"You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires."

~ Apostle Paul (Eph. 4:22)

Is your child at risk?

The pamphlet was glossy white and folded into threes. The front cover blemished by reprinted crayon, thanks to some toddler somewhere who'd won the PSA logo contest, armed with a crimson Crayola and spatial luck. The outline was perfect—Two shrugged shoulders, symmetrically curved, braced together at the edges. It was the texture that was crude. Childish. Like he, she, it had used their front stoop as a table and forgotten about the grainy bits of cement underneath.

Back then, little me fished the pamphlet out of the trash. Not the recycling. The trash. Right where Mom had thrown it because the doctor made her mad. The paper was thick and cumbersome in my small hands; the rough, fibrous corners poked my thumbs.

Mom didn't like the words it said—the even columns of clean font that explained what was wrong with me. When she called it filth, I knew she wasn't talking about the old coffee grinds or the slither of orange-y spaghetti sauce staining the inside.

One in ten children contracted the Devil.

Mom said I wasn't a "one".

Still, I couldn't stop looking at the grainy heart in my hands, and the question it framed, shoving the letters forward think, think, think...

Is your child at risk?

Short answer?

Yes.

The overhead bulb fizzled. Its lackluster shine washed the walls yellow. I was a long way from home now. A long way from my kitchen with the wheely trash can that disappeared into the cabinets. A long way from my bedroom. I was where they put kids who were a one in ten.

Kids with spoiled hearts.

We were all one-in-tens down here.

The bathroom smelled of dried piss and other scents I'd grown accustomed to since my sixteenth birthday. Graffiti grew thick on every surface, like a mass of squiggly larva, or spaghetti, wriggling off the plate and then—floop—off the table. Words in strange colors, forced into stranger shapes, slid in and out of crevices and across the floor—hell, they wended up the toilet bowl. Going around and around like a never ending flush of profanity and meta.

It was marvelous. That much ingenuity, creativity, and self-expression being reserved for the shitter.

It'd be a landmark someday. This bathroom. A museum piece set up under harsh lights with edited newsreels playing on loop in the background. They'd show it to everyone then, once the disease died out and we became a footnote in the history books.

Like the Black Plague.

Or Ebola.

Or whoever decided taking their lipstick to the mirror was a good idea. As if the flickering light wasn't bad enough, jiggling, undressed, from exposed wires, now I could barely see my face around the giant Ephesians 4: 22 scrawled in puce on the pitted glass.

"For the love of...I'll kill 'em." I ground my teeth, annoyed, and yanked a coarse paper tissue from the wall dispenser.

A mistake.

My hand wasn't working properly. There were bruises and blood and a puffy swelling between the joints of my fingers. The tissue fluttered from my grip, leaving a twinge of pain that ran to my wrist.

"Dammit."

Forget that. I didn't need to see myself anyway. I was sure my face hadn't changed much from yesterday or the day before. My eyeshadow had rubbed off weeks ago—and the glitter. I still wore the stains, though.

The CDC had a professional on standby to glitz us kids up. It looked better on the TV when they put us in here. All the "ones" together. It took them two, three tries to catalog my barcode before they cranked open the doors to The Pit. I'd fucked myself up with a razor a few times, in my lucid moments, trying to get at the med implant under my skin. I had so many ridges, the handheld lasers couldn't tell the difference between their striations or mine.

Mom called the CDC containment team the morning I turned sixteen. I came downstairs for confetti pancakes and got three yellow tablets in my orange juice instead. When I woke up, I was strapped to a moving gurney, watching fluorescent ceiling tiles flip by.

Mom left me one voicemail. She cried for ten minutes straight.

"I did it for Sandy," she said.

"It's not my fault!" I remember screaming, just before I winged the cell phone at a nurse's head.

I almost clocked her, too.

That was nearly two months ago. Seven weeks. I still had the food stamp book they gave us, but I'd run out of my pill allotment. The ones meant to ease our symptoms,

and keep us sterile.

Sterile, because they couldn't stop us doing the thing.

Lust.

Yeah, that one. Number five was a big symptom and a popular one. Not that any baby should be born in a hell hole like The Pit, but, you know, choices...

Food stamps.

Pills. Or lack of, which sucks.

They gave us a hermetically sealed package, too, showing us a twenty-minute instructional video on how to use it. Mine was currently buried at the bottom of my rhinestone purse on top of the toilet tank. I'd been thinking about it a lot recently. When the pain comes.

It's like giving a lost person a single bullet and gun to wander an endless desert.

Choices. Pills or bullets or pain. Pick one.

One in ten.

Plaster crumbled from the wall, catching in the white-ish ceramic sink. Outside, the bass pounded, muffled, but with enough heat to melt the streets above. The bathroom vibrated with each whomp from the speakers, peeling back the hairs on my arms standing them on end, trembling.

Thirteen-year-old me would be so skeeved right now—public toilets and electronica.

And to think, I once thought radio remixes were hardcore.

Awkwardly, I pulled my shirt off single handed. It was the cropped kind with a shredded backside. The kind that looked tough and daring. You could see all of my muscles and the ridge of my spine and my acne scars between the saggy gray strips.

Sweat darkened my bra cups and hid in the folds of my stomach, oiling my bared skin. In the dirty mirror—the parts not marred by book, chapter, verse—snippets of neon paint snuck over my shoulders and smudged my neck in streaks of yellow and blue so vibrant, they only belonged to blacklit bacteria. I had two wings back there big enough to blanket me; feathered tips stuck coyly into the tops of my torn shorts.

The boy who'd traced them on me in gooey finger paint had a mouth that tasted like metal and dry ice and other things: cigarettes and beer and the cinnamon gum he'd tried to hide them with. He tasted better than fresh air.

As I said, number five was a biggie.

A dull ache compressed my chest. I couldn't breathe. Rolling my neck and counting slowly didn't help. It never did. The psychiatrist told me a lot of useless stuff during my visits. It wasn't the same, sitting in an office, flipping through laminated charts, as it was down here, in the stink and slime and thrumming bass and strobe lights.

In the sea of abandoned kids surging together, smothering their heartbeats with fake sound. Sure, they dumped food down for us every other week. But we were still left alone to ease our desires.

My body prickled, hot in all the wrong places, fascinated. He was still in the dank hall, that boy. Right where I'd left him. Between a moldy wall smeared with paint from my back and the body of a dead girl on the floor—at least, I thought she was dead. It hurt to think about him standing there, breathless. Drunk and shocked. Lips cherry-pink from me and his bleached shirt smattered in blood. Also from me.

I mean, it really hurt.

Like really, really.

Each rapid image flooded my arteries with pain. Flowing from one large vein to the other.

Okay, girl. Here we go.

I'd known it was coming. That's why I'd abandoned Jack, Jake—Jackson!—when I did and locked myself in the bathroom. Pain always followed a flare-up, and recently it'd been getting worse. Gone were the days of blinding headaches and the occasional chest strain. Now the pain took my whole body, mounting, mounting until I was sure it had built a foundation and walls and a picket fence. Until I was sure it would never, ever go away.

When that happened, I'd go mad. Not Mom's-mad-at-the-doctor mad, but the kind where you binge on life until you bloat like a fat leech and die.

That kinda mad.

Gluttony. Symptom number six.

Fisting the sides of the sink in my damp palms, I squeezed until my swollen knuckles disappeared, blending into the off-color glaze wicked bruises and all. My guts cramped. Kohl lines like thin snakes traveled under the skin on my arms; appearing and disappearing in the trippy light fast as my fluttering pulse.

I wasn't even sure that was real.

My pale knuckles made the red on my hands pop, like a crimson Crayola on a white pamphlet. And no matter how much it hurt, I still couldn't stop thinking—

The kiss. I'd never indulged so deep before. I think I found his fucking tonsils. It wasn't romantic—it was desperation. Frantic. My heart only pumped when I did what it wanted.

It hurt so much it thrilled me.

Is your child at risk?

The girl lying on the shittastic floor would say yes if I hadn't clobbered her face into blood pudding. Her pert, pierced nose caved first, and then I'd closed her eyes. Stamping a permanent black where her inky liner shaped her lids into a sexy swoop. I'd straddled her chest and crushed her with my knees. I had strong knees and thighs.

I wore rings.

And she deserved every punch.

Anger. Symptom number four.

I was too weak to ignore my urges. That's what Mom said. That's why she sent me to The Pit after therapy failed.

After I tried to smother my baby sister Sandy in her crib. To stop her from clawing apart my life with every "isn't she the most precious thing you've ever seen?" quip from the neighbors.

Because she was new and good.

And I hated her for it.

Envy. Symptom number three.

I managed a sharp breath through my nose. Yanking it in like a powder line. Urine. Dirt. The dry, sweet after stench of weed. The rush slugged my lungs and cleared my head long enough for the horror to root and bloom.

Long enough for me to wake up and realize what I'd done.

"No, no, no, no..."

Filthy disgust turned me suddenly cold. I was exposed, misshapen and ugly in the light. It always went like this, my sickness flared and then faded, leaving me dizzy and gross.

The urge to symptom-number-five the boy with the bleached shirt bled out of me like the life from a buckshot deer. I needed an acid bath to scrub clean the parts of me he'd touched.

I wanted to throw up, to purge the nasty from my shaking body.

"It's not my fault," I whimpered.

It was my sickness. And it wouldn't stop. I'd finished my allotted pills yesterday, swallowing the little gold rocks, knowing they wouldn't help, but believing anyway because that's what I'd been taught to do.

I'd believed I wasn't a one in ten so hard, I was a bitch to anyone who'd been diagnosed. I believed I was better than them—perfect, even. And Mom was so wasted on denial, neither of us could see...

Pride was the first symptom.

"This isn't me," I said to myself because I was the only one who wanted to listen.

Me and three hundred other kids.

No one—no grownup—understood what it was like being a diseased. We didn't have choices. We couldn't control it. It happened to us and then it didn't and we had to live each hour remembering in the violet dark.

I was achingly lonely.

The pamphlet never mentioned that part. The pamphlet with a red kiddy heart drawn on the cover. I read it from front to back in my closet; sitting under a brush of clothing beside a bag of old stuffed animals, my flashlight illuminating the text. Flashing from one scary word to the other:

Is your child at risk of the Devil?

When the nurse gave the pamphlet to Mom, she said there was a trial vaccine—

"No, thank you," mom said, shoving the truth into her giant purse. "Gemma will be fine."

Gemma will be fine.

By the time she woke up to my reality, my truth, I was crushing my six-month-old sister's face into a fuzzy blanket. Then her adjectives changed.

Gemma is weak.

Gemma is dirty.

My nausea worsened at the memory. I let go of the sink and hunched to grab my knees, trying to stay standing. Closing my eyes against the spins, I recited what was seared on my brain in the beam of a cheap red and blue flashlight.

"What is the Devil? The Devil is an infection of the superfluous self, degrading morality and self-control, affecting the areas of the person known archaically as the soul. The Devil is beautiful decay..."

Beautiful. Like the skank in the hall who'd danced too close, snaking her tattooed arms around Jackson's neck, her face trimmed in pink neon.

I only turned my back for a second.

And the worst bit was—he'd liked it. I should have been mad at him. But I wanted his attention all to myself and I wanted it the way he gave it to her: slinky and low and curving one hip after another on the echoey beats.

I deserved to have him that way.

My whole head hummed and I swear—honest to God I tried not to think about the way it made me feel. The hate and the anger and the greed—

Greed. Symptom number two.

Baring my teeth, I swung my fist; smashing the mirror and my wilted reflection into a hundred splinters. Shards of vandalized glass exploded, falling like glittery leaves from the metal frame. Clean tile appeared underneath. Unmolested by paint or pens.

Now my hand really was broken...

This pain was different, though. It was fresh. Not a thousand years old and strangling my soul, ripping up my insides and poisoning my veins.

"Risk factors," I continued, focusing on my truth as the world tilted and blurred. "Age: The chance of contracting the Devil lessens with adulthood and the onset of skepticism and the maturity of the frontal lobe. Children, especially early teens, are the most susceptible to the Devil. Hormone changes and the advent of ignorant independence play a role in the acceleration of the disease."

Disease. They wouldn't call it what it really was. Or who it was that had settled into the bodies and bones of a thousand unlucky children overnight. Blotching our hearts. Waiting to manifest as an army of juvenile delinquents, only to be buried underground in a never ending mosh once the adults figured it out—

There was no cure.

Best they could do was keep feeding our needs until we weren't anything anymore. They called it caring—a humane solution. Secretly, I think they were just afraid. Of us.

And the funny thing is...

so were we.

I must have fainted, because, suddenly, my knees folded, and something hit my forehead, hard. When I opened my eyes again, I was laid flat out on the crusty floor, staring at the rusty pipes straining to hold up the rotted ceiling.

There was more graffiti up there, flocking toward the single light bulb like demented, multi-toned moths. They shouted at me. Eating through my ears in terrible distorted, cavernous voices. Dancing in and out of my mind. Planting images in a field of colors that even the strongest antiseptic couldn't swab away.

Dazed I lifted my hand to my forehead. Something warm tickled my eyebrow.

Blood.

My blood, not the blood of the girl I'd stamped on. Kicking her over and over and over again until my ankle gave and I had to lean against the wall to catch a breath.

Is your child at risk of the Devil? Know the symptoms. Save a life.

Another sluice of pain caught me by surprise. Usually, I could handle it, my tolerance for physical duress was wicked high—but this time, I let the scream come. It filtered through my clenched teeth, drowning under the crash, crash, crash of the rave buzzing beyond my decaying cocoon.

Grabbing the open toilet bowl, I hauled my body into a sitting position. My mouth tasted like nickels and pennies and sucking on grocery cart handles when you were a kid.

My mouth tasted like a boy. I couldn't remember his name.

"Superfluous self," I fumbled to reach my purse resting, less than sanitarily, on the back of the scummy toilet's tank.

The light dimmed. My purse tipped, flopping half of my belongings into the rank water a foot from my face. My fingertips, mid necrosis, were black as frostbite—

it would only spread. It was getting worse, it would never stop, and I'd finished all my pills...

"Degrading." I grasped the hermetically sealed package. The same package a butt-hurt nurse had given me after I chucked a cell phone at her head. Three years after I first learned PSA meant Public Service Announcement. And that CDC was the center for diseased people like me.

Three years after the doctor asked me a bunch of funny questions during a standard check up that thirteen-year-old me didn't quite get.

Not really.

But however I'd answered...

It made me a one in ten. I had every symptom:

Pride.

      Greed.

              Envy.

                    Anger.

                             Lust.

                                   Gluttony.

                                              Sloth—

I dragged my feet under me and used the lip of the sink cut with a smudge of my blood for support.

Standing up, I looked at the vacant space, the clean slate, where the mirror had been. "Beautiful..."'

Someone rattled the door, belting it hard enough to shift the lock. A decidedly drunk, male voice swore at me, impossibly loud. "Hey! Hurry up!"

I closed my eyes against the desire to rip the door open and slam my boot places it would probably kill him. Using my teeth I stripped a hole in the plastic wrapping, shedding it to get at the bullet shaped case inside.

I cracked the seam.

Every kid thirteen to eighteen was at risk. The PSA made pamphlets and commercials. They interrupted radio broadcasts with warnings:

"Get your kids tested."

I patted my palm on my chest, looking for my heart.

Right? Left? Right...no...left.

Outside, the boy slammed the door one more time, defiant, "Fine! You leave me no choice."

I knew he was probably pissing on the door frame.

The scalpel was heavy when I plucked it from the holding case. I'd only seen this done once on low-grade film, but it had all the method of a biopsy or cutting the tender-rotten part from an apple.

I felt along the wire edge of my bra cup, molding my fingertips against my skin, sorting out the slope of my ribs until I found the right spot.

I sighed, "You leave me no choice."

Because this was what they—the CDC, the grownups—taught us. In twenty minutes, they showed us what they were too humane to do themselves. What we should do if it got too bad.

Kids wound up dead down here every day. I'd uncovered a few myself, hidden behind overflowing garbage bags and under discarded blankets stiff with dirt. Murdered. But there was no way I'd be the one to put them there. Maybe if Mom had caught on earlier, gotten me into the right programs sooner, I'd have more of a chance to hold on.

But the early me—the thirteen-year-old me, who loved her pet rat and spaghetti with hot dogs—was fading. And anyway, there was no erasing what I'd done to Sandy. I didn't care how gratifying the sickness made those memories.

Even if it wasn't my fault.

I should have done this sooner.

Sloth...

In the end, it was like crafting. Taking a piece of rough construction paper and wheedling the safety scissors around the edges in a silky line until you cut free the shape you wanted.

I was warm inside. Which was a strange revelation for someone who'd been called a cold-hearted bitch.

My heart wasn't cold.

Snipping the valves like cutting a green bean took awhile, but soon enough the scalpel tumbled into the sink, slithering slowly in a trail of dark blood, down the white ceramic curve toward the rusty drain.

I couldn't stop looking at the grainy heart in my hands. A mass of blubber and meat—veins and other jiggly things that made it too big for my cupped palms all netted in black as thin as threads. It contracted. Swelling and closing in time with the music beyond the walls.

There was a lot of truth in the pamphlet Mom threw away. But there was also one lie.

The Devil is real, it said. The Devil is you.

Not. Fucking. True.

The graffiti spread up the sides of a nearby trash can. Someone, sometime, had long since stolen the lid.

I tossed my heart in.

A/N: Entry written for Nyhterides The Glamour of Grotesque contest.