You are swollen. You feel the stirring within your lymph, a bubbling up of fizzy stones, popping and cracking and then falling back to the bottom of you, disintegrating. Flecks of dust kiss your veins and vessels: it starts slowly — almost unnoticeably — and then grows to a pungent bustling that disrupts you. When it happens, you almost fall flat on the ground, shaken. You watch the wet acidic dust with your pit eyes and stop inhaling.

You rise, but your movements feel different. Your limbs are out of phase, one gesture seems like a combination of two gestures that bump and entangle with each other. You stop, and even standing still you feel staggered and out of yourself, as if conscious of your existence in two different and overlapping realities. You stare into nothingness and the feeling intensifies.

You see this disconnection taking place in your limbs, your appendages, your skeleton. There is no more stillness within you, only a metallic rhythm that rips bone and chitin, mixing red and black lymph in a biphasic jelly that gargles in your throat, erupts out of your mouths. You despair. Without any option, you roll on the ground; you frantically try to catch the jelly and swallow it again. But you stop when it starts dripping out of your cloaca and from the tips of your other limbs.

It is then that you feel that some of this lymphatic goo is also accumulating in your abdomen. It becomes a solid lump that you try to grind down with punches and scratches, hurting your destroyed body even more in the process. Gargling screeches finally tear down your mouths and the solidified jelly bursts you open in a cloud of liquids. You are not alive anymore to breathe the sweet smell of your newborn.