It is not a nervous tic. Carmen knows, if she wants to stop, she can.

The other girls have such soft skin. Their unmarred fingers grasp everything with delicacy and gentle caresses. Carmen’s hands have always been rough and bumpy. She grips onto anything with unintended force, breaking pencils and bending forks. There are blisters and calluses along the pads of her palms. The other girls don’t feel the itching. The feeling that something is not quite right. With each scrape of her teeth against her knobby knuckles, the insistence of her malady swells. There is something under the epidermis, the sinew, the muscles that pluck against her tendons. A familiar object she couldn’t name. If she were to bite through it, that would solve the mystery. If she could get her teeth on the thing beneath her skin, clench onto it and never let go…

The mastication must become deeper, more aggressive. They say a human could bite through a finger like a baby carrot, but the brain stops the person from applying that much force.

Carmen has tried.

***

She likes to sit in the middle of the bus where the accordion-like mechanism squishes and expands. There is hardly anyone else on the ride. Her shoes dangle off her seat. They move and sway as the bus turns. It’s icy outside. Despite this, Carmen wants to unswaddle herself from her winter coat. She can’t. The stupid, plastic interlocking zippers are fused shut. She wrenches at the seam, twisting and churning in the bus seat. The tips of her fingers swell from the new infection near her nailbed. She can’t get a good hold on the fabric or the plastic.

Her shoulders lurch forward when the bus skates on the ice. She drops the zipper. The wheels barely catch the frozen pavement. It is not the first time this has happened. She gives up on the coat.

The driver white knuckle grips the steering wheel.

“Lord, shield me from every attack and accident,” the driver whispers to the small memorial card in the cupholder. A wrinkled and faded Jesus Christ faces up.

The accordion stretches and flattens out. By Carmen’s shoe, the remnants of summer. A dried, lifeless cicada. She half expects it to buzz when it knocks against her sole. The one other rider is obscured by his ridiculous furry winter hat. The driver mutters more prayers under her breath. Carmen reaches down and pinches the once-cicada. She curses herself and her lack of long nails. She isn’t as gentle as she wishes when the shell half crumbles in her hand.

***

She places the cicada on the shelf next to her other findings. Her prized possession, a dried garter snake skin, is displayed between her college entomology textbooks and pinned insects. Her signature is at the bottom, young and shaky. She can’t look at it long.

Her t-shirt sticks to her sweaty lower back.

Carmen’s coat rends from her body. She tosses it aside, hoping to never see it again. Hoping that in the action, she has somehow destroyed it completely. She doesn’t need it, anyhow. She runs hot, burning, even. How many winters has it been?

***

She’s in her room today, at her desk, in front of her laptop, watching a hive of insects hatch from their tiny eggs. A soothing documentarian’s voice hums through her earbuds. This is one she remembers her professor showing during a lecture. Her thumb assumes the position in front of her lips, hovering near the heat of her breath. The insect consumes the supple outer carapace until a hole erupts, and it escapes. Carmen latches onto a dry shed of skin, first nibbling at the pointed bit near the side of her nail, and then tugs away from her, red and raw, shedding with confidence.

The first piece is unsatisfying, too slippery between her front teeth. Still, it rips away with ease. Blood rushes towards the top of her thumb. The fresher parts of her fingers are blushing pink. A swarm of bugs swathes the tree trunk, covering the bark in an undulating black army. There are still babies left to incubate in the nursery, not yet mature enough to gnaw their way free.

“Some are left behind. It is the nature of large hatches,” the documentary’s narrator says.

Carmen rotates her hand to aim at a different spot of shredded skin, still on the same thumb. She is imprecise, biting too wide and fumbling like an infant learning to suckle. Her canine tooth presses against a protruding object. Carmen begins excavating. She nips. Small, insignificant warning bites.

The inside of her mouth salivates with anticipation. Lately, her habit has left little surface to work with. Now, she can gnaw at her cuticles with a proper anchor. She clasps the mound of flesh between her jaw and braces down. Carmen hums with hurt, then proceeds to press harder. Spit dribbles from the corner of her mouth and trails down her chin. Bursts of red and blue blossom behind her eyelids. She tastes the blood first, then something even more metallic. Her teeth make contact with a hard material, sending waves of numbness down her spine.

Her jaw unclenches, and she opens her eyes.

A silver pull tab peaks through the carnage. It glints in the light of her laptop screen. Her hot blood pools on the divots. There are words engraved on the metal, but she can’t read them, dirtied and old as they are.

Her cheeks are red with the effort of her wide, euphoric smile. She brings her hand back to her mouth and slips the metal piece against her tongue, and closes her lips. In one brave snap, her neck rears back. The interlocking metal budges and screams. It is opening, freeing the baby from the womb. Carmen’s giddy, dizzy with elation, and tugs the tab harder as it moves down her wrist and tracks down her arms. The zipper squeals, cries out. Her blood boils, spilling over her arm and onto her lap. She doesn’t notice the wetness. Instead, she gasps for air in between hiccups. Snot dribbles down her nose.

Fresh air.

Goosebumps rise on the newborn's slick flesh. The strange muscles clench and shiver around the birthed body. It is the first time Carmen has felt the cold.

About the Author:
E.K. Charny is a writer from Chicago where they found a love for the weird and disorienting while studying electromagnetic pulses in the brain, working with neurotic professors, and watching too many late-eighties horror movies. You can find their work and other updates at: ekcharny.com.