The Squid in Your Gut

I woke up nauseous, like the floor beneath me had been placed inside a ship being manhandled by storming seas. The ceiling of my bedroom was still there, the comforter was still weighing on me—with more constriction than comfort—but it felt like I was lying in someone else’s bed. I must have eaten something I shouldn’t have; I had to encourage a reluctant body out of bed to get the Pepto from the bathroom cupboard. A nest was thrown together on the sofa, a large bowl was collected from the kitchen, and I threw on a movie I had seen hundreds of times and had predicted the ending of the first time I saw it.

My hands were trembling as I poured the Pepto into its little plastic cup. I would drink it, throw up whatever was assaulting my intestines, sleep, and then feel better when the credits rolled. I vomited pink. By the end of the movie, I was downing a second bubblegum-pink shot, only to bring up nothing but more pink into the bowl.

Throughout the day I was either in the bathroom, blacking out so often I could see the passage of time from the light shining on the floor through the window, or swaddled by throws on the sofa staring at the same movie on repeat, sipping room-temperature water, and nibbling on the blandest food I could find: uncooked ramen. The only source of light was coming from the TV by the time I remembered to call work and tell them I was sick. I looked over at the coffee table but my phone wasn’t there. If it was somewhere buried beneath the blankets and ramen crumbs, I didn’t have the energy to get up and look. It was either on silent or no one had bothered checking in. Or I just couldn’t remember it ringing.

Sleep finally came for me and I entered a dark, dreamless world. In a second—in that world, perhaps only about an hour or so in the real one—I was awake again from the sharpest pain in my stomach. It wasn’t sharp like a knife, it was sharp like wrongness, like the end. I wished it would end, either by magic or by death. My eyelids were tungsten shields that the small, thin muscles around my eyes were trying to keep open. Staring at the ceiling was akin to keeping the sky from colliding and destroying Earth. I glanced at the door to my bedroom, where the nearest bathroom was. I wanted to get there but I didn’t want to move, if I did, it would kill me—I was certain of it.

All I could do was close my eyes again, wait for the pain to go away, and fall back to sleep. I don’t remember if the pain eased enough for me to fall asleep or if it remained so long I passed out but, eventually, I had been swallowed by the dark water of a dream. I was staring at a screen, there were four options:

A. The castle.

B. The gryphon and its rider.

C. His smile.

D. The killing tree.

I chose C and woke up again. The pain returned and I was back where I started: staring at the ceiling, and then the bedroom door. Still, I couldn’t move. I closed my eyes and saw four more:

A. They save him.

B. He’s imprisoned.

C. He’s killed.

D. He becomes a body.

I had tried to see what the actual question was but all I could see were the options, the fourth catching my eye the most. I picked A and was awakened by pain. Was that the right answer? It was what had happened in the movie. If I picked all the right answers, maybe the pain would go away and I could sleep through the rest of the night.

I closed my eyes again and was given another set:

A. He’s bleeding.

B. There’s a body.

C. She’s thrown.

D. The dog growls.

Again, I tried to find a question but there was nothing but the options, shining in a soft golden light against blackness. Most of them happened in the movie. There’s a body. Was there a body? Maybe I was supposed to find the false one. I chose B.

When I woke up, the pain had worsened, like whatever I had eaten that led to this was something cursed or unnatural. Rather than being broken down by stomach acid, it was mutating into something that yearned for escape and my innards were its chains. I could feel it coiling and writhing in my stomach, seeking a chink in the armor to burst through.

I couldn’t do anything. I closed my eyes, not to sleep but to give in. This would be how I died: fucking food poisoning. Something so horrible Pepto-Bismol couldn’t cure it. At least dead, the pain would go away and everything would be normal again—right.

My consciousness faded. When I opened my eyes once more, I was staring through a window into an operating room. Someone was lying on the table with a blanket over them, the cutout was over their abdomen. I couldn’t see the person’s face, a surgeon was standing in the way. The white masks of the surgeons moved with idle chatter, whatever surgeons talked about. I didn’t think they were talking about the patient. Maybe a game they could have been watching, the annoying kids they were away from, how much more money they could have been making if they chose some other field or career.

A scalpel was withdrawn, shining in the bright-white light, and I leaned closer. The surgeon began to make an incision straight down the abdomen. They went a couple of inches down the line drawn by a black marker when the body suddenly exploded. Bloodied tentacles burst out from the stomach, flailing madly. I couldn’t hear any screams or swears, only the surgeons flinching back before the tentacles began to reach for their necks, and then the lights went out. The operating room was as dark and quiet as space. There was nothing else to see so I turned around and left. I walked down a clean and bright hallway, turned left, and saw a doctor sitting in one of the two chairs outside a door. No, it wasn’t a doctor, it was another surgeon. They were wearing a mask, too; hunched forward with their elbows on their knees, twiddling their thumbs at a snail’s pace. The surgeon turned their head toward me but didn’t look at me.

“You alright?” they asked.

“I think I’m sick.”

“Want to sit down?”

I walked over and took the empty seat. Sitting beside them didn’t make me feel any better. My muscles suddenly felt just as tense as they had been when I closed my eyes before.

“Better?” they asked.

“No,” I said.

“What’s wrong?”

“My stomach: it hurts.”

“Did you eat something?”

“I think so? I’m not sure. I tried Pepto but it didn’t do anything—I just threw it back up.”

“Then you probably didn’t eat something,” they said.

“Oh.”

“Did it happen suddenly?”

“Yeah. Well, I mean, I usually have stomach aches.”

“How often?”

I hummed as I tried to recall. “Feels like every day.”

“For how long?”

“I... I can’t remember.”

“What kind of stomach aches? Like a sharp pain or just a constant ache?”

“It’s like—” I sighed as I tried to think, the feelings they gave were too cookie cutter— “like when you’re wearing something new and you feel like you shouldn’t be wearing it because it’s not... you. Or the ‘you’ people expect to see or should be seeing.”

“Have you been wearing something you feel like you shouldn’t be wearing?”

“No? I’ve been wearing the same things for years.”

“Because you like wearing them or because you feel like you should be wearing them?”

“They’re-they’re comfortable?” The surgeon was straying toward a meaningless topic.

“I don’t necessarily mean clothes,” they said with a soft smile in their voice. The mask covered their mouth and nose and the frame of their glasses made it difficult to see their eyes. I thought if I could see their eyes, they would be so warm that everything wrong would just melt away. I wished they would look at me but they were either looking at the reflective ground or their hands they were holding in their lap, idly fidgeting with their fingers.

“Have you been wearing something you feel like you shouldn’t be wearing?” they asked again.

“I don’t... wear anything. I mean, I don’t have a façade.”

“Well, you’re wearing something that you feel you shouldn’t. If it’s not clothing or personas, what else is there?”

“Body.”

“Do you feel like you shouldn’t be wearing your body?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, I don’t even know why I answered with ‘body.’ But I also knew what to say.

“That’s the squid in your gut,” they said.

“What?”

“When you repress your self-loathing, you only think of your perceptions of wrongness and what’s wrong with others. You keep all of the negative energy bottled up inside until it morphs into the squid in your gut. It will hurt everyone around you, and then kill the host—you.”

“I haven’t hurt anyone,” I said.

A muscle moved in their cheek like they were smirking. They pushed their glasses up the bridge of their nose.

“Did anyone call you today?” they asked as they turned their head and looked at me.