Rearranging Her Guts Novels & Stories

"Seems I can't control it yet in this body." She stood, and picked her way to the door, held and twisted the knob, but before she could complete the task of turning down the knob, she fell to the ground; dropping like a big lump of sack. Her eyes were flickering randomly between green and light brown, and finally it settled with the brown, forming an obvious golden ring in the middle. With her consciousness returned, she quickly rose from where she'd laid, surprise and uneasy. She walked to the middle of the room, took a quick turn around, and paused. Pressure was building up, sweat was rolling and tickling down her face, and she started fidgeting.

She came to in the most horrific, undignified fashion, hunched over a toilet bowl, her whole upper body dripping wet, retching. Calix was behind her, holding her hair back as life slammed back into her and she emptied her stomach. Finally it was over. She was shaking all over violently. She felt herself being pulled back up and a wet cloth over her face and neck. It felt wonderful. Then she was sitting on his lap and being held very firmly against a broad chest until the shaking started to subside. She finally managed faintly, ‘Where…where are we?’

Gerfast set it down and leaned forward to place an index finger just beneath her jawline in search of a pulse. There was none. He acted quick and without hesitation: reaching for the bundled blanket which he unrolled hastily, watching the butcher knife appear gleaming wickedly sharp with a light of its own. He cut open her belly and replaced the butcher knife with a small hunting knife, carefully cutting out each prized organ; her kidneys, her heart, her liver, her spleen… pillaging from her body what had been denied him by the others.

It disappeared like a secret, hidden inside the very walls of Royce’s kingdom. The bugs lay in her palm, weightless. She slid three into the hidden pocket sewn inside the vest seam and pressed the fourth in the lining above her ribcage. She closed her eyes and rehearsed—again—the choreography: hors d’oeuvre cart, refreshment table near the stage, ficus by the security office, monitor outside the private room. She could have done it blindfolded. She opened her eyes and breathed out once, a long exhale that flattened the tremor in her chest until only focus remained.

My stomach lurched and my mouth turned bitter, and before I could stop it, I threw up. I wiped my mouth and straightened. Then I met the woman’s reflection in the mirror. I gasped. "Julia!" She was different now. The harsh, dyed-black hair was gone, replaced by a sleek blonde bob. At least she'd managed to repair the hair before it was damaged by the dye. She looked polished and calmer, like she had erased the scared version of herself I had last seen in that dark warehouse. I turned sharply. She started walking toward me slowly.

She was so engrossed by the scene that she almost forgot why she was present there in the first place. She looked at the sky for a few minutes, enchanted by how beautiful it was. Suddenly, the bag slipped from her hand and fell to the floor, snapping her out of her trance. She then crouched down, opened the bag to pull out its contents, and started rearranging them. She began by attaching the stock to the receiver using the fixing screws.

She is ruthless, she knows what she wants and she is not afraid to call me out on my bullshit. So, inevitably, i am on my knees right now scraping floors, mending holes on the walls and rummaging through my wardrobe to find anything worth keeping, while she is busy reinventing me and lifting my ass up from the gutter. Currently, with a lot of music, dance and homemade cooking.

Everything seemed so bright and the sounds of the forest so loud. She could hear Adrian's heart pumping away in his chest. She laid her head against it, momentarily soothed by the steady rhythm. But that steady beat pricked at her senses, she needed to change it. The order of it called at her to rouse chaos. She picked at the fabric covering him, no longer remembering how to remove a t-shirt. She pulled and pulled, the cloth strained under her but would not rip. But she could use her teeth. She pushed him down and Adrian went willingly, perhaps not yet pulled by the call of the moon.

Look down and you'll see that they didn't even bother patching up your wounds. True to what it said, her stomach region was indeed exposed. The bunch of lunatics led by Dr. Lauren left her lying there with a bloody mess for a midsection. The girl didn't dare do what the system said for fear of her anxiousness getting haywire again. She was a strong-willed woman but even she, in her current state, wouldn't be able to fight the fear of seeing intestines and livers throbbing exposed in the air. She didn't dare look down to see what atrocities had been done to her.

Her glasses had slipped a little crooked on her nose, and her cheeks were flushed red, but she pulled herself together fast, straightening up. “Get on your feet. Back up against the shelves over there.”