Something changed

Philip watched the raindrops clinging hard to the telephone wires. They spread a thick web out from a pole near his bedroom window, some sections shooting into the wall beneath his feet and then surely burrowing in and infesting it.
Slight gusts of wind tugged aimlessly at the black lace web. It was almost as if he could see the wind moving around it, being sheared in two by the thin wire.
The rain clung only to the higher wires, the ones that connected to the tops of the three-storey town houses on his street. Here the slope from pole to wall was so gradual that the rain didn’t run along the wires to escape into porous brickwork.
It seemed trapped. Looking down at a concrete street that it would seemingly never reach. Somehow it was locked, hooked, to its cabled web. Its only hope for respite or transcendence lay in a sudden, sharp gust of wind to rattle the line into throbbing life and send water droplets sailing haphazardly through the air. Or, else, for the clouds to part and the sun to suck its crystalline tears back up into the skies.
They probably shouldn’t have had sex last night. That was Philip’s take on the situation, now he’d had time to reflect.
He’d been waiting a long time, and the night was warm and the kissing as passionate as ever it had been, but now, as he gazed out of his bedroom window, he didn’t see any problem with waiting some more.
Tina felt the same way. It was the first thing he read this morning when he turned on his mobile phone, her thoughts on the sex.
He’d gone to sleep with mingling feelings of elation and maturity sending his mind giddy, and he’d woken up with a boot pushing into his guts.
He went to the bathroom and spent a good five minutes looking at his body, his face in the mirror. Maybe there might be something different he’d notice. A mark on his waist, perhaps, a certain look in his eyes or a smirk he couldn’t shift. But all seemed the same.
Down to breakfast and another quick glance in the hall mirror. He sat as casually as he could manage. His parents were finishing their cereal and swilling coffee around their mouths, the final wake-up call before the journey to work.
He waited a moment for them to say something, for them to smell something different about him; his new found reek of manliness, or her, unwashed from his body. But they strove on with their very busy lives, stuffing toast into their mouths and wishing him a good day. Feed the cat, do some homework; the things they always said.
Philip drank some pure orange juice and munched half-heartedly at a round of toast. He looked at the phone on the counter-top and thought about calling Tina. Instead, he slouched back upstairs, lay down upon his bed and inspected his penis.
It looked the same as always. Nothing seemed different about it, and it grew in his hands as he pulled and prodded at it. Soon enough his thoughts turned to some beautiful woman, naked and purring beside him. He made very sure that his thoughts did not turn towards Tina.
Outside his bedroom window a blackbird landed clumsily on a slowly throbbing wire sending raindrops scattering. One by one they plopped sadly down onto the hard grey ground below.

Drying out

People were noticing they were drinking more.
Always, when paying an impromptu visit to the flat, would there be an offer of a glass of wine. “Red or white? We’ve got both open,” he’d say. That poor, unfortunate man.
Tina, Brian’s wife, would be drinking too, cajoling him, opening another bottle for him, but she always seemed to stay pretty sober. It was like she could just drink and drink, and keep on drinking without feeling the effects of the hedonistic grape.
But Brian, Brian would get in a hell of a state. A hell of a state and he’d keep on drinking. And she’d be there, Tina, opening another bottle and pouring him another glass, and then one more.
His friends saw him pass out on numerous occasions and it was lucky that he did his heavy drinking in the comfort of his own home. They rarely seemed to go out anymore but, when the couple did, Tina seemed quite able to control their drinking. One couldn’t help but wonder if they were just saving themselves for when they got back home. Back home there was lots of wine.
Christmas and New Year had been quite a time. Full of partying and misbehaving. Lots of drinking.
On the third day of 2006 Brian woke from a prolonged stupor that had presumably lasted since New Year’s Eve. Glancing at the watch on his left forearm he was surprised to see a network of thin veins had risen up across his arm. The veins seemed full of vitality but their prominence was made all the more unusual by the slightly greenish tinge to both them and his arm. The skin pigment had lessened in terms of usual colour and had even become translucent in places.
Nausea, caused by a combination of this sight and his woozy head, made Brian attempt to stand and reach the bathroom before he threw up. His legs, though, were less than useful and seemed to flex and bow when he put weight on them. As he staggered forward he felt some pain around the knee and heard a sickening noise, like flesh tearing. He collapsed into an armchair.
Looking down at his leg he expected to see his trousers covered in blood. Instead he saw a damp patch running down his inside leg and a small puddle on the floor.
“Ah shit!” He thought he’d pissed himself.
The urine smelled sweet on the floor and the scent greeted his nostrils with a kick that brought a sharp acid reflux up to his gullet. He choked and then vomited all over himself. The sticky liquid that covered him was as clear and sweet as that which now pooled around his feet.
Confused and feeling feint, Brian gathered what he could of his brain, of his working senses, breathed deeply and cleared his head. His crotch was pretty dry, so he reached down and slowly rolled up the sopping leg of his trouser.
His lower left leg was now a beautiful fleshy green - quite the ripest looking lower leg you’re ever likely to see. And there, close to the knee joint, where the pressure from the rest of his body had caused his ankle to squash and pull at the tauter skin of the knee, was a thin tear from which was trickling this beautiful sweet juice.
Brian looked down at his leg in bewilderment, looked down at the sugary juice running into the veins of the wood floor, looked and saw another pair of feet standing next to his.
His wife was standing there with a glass of chilled white wine in her hand. Condensation dribbled down the stem of the glass.
“Nearly done Brian,” she said. “You just stay right where you are though. Don’t want anymore accidents, eh?”
“What is this? What have you done?” hissed Brian, his fat flopping tongue making it difficult to speak now, or at least be understood.
“Hush now, dear. You’ll be ready soon. Nice and ripe for tomorrow,” she said. “The family are all coming round for dinner, so you drink up your wine and be good, ok?”
In response, Brian managed an expletive and then knocked the glass from her hand. She punched him hard in the face so that he bit his tongue, which hurt a little and then seemed to deflate. His mouth filled once more with sweet warm juice and then Brian tried, but failed, to cry.
She stamped down on his foot. He heard it pop and burst, but he didn’t really feel anything.
Tina then forced his mouth closed and made him swallow everything that he could feel was in there. He looked into her eyes and saw nothing but seething rage. He was little more than a fattened pig who had bitten the farmer, come to slaughter.
Brian then passed out, his body drowned in sweetness.
They roused him, as best they could at 3pm the following day. His sticky eyes opened enough to make out the shape of his wife and her family standing around him, holding long thin straws. His mother in law smiled at him, punctured his stomach and drank deeply.
Brian’s sticky eyes meekly sealed again.

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This story has a similar premise to this piece: The Green Man