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There’s wisps of blonde hair flickering past Pamela’s peripheral. The noise of bells somewhere at the back of her mind. Laughter so familiar it makes her ache. All of it muffled, like through a thick fog.
She grips the steering wheel tighter, but her vision does not get any less blurry. Her head doesn’t stop throbbing. It’s eating her from the inside out, itches under her skin, in her guts, in her throat, in her lungs. The road is dark in front of her, and she’s almost crashed the car one, two, three times.
Pamela squeezes her eyes shut.
.
The motel room is dark. She stubs her toe while trying to find the bed, her vision spinning ever so slightly, but she refuses to turn on the light. There’s blue eyes boring into the back of her neck, her skin crawling with it, and she doesn’t want to see. Doesn’t want to see long, lanky limbs, doesn’t want to see big bows and wide eyes, doesn’t want to see pigtails and a face painted white.
Not like that matters, really; Pamela falls onto the mattress and stares at the void above her that is the ceiling, and whenever she blinks, she can see the rot, blooming red at the edges of her vision. Can feel it eating through her body, through her very being, can feel how it’s yearning to return her to where she came from.
She closes her eyes again, and now she can see her—can see Harley, with a sunken face and a dopey smile, Harley who’s poking at the fungus growing out of her shoulder, like she’s studying the most fascinating specimen. Maybe that’s all she’s ever been doing.
“Come on, Red,” Harley sing-songs, tilting her head with a grin, her skin somehow even more sickly-pale than it usually is. “Aren’t cha gunna come home ta me?”
Pamela drapes both her forearms over her eyes, but even like this, she can watch Harley decay. Even like this, she doesn’t stop seeing, doesn’t stop hearing those stupid cute bells.
“I need to do this,” Pamela whispers, more to herself than to anyone else. There’s no one other than her in this room, anyway. No one, no one, no one. She’s all by herself. In a way, she always has been. “I need to do this. I need to do this. I need—”
.
After her shower—watching blood and fungus bits wash down the drain, the pain biting all over her body, looking at her flesh that’s growing more and more spongy every day, pieces of her cut off—Pamela wipes the condensation off the mirror, clutches her towel around herself more closely.
There’s a growth coming out of her eye, and it’s brown like dried blood. Her face is haunted with dark circles under her dull eyes, and her hands are shaky, like an addict’s, which is almost funny, but she’s lost her humor. Just like her blood, just like the fungus—for is it not part of her? Is it not, too, her flesh?—everything else is going down the drain, as well.
She probably deserves this. Her body is so weak—gone is the connection to nature she once had. Gone is the feeling of grandiosity in her she just up and lost, she just got taken from her. Really, she thinks perhaps she’d be able to just settle for normal.
But Pamela is not getting normal, either, and anyhow she’s never settled, and she presses her palm to the cold mirror, feels how it trembles into her bones, and furrows her brows.
In her reflection, however blurry, she no longer recognizes the woman Harley fell in love with.
And still, she has to push on.
.
She’s driving again; this time on an empty stomach, ignoring the flicker of someone in the passenger seat. Someone with a wide smile and wider eyes, someone who’s fiddling with their fingers, someone with blonde ponytails that whip in the wind with the open windows.
Pamela contemplates turning on the radio; maybe it would help distract her further. But there’s already a song playing at the back of her head, and there’s already her girlfriend in the passenger seat humming along, spreading more spores with every tap of her fingers against the dashboard.
It feels like some sort of warning, in a way. Some sick, mocking, morbid warning.
This is what’s going to happen to her if you stay. Ironically, it’s probably also what’s going to happen to her if you don’t. What does it matter anymore, anyway?
Pamela tears through her cheek with her teeth, pain rushing through her body like a drug, her head splitting in the start of a migraine—or maybe that’s just the cordyceps, really, who even knows at this point—and she hadn’t even noticed she was chewing on the inside of her mouth.
It doesn’t matter; Harley is still decaying in the passenger seat, and Pamela is right along to join her, she always has been.
Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe it has always been the other way around.
.
When she sleeps, she dreams about blurring colors and about talking plants. When she sleeps, she dreams about people being eaten by the spores in her car—and there are people in her backseat, there are people being eaten, but this is different—about it covering every inch of their bodies in growth.
Pamela loves it. She loves the spongy parts of the mushroom growth, loves to watch it grow and grow and grow. She loves how it makes everything spin, how it pulls her closer, closer, closer, how it’s going to ruin her, too. She has always loved anything that grows, anything that burrows, anything that takes and takes and takes.
When she sleeps, she dreams about Harley’s body, just a little bit mangled, her skull opened, the cordyceps growing out of her, blending colorful into her hair. When she sleeps, she dreams about Harley’s body, covered in holes that would unsettle even the people with the least amount of trypophobia possible. When she sleeps, she dreams about Harley’s body, about how it’s filled with spores, about how it’s spreading them, about how it’s giving back to the earth.
And she loves that, too. Still she wakes up crying.
Which really, just ends up making her head hurt even worse. Sucks.
.
Sometimes, she’s convinced there’s no end to this road. Sometimes, she’s convinced she’ll never stop running.
But wait, no, that’s not what she’s doing here. Of course that’s not what she’s doing here. Pamela grips the steering wheel tight and grits her teeth and ignores the hole in her chest, the longing. She’s not running. She has a purpose.
Her glove department is so full of letters she’s written for Harley that it’s almost bursting. She can’t remember if she’s already sent any. How many she’s sent. How many more she’s going to send. Which ones she wrote to be read.
Don’t hate me, spins around in Pamela’s head, like she’s scribbled on that last page until her hand was cramped. Don’t hate me, don’t hate me, don’t hate me. You have to understand.
(The Harley that’s not-there in the passenger’s seat’s head falls to the side, her neck cracking with it, her eyes wide and empty and dead. Pamela feels sick. Maybe this is what she’s always wanted.)
She keeps driving.
(She keeps running.)
.
Pamela stares down at the floor, At Harley’s body lying there, angel-blonde hair spilled out like a halo. She looks like an angel everywhere else, too—covered in… covered in Pamela, in the end. These spores are all her, after all.
And she’s so hungry. So she gets on her knees and she knows she’s hallucinating, but it feels so real when she digs her fingers into infested flesh, when she stuffs it into her mouth, warm, the blood running down her chin, the mushroom tasting like something she can’t even describe, filling her until nothing else is left. Feeding on what’s feeding on her. Loving what loves her.
Or what did, at some point. Now she’s alone on the floor of another cheap motel room, and her knees ache where they dig into the cold, hard floor. Now she’s alone on the floor and she doesn’t have her powers anymore, and Harley isn’t here either, and even if she was, how is Pamela supposed to hold back?
She’s always been a carnivore. Just never thought she’d spin out this far, she supposes.
“I have to keep going,” she says to herself, squeezing her eyes shut, but she can still faintly smell Harley’s perfume. The hallucinations are cruel. She wonders when she’ll see the Batman again. “I have to keep going. I have to—finish this. I have to.”
She doesn’t know who she’s pleading to, who she’s trying to convince. Except she does, because she’s been writing so many letters.
.
Her breath is always so shallow these days. She thinks kissing Harley would probably help her breathe. But that’s probably just the fungus talking.
.
She has sex with another woman and thinks about Harley the whole time, but she’s always thinking about Harley anyway, so what difference does it even make? A mistake is a mistake is a mistake.
Whatever; Pamela is dying anyway.
.
(But then she doesn’t, and when she looks in the mirror, she doesn’t recognize the person Harley fell in love with. Maybe she won’t ever again. And wouldn’t that be terrible?
Even now, she doesn’t stop writing letters. She just stops sending them.)