didn’t get it quite right, did I?”

they say at last.

“You don’t like me yet. That’s okay. I think I see the problem. I can fix it.”

After a moment, the hole in their underarm begins to widen.

“Domino?”

Kinsey breathes.

“What’s happening to—”

“Shhh.”

A few grains of sand make their way down Domino’s temple. Kinsey feels an answering bead of sweat at the small of her back.

“Just give me a second.”

As Kinsey watches, the hole grows until it’s the size of a bottlecap. There’s still no blood—just pulsing red darkness, damp invitation. The skin around the hole ripples, then puckers up to form two neat parentheses of pink flesh. Domino shifts their weight on the lab table and as they move, the skin of their underarm rucks up like a lifted skirt, folds forming over and around each other, sliding across each other, crumpling like a fistful of satin before smoothing out again.

“Wait,”

she breathes, just as a small tender node of raw pink pushes its way up out of Domino’s skin at the apex of the cluster of folds. She has to hold back the rest of the sentence: for me.

“Is that better?”

Domino asks, reaching across their own chest to trace a finger along the brand-new orifice nestled in the crook where their shoulder meets their ribcage. At the brush of their finger, Kinsey catches the faintest glisten of moisture.

Her mouth floods with saliva. She doesn’t understand what she’s seeing, doesn’t understand what she’s feeling. She wants this to stop. She needs it to continue. She licks her lips and she tastes something sweet and floral on the air, something familiar, something that reminds her of pulsing muscle gripping her thumb and forefinger.

Domino twists their head to smirk up at her, still caressing themself. Spreading themself, just for her. They keep their eyes locked on her as they slide a finger inside the slick hole in their underarm. Kinsey is still holding the syringe in one hand. She feels her other hand rising of its own accord, reaching toward the dewdrop of moisture that’s seeping up around the edges of the hole. She’s going to touch Domino, she’s going to feel what they feel, she’s going to slip the tip of her tongue between those satiny folds and—

“Kinsey!”

The door to the exam room opens with a bang. Kinsey whips around to see Mads standing in the doorway, their face stark with fear.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,”

Kinsey says weakly.

“It’s—we were just—”

“She was just getting that tissue sample,”

Domino says. Kinsey looks back to see them lying with their arms at their sides, their hands folded neatly across their belly. The syringe is on the lab tray next to the discarded alcohol pad. Nothing looks out of the ordinary.

Kinsey can still taste Domino on the air. She bites her lips to keep from licking them.

She picks up the syringe, turns on her heel, and walks to the door. She hands the syringe to Mads as she passes them.

“That should be enough,”

she says brusquely. She knows she should clean up after herself. She knows she should tell Mads what she just saw. She knows a lot of things. But at the moment, she doesn’t care about what she knows.

Kinsey goes to her bunk. The wind on the other side of the back wall of her room is just picking up into a feral, wolflike howl. She ignores it. She ignores everything. She locks the door and pulls the painting off the wall. The photo taped to the back flutters free, the stickiness of the tape nearly spent.

She doesn’t put it back until the next morning.