Happy Snacks

The fiery-orange habanero corn chip was so saturated, its top sloughed away as Prue pulled it out of her patient’s bedsore. The girl’s hip was a seeping well of sepsis and snack food. Prue had to force angled tweezers under the compressed layers of spice, corn chip, and cottage-cheese clumps of caseous necrotic flesh. She was reminded of digging through the soggy remains of a cheap nacho platter. The friable flesh stuck and stretched as Prue pulled another sodden too-fluorescent-to-be-natural tangerine scab from damaged skin.

“How’d you end up with this anyway?” She said it more to cover the sucking sounds of infected flesh but discovered she wanted the answer. Prue tapped the tweezers into a metal kidney bowl and then wiped them on a gauze pad before digging back into the wound.

“Mental health days,” the girl said with a shrug. She was slight, barely enough weight on her bones to cause pressure ulcers. “You know, taking a couple days, calling in sick and trying to care for yourself?”

“This was more than a couple of days.” Prue packed the last of the gauze into the girl’s suppurating flesh. The patient room was overused, a little rundown, and poorly stocked—essentials running low because staff were overrun. Aggi would show up soon with the new tray and more gauze.

“Well, yeah, the world is shit. My boyfriend was with his other girlfriend, my job is crap, and I have no money. That all needs more than a few days to recover from.” The girl winced and sucked in a breath through her teeth. Her fingers clenched the thin hospital pillow tight. “Shouldn’t a doctor be doing this?”

“They used to.” Prue nudged aside another clot of fat-coagulated spice powder. “But there have been so many bedsore cases lately they can’t keep up. Now nurses do it.” She didn’t say it was cheaper and that the hospital saved more money this way. She maneuvered the tweezers under yet another layer of sopping corn chips. There was a sucking sticky slick sound, and then the sweet, gamey tang of rotting flesh seeped out around the edges of its seal, along with a thick off-white ooze. It wasn’t the worst bedsore she’d seen, but it certainly wasn’t pleasant.

“Is that fiery habanero? Looks like the right color,” Aggi said as he came into the room. “Where do you get those? They haven’t been made in over a decade.” The scalpels rattled, metal on metal, as he put the new debridement tray she needed on the cart. He opened boxes of gauze and displayed them at her side like impulse buys in the grocery store check-out line.

“New snack shop on Front Street—Happy Snax.” The girl’s teeth were clenched, with her shoulders pulled into her chest, nearly folding herself in half.

“Almost there, okay?” Prue leaned forward a little, attempting to catch the girl’s eye. She held her tweezers tight and aloft. Tangled skin, scabs, and corn flopped over the top.

The patient nodded. Prue settled back on her heels and leaned down again over the girl’s hip. She pulled up what she hoped was the final layer of spicy chip rot within the wound; she slipped the tweezers under and folded the corners inwards. When she pulled them out, tendrils clung to the soggy snack. Prue’s eyebrows came together, wrinkles deepening as she frowned.

She stared at this new development. The tendrils were foam-pink and crystalline white. Thinner than sinew. Thicker than nerves. Curiously familiar. But in the wrong place.

Her head tilted as she pulled a few filaments farther out, hooking them over the arm of the tweezers. They came from deep within the flesh, deeper than the chip. The girl’s leg twitched, a single jerk, before Prue laid them back in the curdled wound.

The strands moved, like a Ford interlocking suture being pulled flat over the open flaps of a surgical incision, disappearing back into the necrotic flesh of the bedsore. Prue flinched backwards with a gasp.

“Whoa, I didn’t know humans could do that.” Aggi pointed at where the thin layer of corn chip resettled, fitting itself into the contours of the wound, sealing whatever those filaments were back inside.

“They can’t.” She shook off the shock. There was no way that happened. From the debridement tray, she grabbed small, sharp scissors, the ones used for trimming away the singed edges of burnt skin.

“What can’t humans do?” There was more than an edge of panic in the girl’s voice as she shifted, struggling to twist and look at what Prue was doing. “Why’d he say it like that?” The girl pulled her leg up and away from Prue, curling into a ball, her elbow so close to slipping into the sore.

“Calm down a second.” Prue’s hand hovered above the girl’s shoulder. Her blue nitrile glove was smeared with fluorescent orange spice paste, flecks of corn chip, and spumescent skin. “Okay, just breathe for me. Big breath in and then let it out.” She nodded as she said it, in case the girl was watching. 

The girl squeezed her eyes tight and pulled in a shuddering breath after a few seconds. “You’re going to be fine.” She tapped the girl’s calf with her clean-gloved hand.

The girl breathed out. Her lips curved up in a smile as she stretched out her legs. The movement was not quite fluid. Not the way that Prue would expect. The girl’s leg twitched again as she straightened on the bed. The smile was freaky. Really fucking freaky. But Prue wasn’t about to question it now. She bent to the bedsore again and snipped around the edges of the chip debris, a careful curling cut until she could see those filaments again.

“Why fiery habanero?”

“I used to eat them with my mom. On nights when it was just us, we’d do midnight margaritas and movies. We usually watched Practical Magic, because that was her favorite. They remind me of her. So, I bought them. So many of them.” Her sigh was content as she nuzzled into the thin pillow, like a child settling into happy exhaustion and the sleep that would follow.

“What happened to her?” Prue glanced up at the girl’s face, tweezers hovering.

“Car accident.” She cuddled the pillow on the stretcher close.

Prue did not get paid enough to deal with whatever was going on in this girl’s head. The mental health crisis causing young people to get these bedsores was bad enough, but this went further. Like she’d managed to transcend the reality of her pain and infection.

Prue shook her head and peeled up the side of a chip. There were those filaments again—foam-pink and crystalline white. As fine as floss. Embedded deep within the healthy flesh of her muscle, like they’d been sewn in. Or punched through.

The girl sighed and her leg twitched as Prue brushed her finger along them. Strange. Again, a sense of familiarity washed through her. She’d seen this before. The summer right after high school, when she’d worked at the mushroom farm to pay for her personal support worker certification: mycelium.

***

Prue shivered as she walked through the staff parking lot to her car. The night had been long and terrifying, like so many nights in the emergency room. Birth, death, and every strange, fucked-sideways aspect of the human condition in between. The girl with the mycelium in her muscle, while bizarre, was the least of their problems. Tests were ordered, samples taken, necrotic flesh debrided, and the wound packed. They sent the girl on her way in the early hours of the morning.

Prue got in her car and leaned forward, pressing her forehead into the January-cold steering wheel. So cold it gave her brain freeze. That was good. The pain would keep her focused and awake enough to make it home. At this point, she wouldn’t mind a few days to herself. Maybe she would have the chance to see her boyfriend, Dean. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him for more than a few minutes. Or had taken a day off for that matter. Everything cost too much to take time off, and every little bit of solace was a subscription service. She screamed and slammed the heel of her hand into the engine start.

She left the parking lot just wanting something, anything, to make herself feel better. To make life bearable. For just a single second. Like that girl from last night. Her favorite snack and the movie she liked best as a child. She wouldn’t take long to get home. Not at this time of day. There was time for a detour. To see what all the Happy Snax fuss was about.

Prue took the turn for Front Street, and there it was. The shop looked like a blast from her past. It felt as if it had always been there.

The inside felt immediately familiar as she took a basket, as if it was the corner store she went to as a kid. Snacks were packed tight on the shelves in all the best colors: bright teals, electric pinks, happy yellows. All the snacks she remembered from commercials between her most beloved shows. Flakey cream and raspberry-filled pastries, teddy-shaped graham cracker cookies, bagel pizza bites, crackers with orange cheese spread. Chip flavors she hadn’t seen in years, decades even. Sodas that didn’t exist anymore. Ones that reminded her of sleepovers and sick calls and snow days.

The aisles should have been claustrophobic, but instead was a comfortable closeness, like a hug. She walked through them, running her fingers over remembered packaging. There was nothing she needed here, but she wanted it all. She picked up a bag of cheddar-flavored cracker chips, and they broke free from the shelf with a familiar chitinous snap. Everything she picked came away with a satisfying pop. It reminded her of her first job, that carefree summer when she still lived with her parents and she worked at the farm. Before responsibility and debt and too many breakups.

She brought the basket to the self-checkout and was soon back in her car. A little smile, the first one in days, started as she pulled away from the curb.

***

Prue squeezed her eyes tight against the frustrating jangle of musical notes. Not her alarm. She didn’t have to get up yet. Her arm was heavy as she patted for her cell phone on the bedside table. She tapped the screen, hoping she either answered or hung up on whoever was calling. She let the phone rest on her face and waited for a voice.

“Doesn’t your shift start soon?” Dean’s voice wasn’t shrill with panic, like it used to be when she was late for work.

“Starts at midnight.” She gripped the phone as she rolled over with a frustrated sigh. She wanted to be happy that he called, but she could have had more sleep. That would have been nice. Helpful even, if tonight was going to be anything like last night.

There was another part of her, warmer and softer, that wanted to make the best of this unforeseen call. “There’s time if you want to come over.” She wanted to say more—that she wanted to see him. That she wanted to be held. That talking to someone—anyone—after last night would be so good. But she didn’t.

The pause between them lengthened, and she rushed to fill it before it became awkward. “You don’t have to if you don’t have time today. We could get coffee later. I’m off starting tomorrow.”

His sigh was heavy. She sat up in bed and pulled her knees into her chest.

“Look, I can’t keep doing this. You’re always working. I can’t wait around for you to call and have time.”

“What?” She understood but didn’t know what else to say. She had seen this coming. It was part of that life she’d been promised—financial security, a loving and supportive partner, stability—but would never have.

“I’m sorry. Look, you’ll find someone else. Someone who is more flexible in their schedule.” He disconnected. There was only filtered digital silence.

It made her miss dial tones, especially the one from her parents’ landline in the nineties. That continuous, harmonic chord gifting a few seconds to process what happened. She hugged her knees, her arms wrapped firmly around herself—a cold and lonely comfort in her dark room. She couldn’t move for several minutes and then when she did it was an aching and slow process, she crawled from the center of her bed to the edge. Too late to call in sick, and working would be a better distraction than anything else.

She started getting ready for the night shift, a continual push of limbs too tired and too heavy to move. Of continually blinking at things to bring them into focus. Of forcing her thoughts to flow faster, to accommodate the speed of the shift later. That wasn’t easy on a good day, or even her best day. All she wanted to do now was lie in bed and not move.

The kitchen light flickered on when she hit the switch, an old bulb and a poor electrical connection. She sighed seeing the bag on the counter. She grabbed the box of teddy bear cookies and slid her fingers under the glued cardboard flaps. Every cookie was the same size as her thumb, from knuckle to nail. She took one out and held it, tempted to play with it. Like she did during school lunch hour, making it walk across her desk.

She popped it into her mouth before giving into the childish impulse. Out of reflex, Prue read the label. Lower calories than she was expecting, but it made sense, given how the snacks never filled her up when younger. The makers followed the new laws for ingredients: it was a list of Latinate chemical names, including the one for agaricus bisporus, which seemed familiar—words from too long ago—but the rest she didn’t recognize. She shrugged, not caring even a little if they tasted like she remembered.

They did. They were pure satisfaction, from the sugar-wax glaze to the taste, the way they shattered between her teeth and turned to mush just before she swallowed.

Prue’s shoulders relaxed as she rummaged in the box for another. A differently shaped one than before. Another crunch. Another cookie. Another. And another. The minutes passed with half the box disappearing. As she looked down at the remainder, she could pinpoint the moment that the serotonin and dopamine burst across her brain. Her eyes widened. It felt like little electric bolts. Immediately, the tension in her limbs loosened, the familiar ache of her grief lessening.

The whole box was gone when her alarm finally went off. It wasn’t that she couldn’t get ready before going, but rather, surprising how so much time had passed while leaning against the counter eating. But she felt good. Really good. Almost like nothing had happened at all. She needed more. So much more.

***

Prue’s shift that night was the same as normal, but none of it could affect those new tendrils of happiness that had unfurled in her brain.

She barely noticed the motorcyclist who’d gone headfirst over his handlebars and presented with double compound fractures in his arms. He screamed more than he breathed, both from the pain and the sight of his jagged, snapped bones. Prue also couldn’t fathom why another patient might be in pain, even after seeing the scan of stones churning in a woman’s kidneys. Then there was the man who’d not removed his socks in two years. A sports superstition. Gangrene had set in some time ago. An X-ray showed that the bone had been eaten away, and what little was left of his feet melted through Prue’s gloved hands and splattered on the floor.

Those waves of positive neurotransmitters, the ones governing happiness, crashing through her like filaments lighting up every nerve, stopped in that second. Everything hit her in a torrent. The salt of her tears stung as she cried, holding the gangrenous, bony stumps of the man’s legs.

He leaned forward and patted her hair. “Don’t worry, dear, I’ll be fine.”

He was in extreme shock, but Prue almost leaned into that touch. That single second of contact. Instead, she ran from the room, her hands trembling as she ripped off her gloves. She pressed her hands into her mouth and her back into a wall, hoping to keep jagged sobs from escaping.

“Hey, are you okay?” Aggi’s hand was heavy and far too hot on her shoulder. She jumped and her eyes popped wide. Her sob and fright mingled to a mewling whimper in the back of her throat. He crouched and looked into her eyes. “What do you need?”

The answer coursed along the remnants of those snapped nerves: Happy Snax. Those memories of better days. But, she reasoned, cookies hadn’t filled the loneliness inside her. Neither had being at work, but at least it was practical. She inhaled a shaking breath and nodded. “I need to finish the shift.”

With a silent nod, they both went back to work.

Prue’s days blurred together as she took every shift, every hour of work that came her way. She should have had three days off. But the unit was too shorthanded to refuse her. She was approaching burnout; she could feel it, the numbness creeping through her thoughts, the way she did everything by rote, how she didn’t notice patients anymore.

Work was punctuated by the momentary bliss of eating one of her snacks. Currently, it was a package of cookies she dipped in confetti icing while standing at the staff room windows. She smiled with every scoop of sprinkles and sugar. She felt every pulse of serotonin web through her brain. Every sharp spike of dopamine with each saccharine crunch. She didn’t care how much money she spent on Snax or how they had short-circuited her mind.

Every bite was a new memory—a good grade on a test, the perfect birthday present from a friend, a snow day cuddled in blankets watching reruns of gameshows for hours. She wanted to stay there, in those memories. It was so much easier.

Aggi bumped his shoulder against hers. “Another trip down the memory hole?” He nearly made her jump. She hadn’t noticed him come in, hadn’t seen his reflection in the glass.

“What is that they say? Healing my inner child with my adult money.” She held up an icing-covered cookie, an offering.

He shook his head. “There is something about it having mushrooms in it that puts me off.”

Prue shrugged, a lot of things had hidden mushrooms in them—dried mushroom powder in sauces and soups. It was part of antimicrobial food packaging. There was even wound dressing that had chitin in it inside the supply room.

“More for me.”

“Patient in room seven for you, also.” He backed out of the room in a rush, his sneakers squeaking on the old linoleum floor.

“Be right there.” She licked around her teeth, unwilling to let even a molecule dissolve without her knowing it. But the texture inside her cheek was wrong. She grazed it with her tongue. No longer a smooth mucosal membrane, it was a floss mesh. Checking again, this texture was more structured than the lace patches of oral lichen planus.

A tongue depressor and dental mirror were easy enough to find in the supply room. A bathroom with a lock was not far, the next door along the corridor. Under the fluorescent light of the public bathroom, she opened her mouth and saw it. Thinner than sinew and thicker than nerves. Foamy pink and crystalline white. Both tools clattered into the porcelain sink. She’d been wearing a mask, a face shield, and gloves when she’d treated that girl. There should have been no chance of contamination. She’d had no cuts or scrapes for it to be a subcutaneous spread. Leaning forward, she looked again, her mouth so wide the corners of her lips stretched painfully. It was hard to breathe as she held her tongue away.

Prue washed her hands, a reflexive action. Scrubbing hard with the inadequate soap, she stared at the insides of her cheeks. The interlocking strands hadn’t disappeared. She ran the edge of her fingernail through the floss-like fibrils, severing them through the middle, and watched them retract up past her gums. There was a new weight in her skin. One that was unfamiliar. Then, her already open mouth sagged wider. The entire right side of her face fell, her jawbone pulling her skin down. Her lower eyelid distended, revealing the far-too-delicate flesh inside her ocular cavity.

She wanted to swear. Tried to shout out a reflexive fuck. But her lips didn’t join anymore. She couldn’t make her face work. Her moan turned into a scream. It was all she could do as her heart beat faster and air rushed out through her lopsided, gaping mouth.

She shoved her jaw up with her hand, holding it there as she scrambled to unlock the door. But she couldn’t. Her weight wasn’t right. The balance of her movements and muscles was off. She screamed through her force-clenched teeth.

Prue felt it then. The soft slither of those tendrils in her cheek. The punch of new holes in tender flesh. She should have felt this when it was first happening, the initial time she ate Happy Snax. She gripped the sides of her face with both hands and fell to her knees. The pain left her gasping, unable to pull enough air in through the orthodontically perfected spaces in her teeth to scream again.

It was like being sewn up with no anesthetic—the puncture and pull of those curved tendrils as sharp as suture needles. Then, the weight of her jaw lifted from her skin. Her limp flesh dragged up and fastened in place. Falling forward, she hunched over her thighs, and her eyes squeezed shut as she moaned through the burn and sting.

Then the pain was gone. Didn’t even linger. All those little threads were back in place as she ran her tongue along her cheek. She didn’t want to feel that sagging relief as she rolled into a spinal twist, arms spread wide, her chest lifting and falling as she panted on the washroom floor. She moved her mouth open and then closed, open then closed, to see if she could do it.

The door banged against the lock, jangling its hinges. It startled her from the floor. Air caught in her chest as she scrambled up. She wrenched on the taps and scrubbed her hands again. The lock released easily this time, and she stood in the corridor facing Aggi.

“I thought it was a patient.” He stepped to the side to see around her. “You okay?”

“Fine, yeah, on my way.” She rubbed along her jaw. There was a fine tremor in her hand. Panic and relief all at once, and her body didn’t know how to process either chemical than with shakes.

The air was heavy with the smell of rot as she opened the patient’s door—sweet, tangy, and fungal. Prue’s inhale was shallow as she looked at the girl from so many nights ago. She sat on the bed, sculpture-perfect, decorated in garlands of petals and pearls. The girl didn’t move; didn’t even raise her eyelids to look at Prue. She just sat there, delicate furling leaves in both her palms.

Prue took a step closer.

A pearl, round and luminous, emerged from the girl’s collarbone. A whole chain started, adding another rope to the necklace she already wore. Each opaline pustule rose like mushrooms growing in the damp-dark. Prue flinched, stumbling back a step into the doorframe. A tight swirl of petals in the girl’s palms bloomed with a wet groan that seemed to echo in the small room.

Prue fumbled through the boxes on the wall, wrenching on a mask and gloves as her hands shook. “Fuck me sideways with a saw.”

We can feel you.

That voice was too harmonic, too multitudinous. Prue covered her ears.

The tendrils were in her head, vibrating her cheeks, oscillating as if someone was playing them like a harp. They moved, deep within her, filaments slithering along bone, sliding next to sinew, tangling with her tendons, and rooting in her flesh. Paralytic pain. All at once, so much worse than before. But the mycelium didn’t let her fall, didn’t let her move.

The girl’s head turned, her flesh crepitating as she moved. She smiled that little dazed smile, the one that caught Prue off guard before. She faced Prue and Prue knew she could see.

She felt it in those pale threads veining all the way through her. She watched as the girl’s flesh curled away from her skull, the bone making way, as another mushroom fruited there, like a large flower pinned in her hair. The peach baroque swirls of a schizophyllum commune. Delicate, like petals in a painting.

There was a picture in Prue’s mind, flashes of sleepovers and sick calls and snow days. Of aqua and pink packages. Of sodas that didn’t exist anymore. Of playing with her teddy bear cookies, making them dance across her desk. Of when times were easier. Better. The girl’s smile creaked upwards—uneven and jagged at the corners.

Prue tried to shake her head. To assert her own will. But she couldn’t. The most she could do was breathe, and even then, that was becoming less of her own volition the longer she looked at the girl.

She breathed in deep, as deep as she could through her nose, pulled her cheeks between her teeth, and pressed hard enough that she should have drawn blood. She grated her flesh—the filaments—between her molars. The gossamer ruptured and recoiled in her mouth. The copper wash of blood was bitter as she bit down harder. The weight of her jaw too heavy, the pull of it snapped more of the threads. She groaned as she pushed her hands up against her jaw, continuing to mash those strands of mycelium up against the serrated edges of her teeth. Air rushed in through the new gushing gaps in her skin.

There was a disconnect within her, the voices once synced in harmony now screaming out of rhythm. The multitudes still there but mutilated. Severed. Separated. Freed.

She stumbled forward, her hold on her jawbone slipping as blood oozed between her fingers. Her heart beat fast, faster than she should survive. Her breath was quick and shallow. She was shaking but didn’t know if it was from fear, shock, or strain. She screamed, the sound muffled by her hands and teeth.

It’s better, here, in our memories.

The warmth of dopamine and serotonin washed through Prue’s system, bursting in her cheeks and taking away the pain.