2022 Student Horror Writing Competition
All of Us Monstrous
By Ash Hough
On Millie Fowler’s tenth Halloween, she grew a tail like the devil.
Creekview Elementary was notorious for turning the candy-coated, plastic-scented holiday into a production. All of the little suburban children would tumble about the schoolyard as a Power Ranger or a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle or, if they were really clever, some indistinct iteration of a main character from the never-ending Magic Treehouse saga. Their moms bought their costumes from the local Halloween store, or they spent hours sewing them and hot-gluing them until the skin on their fingertips just about fell apart, because Halloween wasn’t just Halloween at Creekview, it was a competition, a flurry of peacocks strutting along a perfectly manicured football field. Every Halloween before school started, the students would be paraded around the perimeter of the campus, and all of the parents and the grandparents and the aunts and the uncles would be standing across the streets with their expensive digital cameras, taking pictures to put up on their refrigerators with magnets shaped like the Empire State Building or the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore.
That particular Halloween, Millie was corralled with all of the other fifth graders in the multi-purpose room, and she was wearing a Sleeping Beauty costume from the thrift store. She always wrinkled her nose when she put it on. It stank, no matter how many times her mother washed it in the machine that was older than Millie, and the hot pink hue of the polyester had faded over the years.
“You always dress like Sleeping Beauty,” said Millie’s best friend Carrie. The two had been bound at the hip since first grade. Carrie had complimented Millie’s lunchbox, and thus the matter had been settled. “You’ve gone as Sleeping Beauty for five years in a row.”
“So?” Millie had said in reply. “I like Sleeping Beauty.”
“Why?” Carrie stuck her tongue through the gap where her lower incisor had been a week before, then smoothed her hands down over her own costume. Millie didn’t recognize it. She wore a pink dress too, and a long pink wig, and Millie guessed it must be from one of the shows her mother wouldn’t let her watch. “She sleeps for like, the entire movie.”
“I know that.”
“Then why do you like her? Ariel is much cooler.”
“Ariel gave up being a mermaid for some stupid boy. She’s not so cool.”
Carrie pushed Millie. “Says you. Once you like a boy, you’ll get it. But why do you like Sleeping Beauty?”
Because she’s pretty, Millie thought. Because I like the way her voice sounds, and I like that scene where she dances with the prince. Millie had been enraptured by that scene as a young girl, fascinated by the ebb and flow of Aurora’s golden hair. It came back to her in dreams, sometimes; wonderful dreams where she would dance with a beautiful princess clad in lush pink silk. They would swirl together beside a crystalline blue lake, their toes bare in ticklish green grass, and the princess would stare into Millie’s eyes, and her heart would start to beat in time with the song. I know you, I walked with you once upon a dream...
And that was when it happened. At the base of her spine, beneath her stinky old dress, her skin ruptured, and Millie felt something emerging. Something fighting its way out like an animal in a cage..
All the breath left Millie’s body at once. Her hands flew to her rear end, and she could feel something warm soaking through the polyester.
“Millie?” Carrie asked. “You’re white as a ghost. What’s wrong with you?”
Millie couldn’t say.
She was shaking.
She had to go.
Frantically, Millie backed out of the multipurpose room— almost tripping over her own feet in her haste— and sprinted to the girls’ room. She slammed into the first stall and locked herself in, then stripped naked and felt at her tailbone. It was a lot longer than she had remembered, and her hands came away bloody.
Her screams echoed off the pristine white tile.
At the emergency room, doctors were astounded.
“Very unusual,” one had remarked as they studied the deep red of Millie’s new tail.
“Certainly an interesting development,” another had commented while they pinched the sharp spade at the end between two fingers.
Millie was uncomfortable with all of the poking and prodding, and she couldn’t help but shriek when they attempted to yank the tail off, but her mother told her to be still, and so she was still. In the end, the doctors reached no definitive conclusion. Millie’s mother adamantly refused to have it amputated— it was an expensive procedure, and she reasoned herself into complacency with the assertion that it would go away on its own— and it wasn’t hurting anyone, the doctors had decided.
“Just keep it hidden while in public,” Millie’s mother told her, rubbing one hand soothingly along her back. “Others will stare at you.”
And so Millie kept it hidden while in public. Nobody at school knew about Millie’s tail, for she was very careful never to let it escape the waistband of her jeans. She couldn’t exactly control the thing, but she hid it well enough. It was easy to tuck it away and wrap it around her leg beneath cheap denim.
The shame, however, was another matter.
The next Halloween, she didn’t dress up at all. She suddenly felt too old.
Time passed, Millie kept her tail hidden, and for a while the tail seemed to be some extraordinary blip, some wild phenomenon that nobody could explain. It almost got to the point where Millie forgot how unusual it was. And as the tail was unconsciously forgotten, so too it seemed was the shame, displaced in the deepest corners of her mind to gather dust.
Then Millie turned fourteen. When she was fourteen, her mother had taken her to the local mall, and she dragged Millie through with an iron-clad grasp. She was an adamant woman with a steel-solid will, and she knew that her daughter was beginning to foster a fondness for things the pair could not afford. So, whenever they went to that mall, Millie’s mother would always drag her in a blur past all the stores that might tempt her.
For all her mother’s efforts, though, one day Millie’s eyes snagged on the window display of a lingerie store. There was a sizable poster in that window, with a picture of a beautiful model sprawled luxuriously on a swathe of dark red silk. She wore barely anything at all; a lacy white garter and panty set, with a bra to match. In the brief moment Millie had to stare; she was lost in the way the model’s breasts curved pleasingly in their cups, the glowing contrast of pristine white lace against honeydew skin, the fullness of the curve where her legs joined her hips in an embrace that, in an instant, sent a jolt down Millie’s spine with the magnitude of an earthquake. Such magnitude, in fact, that it split Millie’s crust of skin clean in two, her back tearing apart like the tectonic plates she’d learned about last week in Earth Sciences.
From the newly-rendered crevasse in Millie’s flesh rose new fragments of bone. Each of her vertebrae burst forth from their envelopes of muscle and sinew, creating a ridge of spines that tore easily through Millie’s feeble linen shirt. Blood poured down her back, and Millie could feel it trickling down her four-year-old tail, which lashed about in her pant-leg with an unprecedented bloodlust. Before she could catch up with it all, she was wailing on the linoleum floors in a pool of her own blood, crying out as loud as she could for help, and all anyone could offer in return were stares.
Once again, doctors were befuddled.
“Obviously some... unnatural kind of deformity,” one doctor said. Millie tearfully wondered how unnatural anything that came from her body could really be.
“Looks to me like you oughta pray to God and hope he forgives you for whatever you did,” said another, and Millie didn’t think he was very good at his job.
Once again, no solid conclusion was reached. Millie’s mother would not allow them to perform any sort of cosmetic surgery— they could scarcely afford the visit itself, and she would not allow wasteful spending on vanity— and the spines weren’t hurting anyone, so the matter was settled.
“We’ll get you back to normal soon, okay?” Millie’s mother told her. “Don’t you worry. Everything will go back to normal.”
Try as Millie might, though, from fourteen onward her own body was as uncontrollable to her as the rise and fall of the sun. The spines that tore her skin apart seemed to open a floodgate, because after them came a never-ending onslaught of monstrosities. When she was fifteen, she watched a movie where two women kissed. It sent goosebumps down her arms and legs, and then those goosebumps erupted with thick, wiry black fur, rough and sharp as steel wool. Her inner thighs especially were thick with it, and they snagged on each other as she ran and cried for her mother. They would not yield to tweezers or wax or Nair hair removal cream, and Millie’s skin underneath only turned red and raw for her efforts. Within the next week, her mother had filled her closet with turtleneck sweaters and thicker denim. When she was sixteen, Carrie had hugged her. She had grown a lot since elementary school— they both had, in ways not entirely known to the other— and Millie had never thought about how beautiful she’d become. But then Carrie embraced her, a moment of comfort before they parted ways for the day, and Millie wondered, in a brief thrall of weakness, what it would be like to hold Carrie in other ways. Before she could reprimand herself for it, before she could take it back, her hands convulsed against Carrie’s back. They grew gnarled and crooked, her bones warping beneath the skin and her fingernails shooting forth from their beds. She pulled away with claws instead of hands, and Carrie was long gone before Millie could even begin to apologize. Millie’s mother sent her to school in heavy leather gloves the next day, and Millie had pleaded with Carrie not to tell anybody. But Carrie had a glint of repulsion in her eye, one that betrayed her thoughts, and by the day after that, every girl in school avoided Millie like her mutations were contagious. When she was seventeen, she was changing in the locker room after gym glass. She kept herself hidden away, locked in a shower stall so that none of the other girls would be discomforted by her, but when she emerged the first thing she saw was the illustrious curve of a rogue hip, and her first thought was, No, Millie, don’t. But her first feeling was something akin to hunger. It was a hot, sour pang in her mouth. And before she could control herself, her gums ruptured, coating her tongue with blood. A new set of teeth was emerging from within, sharp and wickedly curved, a mouthful of fangs. They grew so rapidly they punctured her lips. She slammed the stall door shut again before spitting a stream of violent red on the tile.
And it never stopped. Millie grew horns and her tongue split like a snake’s and her belly grew rough and grating with scales, and all the while she kept holding onto the belief that she could go back to normal. That one day she would be able to take the sheets off of the mirrors, that one day she would go back to school— her mother began keeping her at home once her eyes became all-black— that one day she would be able to look at another girl and not be afraid of what would happen inside of her. That one day she might be anything other than wretched.
Her mother’s efforts to fix her were Herculean, at first. But with every mutation, it became more and more evident to her that there was nothing she could do to fix her. It was then that she came to the conclusion that any fixing to be had must be by Millie’s hand, on Millie’s own. She told her so when Millie turned 18.
“You’re kicking me out,” Millie said. Tears oozed down her cheeks as thick and black as tar. Her tear ducts had mutated when she had sobbed into her pillow the year before.
“I’m not kicking you out,” Millie’s mother said. “I would never kick you out, you know that. I’m giving you an invitation to return once...” She regarded her monstrous daughter, and she didn’t seem to know what to make of her. She hadn’t known what to make of her for quite some time now, and she made no movement to wipe Millie’s tears away. “Once you’ve got yourself sorted.”
There was a certain numbness that overtook Millie then. A cavity inside her, almost like the reversal of years’ worth of mutations; through it all, through every drop of blood and every shard of bone and every inconclusive hospital visit, Millie had never thought that her mother would give up on her.
Her mother was still talking, but Millie couldn’t hear her anymore. She stood, numb, and walked out the front door, numb, and wandered the cracked and littered and crowded streets, numb. She wore a tank top and cotton shorts, no shoes to hide her gruesome feet, her tail dragging lifeless on the concrete. Passerby stared at her shamelessly. They whispered about her. Millie paid them no mind.
She must have walked for miles, though she couldn’t be sure. She walked until she did not recognize the world around her. And she found that this new world, one that did not recognize her, was lighter on her shoulders.
“Hey,” called a voice from across the street. “Hey, girl.”
Millie glanced up, bracing herself.
Two women walked parallel to her. One had an odd shape to her head— horned, flattened, with a beak where her nose might have been— and a clubbed tail dragged behind her. Beside her, the other woman had bent legs like a goat, which ended in cloven hooves. They were holding hands.
“You've been kicked out?” asked the hooved woman.
Millie’s heart— still somehow human— stood still in her chest.
She shrugged.
“Why don’t you come with us?” said the horned woman. “We can help you, honey.”
As she stared at them and the tiny miracle of the point where their hands met, which was at once strange to the world around them and familiar to her, Millie let out all of her breath in a ragged, tear-stained gasp. She fell to her knees. They had grown plates of bony armor over the summer, and as she hit the concrete, she was— for the first time— glad for their protection.
Ash Hough is a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate majoring in linguistics and literature with a concentration in creative writing (fiction). Ash’s story, “All of Us Monstrous,” took first place, General Monsters, in the the Center for Monster Studies’ 2022 Student Horror Competition.