Gregor Smith was not a man that fit. Not into any cultural box, his name; part exotic slavic from an absentee mother, part generic English from a deadbeat father; was forced together like bad teeth. not into his clothes either, or society as a whole. He had fucked two women in his life; his high school girlfriend that had broken up with him two weeks later, and a prostitute that he'd eventually paid double to fake enjoying it like the girls did in the videos. Gregor Smith, and anyone that saw Gregor Smith, knew that he was a suicide statistic waiting to happen. For six years, he had woken up at seven am, downed two cigarettes and a shot of vodka for breakfast, put on a shirt that rumpled around the shoulders and pulled taught around the waist, and went to work; five days a week, fifty weeks a year. The remainder of his time he spent swiping through dating apps, chasing off any wayward matches with promises of how forthright, honest and kind he was (all lies, the only thing accurate to his profile was the name, and even then the last two letters had disappeared).
On the morning of what was to be Gregor's 1528th failed attempt at slitting his wrists with a razor he woke, showered, drank, smoked, scratched at the itch that wouldn't seem to leave on his side and went to work. Gregor saved £1.20 at the bus when the card machine broke and the bus driver couldn't take his payment. The felt of the seats rubbed strangely against his back, but the bus was full and Gregor, already encroaching on the two seats next to him, didn't want to make a scene by reaching round and elbowing someone to scratch at himself, so he tried his best to tune out the feeling and focus on the other things tangential to his life. There were two men holding hands in front of him. Once they had been two boys wearing matching uniforms, hidden on other ends of the bus every day. Then they had been two boys who'd sat together and talked endlessly. Now they sat, silent, together. Gregor had named them, Tall and Brown. Tall was tall, Brown was middle eastern. He didn't know their actual names, or where they went every day, his stop was before theirs.
Gregor got off at the stop closest to his workplace and walked the rest of the way. It was a five minute walk, it used to be shorter but the busses had been rerouted the summer before and now Gregor arrived at work each day sweating through the back of his shirt into his jacket. After a year's worth of missed dry cleanings, Gregor often smelled as if he hadn't showered at all. Greeting him when he arrived to his cubicle was a yellow post-it note with a link to a shared drive. On it were the instructions for the day. His boss, Sarah, liked to be direct, especially with Gregor, and not waste time. Some days he got through an entire day's work without speaking to anyone but the bus driver. He didn't like that. Sarah didn't like Gregor, being the only person who had been at the department longer than her made him a threat in her eyes, he knew it. At times it was like she went out of her way to ensure Gregor saw nobody, spoke to nobody. Fucking bitch. Gregor sat down to work and scanned the rest of the room. Liam and Eva were staring at him, like he'd just farted, but caught themselves as he met their gaze and went back to work. Gregor worked, on and off, till lunch, where he left to find the hot dog truck he had seen yesterday. As it turned out, everyone had seen it yesterday, and the line was ten people long. Gregor hadn't brought a lunch with him, so he resigned himself to the line. the sausages were pressed between metal grills and held over a gas flame to heat, the plasticky skin popping and sizzling and dripping liquid into the fire to burn the smell of cooking meat into the air. Gregor eyed each one as it went on, and moved down the line to get an even cooking time before being taken up, matching them up to who would get them. They weren't store bought frankfurters, so each was different. Some were flaccid, some short. there! Gregor's sausage. It was fat, and looked close enough to bursting, not like the ones next to it. Good. Gregor would take it with mustard- the honey mustard not the dijon- and extra onions, the £1.20 he saved would pay for it. He wouldn't get the cheese, he'd seen the man behind the counter stuffing it into his mouth between orders when nobody was looking, and it looked oily, even if he did like cheese. Two people ahead of him, then one, his sausage was leaking grease into the fire as he ordered, and one of the two men scooped it up in tongs, stuffed it between two sauce laden pieces of bread, and then opened the shaky metal door to the truck and got out, untying his apron and fondling a cigarette carton. Fat fucking pig shit worthless bastard shit immigrant-
"Excuse me?" the man still left asked, his voice raised slightly as if offended that Gregor was taking up his time. He looked down, focused right on Gregor's bald patch. Gregor was looking at the ground furious thoughts racing through his brain, but twisted his neck back upwards. Mournfully, he requested extra onions on the next hot dog, which was limp, undercooked, and short. the man didn't give Gregor the time to ask for honey mustard before slopping greyish dijon on it and shoving the pathetic small hot dog at him with one hand, the greasy white plastic square to pay with the other. The other man finished Gregor's hot dog, wiped his meaty hands on his shirt, and got back in the truck. As he walked back to work, wiping a mustard drip from his shirt, Gregor imagined all the ways he could beat that man to a bloodied pulp. If only he were better at fighting. If only he knew how to fight.
On the bus ride back home, a baby wouldn't stop screaming. Everyone at work had been whispering things to each other about Gregor, he just knew it. What was it now, had he looked at a new hire for too long? Was his mustard splotch really that interesting? Whatever it was they'd regarded him as if he'd stood on his desk and started masturbating then and there. And the baby wouldn't shut up. The mother wasn't doing anything to stop it either, lazy bitch. She turned, and on a bus filled with exhausted, quiet passengers, half the bus turned with her. "What did you just call me?" Gregor sniggered internally. Someone must have catcalled the girl while Gregor had been all up in his thoughts, fucker must be pissing himself with humiliation. Gregor turned around to see the man, but nobody behind him was turned. The woman was looking at him. "Are you deaf." Not a question. "What did you just call me." Also not a question. "Didn't say anything." Gregor murmured. "Don't fucking lie to me" Her golden hazel eyes shattered his orbitals, tearing through his brain and out the other side, her stringy bleach-blonde hair framed her face to make her look like a heroin addict, but in an alluring way. "You called me a lazy bitch. You called me a lazy fucking bitch." Gregor snapped back to reality, the woman really was speaking to him. Gregor started stammering, trying to find words. He was always so good with words when he wasn't speaking, why not now? "Call me that again and we'll have a fucking problem. Understand?" she waved a finger at him. It was tipped in red, and had faded henna markings. It was slightly yellowed too, pulled taught around the bone “Call me that again. go on. go on say it you spaz. what's the matter, can't say it to my face? fuck off. come on.” she directed the last instruction at the baby, which was still crying, and got off at the next stop. Still glaring at him. Nobody else looked at Gregor for the remained of the trip, and when he got off, the bus driver was staring at him. Finally alone, Grgor scratched again at his itch, harder now, and walked home. Even in the cold, Gregor could feel the sweat spreading around his back. And for some reason it hurt now as well. Maybe he had a rash. Gregor scratched at it one last time, and his hand came away with a slight speck of red. Shit. Gregor tried to feel for the rash but when he pulled his shirt around he saw that it wasn’t sweat on his back, the right side of his shirt was dotted and pitched with blood. Shit. something under his shirt moved. Shit shit shit shit. It moved more now, like it was crawling, burrowing. Gregor, lit by a streetlamp, dropped his jacked, his backpack, and began wrestling with his shirt. He looked like a madman, but he’d rather that than some giant foreign spider or insect burrow into him and murder him. His shirt now off, Gregor started hitting himself wildly, trying to find wherever the thing had crawled to, there, still on his side. He batted at it, but it held on, and then again, but he only hit himself. It was latched on to him. Gregor ran into the streetlamp to crush it, instead he bruised a rib and caused a woman aminute or two up the road to swap sides. Thinking less and less, Gregor clawed at the thing, hitting smooth carapace and drawing more and more blood. Stupid fucking piece of the insect bit the tip of Gregor’s finder before he could finish the thought, and he ripped it away to see blood from the scratches, but also from his finger. The bite marks were too big to be an insect, it was like a person had bit him. Still panicking, Greg reached around and, gently, touched the creature. Carapace, ridged carapace, except not. The creature didn’t move, Gregor felt around each plate, which weren’t plates at all. Inset below Gregir Smith’s armpit was a second mouth, bleeding profusely from the gums, and muttering the same thoughts of disbelief that ran through Gregor’s mind.
Gregor did not put his shirt back on, two of the buttons had torn off anyway, in the morning he would put it in the bin. Instead, he hoped nobody saw him, bloody and shirtless, walk to his flat at the end of the street, and sat himself in front of the mirror to look at himself. Gregor was covered in dry blood, the shredded gums of his new mouth were bleeding and, knowing what it was, now hurt badly. His lips were rosey and full, and the tongue was a tongue. Gregor was confused somewhat, but relieved it wasn’t a bug, so he showered the blood off and went to sleep.
Gregor dreamed that night, that someone has cracked open his side with a woodcutter’s axe. Again and again, the metal bit into him, pulling chunks of slop. Deeper, more, until it bit. The axe stayed in, and could not be pulled out. Gregor let go, and the axe handle came away, chunks bit free from the metal.
Gregor woke from the dream, because it had all been a dream, a nightmare that probably meant he was working too hard or needed to masturbate less or eat better. I’m going to do push ups. I’m going to get up and do ten push ups, then im going to get dressed. Gregor heard himself, think, and in a panic sent his hand to his side. Teeth. Fuck, he felt his second mouth say, and recoiled, hoping he would throw up through the right throat.
Gregor went to the bathroom to check on himself. After wading through a sea of plastic package scraps, cans and trays of food, he opened the medicine cabinet. The packet of condoms he had bought before his most recent date had expired three months ago, and water had gotten into the paracetamol, dissolving all the pills he’d so carefully carved from blister packs into a brick of bad-tasting pain relief. Gregor moved the packet of razor blades (not the ones shaped like a trapezium, they looked funny when you killed yourself, the ones you could snap in two looked better) and pulled up his bedshirt, going grey in its old age, begging to be cleansed in a washing machine. There it was. Lips, teeth. Gregor tried to make it open, but he couldn’t find the muscle. All he could do was twist his body or his arm, sometimes to the point that it hurt.
Eventually Gregor tried thinking. Thinking a word. Open, he thought, and the mouth said it. For a moment, the mouth opened to speak the word, but closed just as the word ended. Open was one of those words that you had to close your mouth to say. Even so, it didn’t feel strange hearing your own thought. In a way, Gregor already had been, just now it came through his ears as well as his head, at the same time. Gregor racked his head trying to think of a word that left his mouth open. Watching the other mouth gnash and spit making words. Eventually he decided just to open it himself. Pinning his shirt under his armpit, where it started immediately soaking up sweat, Gregor forced a finger through the teeth. It gave, opening softly. Then another, then another. It suddenly came to Gregor that he hadn’t washed his hands since the last time he’d masturbated, and he was likely spreading the residue of last night’s dick sweat into his own mouth, or one of them at least. Gregor made a hasty retreat and washed his hands more thoroughly than he had in a week before trying again. There was a tongue, or at least he thought it was a tongue. Gregor Smith didn’t make a habit of touching his own tongue, and he hadn’t touched anyone else’s in so long it might have been never. That was something you did during sex, you shoved your fingers down someone throat. It was meant to prove that you were in charge, that you could do that and they’d accept. That you were in charge. Gregor started thinking about doing that to so many people. Sarah, Liam, Eva. Anyone. Gregor realised he was hard, and pulled his boxers down, letting it flop into the sink. Feeling the mouth, the teeth, the lips, the tongue, Gregor wanked himself off staring at the lifeless reflection in the mirror, at the razors, at the pills. He came like a cut artery into the sink, and let the tap run so he wouldn’t have to touch it before he went to the toilet and pissed, the second mouth still whimpering Sarah’s name.
There she was, at work. Bitch. Today, the task Sarah gave Gregor was to clean up a spreadsheet. Be quiet, play with the toy, and don’t disturb anyone until I can think up a reason to get rid of you.
“Greg? You okay?”
“All good.”
“Okay, It sounded like you were whispering something”
Shit
“I’m sorry?” Sarah looked confused
Shut up shut up
“Is someone on the phone, Greg?”
Idiot fucking whore leave me alone “you stupid bitch.”
Wrong mouth.
Gregor sat in a cafe the rest of the day. Sarah had told him to take the day off and work from his laptop. Gregor didn’t want to go home, being there during the day was depressing. If he was there without purpose, with nothing to do, he would have to clean. To open the cupboard, root around for black bags, scrape all the cans and boxes in, tie it off, then do it again and again and again and even then he would have to sweep, wipe, clean, mop, sponge. For now, he had to live in that dump. He had no time. The moment it was his choice, Gregor became a cave dweller. So he sat at his too-small table, with his cold, overpriced coffee, and deleted rows of empty data while trying not to think about turning Sarah’s face into a red pulp, and shoving his fingers down her throat. It was all he could do not to smash the table, to pick up his laptop, fold it over backwards, smash the coffee mug, walk back over across the road to find Sarah and beat her with it. Gregor had done the whole ordeal three times in his head; first, slamming her face into a desk till her smashed socked popped her eye like an egg yolk; second, breaking each of her fingers individually and listening to each scream; third, finding the spot where her jaw met her neck and pulling it straight off like opening a crisp packet Gregor looked back at the laptop. It was quiet. Not even a minute ago it had been alive with chatter, but now there was nothing. Gregor looked about. The woman at the till was staring. The people in line were staring. Sarah, holding the daily coffee she always brought back in after lunch that stupid idiot fucking Gregor had forgotten about, was staring.
Gregor pushed past her, past them all. He realised he’d left his computer so, shielding his eyes, he went back in to pick it up, his second mouth screaming at him, you idiot fuck up you fucking idiot retard they’re going to fire you, just kill yourself right now in front of them and kill that bitch too, the last part said as he barreled into Sarah for the second time that day.
Gregor didn’t take the bus. The mouth wouldn’t stop yelling, and he couldn’t face all those people. Tape, he had tape in his bag. Gregor ducked into a public bathroom, tried to at least, but he didn’t have a coin. Instead, he unbuttoned his shirt and tried to tape the mouth closed. No use, it was rattling, spitting, yelling at him for being so useless and pathetic. So he ran home.
Gregor hadn’t run in a long time. Save for the bus, which usually left him after waiting just long enough to give him hope. By the time he reached his flat, he was too tired to think. The mouth slowed, running out of breath, and by the time he reached his flat it was quiet, only whimpering occasionally about how much of a creature Gregor was for living like this. Gregor hit himself in the side to make it shut up. Lips split on teeth, staining the still-cut gums a new shade of red. Again. Again. The teeth started to loosen, on the fifth one cracked entirely, and Gregor doubled in pain. Gregor tore off his shirt and coat, buttons flying, one of the sides caught in the mouth. Gregor yanked at it, pulling an incisor free with it.
Gregor was bleeding like minced beef left out too long. The mouth, now split into a grin, still moved, but Gregor could barely think to comprehend the worlds. Again and again he hit himself, leaving only a checkerboard of teeth in his second jaw. Still exhausted from the run, Gregor sat on a pizza box on his blanket, and fell backwards.
Gregor dreamed of a snake. Not a big one, just a snake. It was curled up inside his chest, chewing on him. It made its home, carving out unimportant things; livers, kidneys, lungs. It didn’t need those, only Gregor needed them. The snake wrapped around his ribcage, lapping at the sides for blood, finding hanging strands of meat and pulling them free, delighting in their fatty, stringly taste. Finally, it reached a wall, stretched thin and rubbery. Greenish lesions deeper than the wall marred it, but the snake only saw another meal. It opened its jaws, burst through, and saw a world of food. Why , it thought, have I been scavenging on one man when I can eat anything?
Gregor woke up. The mouth had bled through into the bed and was whispering. Gregor sat up, head spinning from blood loss. This wouldn’t do. He couldn’t live like this, it wasn’t fair. That one came out with spittle, blood, and the shrapnel of a molar. Gregor needed to be normal. Not this, not this creature he’d become, normal. Gregor could do that.
Buried under wires and flash drives was an old spool of fishing line. Gregor didn’t remember why he’d bought it, it was far too thin to hang himself off and he couldn’t remember a time he’d had hobbies that didn’t come from the glow of a computer monitor. Then a needle. Gregor’s mother had known needlework, she’d taught him as a boy, back before she’d told him how much of a mistake it had been not to abort him. She’d wanted a girl anyway, badly enough to gamble on it. When Gregor came out, red, bloated, barely alive, She had cried, and tried to kill herself a few days later. Gregor’s father hadn’t noticed. He’d almost forgotten the skill, but he still had the supplies. Rusted through, held to the fridge by a magnet just in case he needed it. Long, blunt, bent somehow. But it was something. Gregor took it between two fingers, and after calming the tremors in his hands with the dregs of a bottle of vodka he didn’t remember buying, managed to thread the line through. Gregor returned to the bathroom to work, naked, bloodied, sweating with effort and drooling from sleep. He took the two lips; grizzled, shredded pieces of flesh that peeled off at the slightest tug; and pressed them together. Gregor angled the needle and pressed.
Pain.
Gregor flinched. The needle dropped out of his hands only partway through, tearing through the second lip. Panicked, Gregor got on his knees and searched the floor. Where was it, amid months of grime and pubic hair and dried piss? Nowhere. It had gone, disappeared. Idiot fucking- Gregor didn’t listen to the rest, because again he felt a sharp pain in his side. The needle was still inside him. Gregor stood back up and returned to his job. Every movement was agony, and he pushed the needle through whatever bit of lip remained unruined. Occasionally he had to start again, a stray thought of disgust ripping through stitches and leaving the lips even more shredded, but eventually, Gregor made progress. Too many stitches to tear at once, the mouth could only pull. It still hurt, every thought was pain, but he couldn’t hear them.
Gregor looked at himself in the mirror. Clear fishing line, like scar tissue, hid the mouth. He’d covered it completely, there was nothing that could be seen. He looked like a pair of old jeans that had been patched up. Finally, Gregor was normal. Gregor took one step back to his bed and doubled from the pain, but he kept moving anyway.
Gregor was normal.