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Charlie woke screaming. His body jerked violently against the padded floor. He looked down and noticed that he was no longer in the straitjacket. Although this recent change was welcome, he now had to overcome whatever was moving underneath his skin. A sudden pain tore through his stomach. He lifted his shirt to notice, to his surprise, that he was bleeding heavily from his belly button.
Confusion set in. As negative thoughts beset his mind, he began to wonder: What had these doctors given him? He ran his index finger across his navel. It appeared to be a deep gash, not that dissimilar to how a bald vagina might look to a virgin. The hatch on the door came down. A pair of authoritative eyes were staring at him. "Something is wrong with me. Can you get the doctor? I'm in a great deal of pain." As quickly as the words came from his mouth, the hatch closed back up.
Everything was happening too quickly for Charlie to comprehend. He needed medical assistance, but no one cared. Then came the sounds of crawling from the walls. It wasn't just one, but thousands of creatures scurrying amidst the plaster. Nothing was making sense. Was this a dream, he thought?
Charlie reached inside his belly button. Maybe if he could identify the source of the bleeding, it might reassure him that this was actually happening. As soon as he stuck his finger inside, something bit him. He winced in pain and equal parts bewilderment. A charcoal black, bony but furry leg pierced the belly button. One of the male nurses banged on the door, screaming for him to pipe down as it was two in the morning.
He was unable to keep quiet, especially as the remaining seven legs all did more long-lasting damage to his abdomen. The pain became overwhelming. He had never felt pain quite like it before in his twenty-five years on this planet. As agony tore through him, something clicked in his mind, a hard, humbling realisation. He had always dismissed other people's suffering, especially his sister's, telling himself he was the one who had it rough. But now, as every nerve burned and his body convulsed, Charlie realised the truth—real suffering was silent, isolating, the kind that carved you up from the inside.
He suddenly saw why Abi, and his mother before her, could endure so much and still keep going. The strength needed simply to survive pain, to bear wounds that never heal, belonged to them, not him. Maybe that's why women became mothers—taking on hurt, carrying it, and turning it into something that protected others. Grief washed over him as he remembered his mother, lost only days ago. Now he knew a faint echo of what they had carried all along.
He soon started violently convulsing on the floor as the thing inside him tore its way free. He looked down, and that's when he saw it. It was his sister, but not as he remembered her. Her angelic face was there, somehow, impossibly attached to the body of a golden orb-weaver spider.
"I'm not useless anymore, am I, brother?" Charlie stared into her eyes. "Abi.." The creature watched him with glee as he died a painful death. "What was it you used to call me? Ahh, that's right - spastic." He started to fade in and out of consciousness. "I remember all the times you had your mates round, purposely hiding your lips while speaking so you could mock me".
Charlie's eyes began flicking. His vision started to blur. His mind started to flip between seeing his sister's head on a spider and how she appeared before she was violently murdered. "I was just a kid. I didn't mean to take it out on you. I was just angry at the world for not having what everyone else had".
"Spare me your sorrows. Justice will be served on all men like you, who openly hurt those who are vulnerable or different." Charlie attempts to crawl across to his sister one last time. The pain, however, is too much. He can barely move an inch without winching in shock. Another flurry of knocks echoes across the room. "I already told you, Binks, one more time and you're going back in the straitjacket". The nurse's patience was growing thin with the commotion, as was Abi's with his gaslighting.
"Abi, you don't understand. I wasn't really exposed to anyone who is blind/deaf/an amputee/paralyzed or any other physical... Disability?" Abi hurries over to Charlie. Her eight legs sounded like a tap dancer dancing on a glass table. She extends two of her skeletal extremities. Charlie thinks for a brief moment he has managed to get through to her. To his shock and horror, Abi uses her fangs and bites down on his tongue. The venom penetrates so quickly that he is no longer able to speak.
"Now for the rest of your pitiful existence, maybe you can try and understand what it must have been like being me for a day". The door to the padded room opens out. The guards and nurses are dumbfounded by what they are seeing. A spider with a female face is killing their patient. Charlie soon died staring at his sister's face.
Abi is then startled as one guard tries to crush her beneath his shoe. Abi hurries off too quickly, shooting venom out towards his knee. The guard drops down, screaming in agony like a newborn baby fresh out of the womb. The nurse screams out as Abi scurries beneath the door. She later vanished in the darkness of the hospital ward. Some say a shimmer of gold and silent footsteps haunt the corridors at night, and patients whisper of strange patterns spun across the ceilings. Somewhere out there, Abi watches and waits, seeking those who once turned away from pain, hungry to turn her vengeance into a legend all its own.
In Charlie's dying moments, as he gazed down at his own blood and gore that was spilt out on the sterile floor, he understood life had lost all coherence. The world twisted between nightmare and fever, shadows swimming along the padded walls, the crawling beneath his skin blurring into echoes of his own tormented thoughts. He no longer knew whether the monstrous vision before him was real, perhaps a supernatural vengeance wrought by Abi, or just a punishment conjured by his unravelling mind. He could not separate memory from madness, nor certainty from fear. Was this his sister, reborn and transformed, or simply the crowning horror of guilt and grief tearing him apart from within?
These questions remained unanswered, but one truth was inescapable: Charlie would spend whatever remained of himself haunted by what he had done and failed to do. Whether Abi had truly returned or Charlie was experiencing the final creation of his splintered psyche, the result was the same. For him, the world had slipped beyond sense or salvation and now only opened into the endless darkness of death, heavy with the burden of his past. The line between reality and nightmare had been erased, and that erasure itself was the only certainty left to him.

THE END