Better Off Dead

Chapter Seven: Nightmare

I didn't know about the regeneration at first. No one did. I had miraculously survived, but there was no reason to believe that I couldn't suffer permanent damage afterwards. I really thought that if part of me was hacked off it wouldn't grow back.

It's amazing how often we're wrong in life.

Having a large quantity of meat stuck to me was an awful experience. I wanted to undo what had been done. The results didn't matter, so long as I wasn't some steak chimaera. I took things into my single remaining hand. With a saw.

Asa child, the obvious solution to being attached to something you don't like is to cut it off. It's not a very realistic endeavor when you have that much to remove and only one hand to remove it with, but I did my best. I found the saw and started sawing off a chunk of me.

I was very determined. But determination wasn't enough.

On the plus side, I was successful in my attempt at self-dismemberment, and eventually I sawed off my arm chunk. Too bad it didn't stay that way. As soon as I was sawing flesh off, new flesh was growing to take its place.

That left me with just as much fused tissue as well as a severed meat chunk on the grass in front of me. I had to hide all the evidence before my dad noticed. I did the only reasonable thing for an 11 year old to do with their severed chunk of flesh.

I sawed it into smaller pieces and fed them down the garbage disposal. I wasn't allowed to use the garbage disposal for safety reasons, but somehow I just didn't think it would be a problem anymore.

I woke up in the night after more nightmares of futile chopping and an infinite amount of muscle pressing down on me until I couldn't breathe. I was all sweaty. Gross. I turned on the light to get a drink of water and noticed that some of my slime had leaked onto the floor. Even more gross. I hated nightmares.