Enough pieces of my skin have been sent to the lab by now to form an entirely new me out of the flesh mound. I don’t know how or when my skin turned out to be so sensitive, but it is. And I’m paying the price with each visit to the dermatologist’s. His name is Dr. Sabatini, and he always insists on having someone else in the room with us when he examines me. Which, of course, I get in this post-#MeToo era, but, truth be told, it makes me feel more uncomfortable to have a woman in there appraising my body as well. And I guess I wouldn’t mind if Dr. Sabatini took certain “liberties” if we were alone, and he simply “couldn’t resist” due to the lack of another witness. It might actually distract me from my fears about him arbitrarily choosing to biopsy a mole. Every time I think there couldn’t possibly be one left, he finds the “irregular nevus” worth slicing. And then, needless to say, sends it over to the lab for examination.

I had no idea—no one could have—what was happening as my hunks of flesh began to amass. Maybe it was because so many of them turned out to be cancerous. That could have been why it was able to pack such a radioactive (so to speak) “punch.” The ability to mutate and come to life. To transform into the biopsied flesh monster that would eventually take over the town. Miss Mola (that’s what I had opted to call her) didn’t even seem to understand that she was trying to “attack” one of the sunniest places in the U.S.—Albuquerque—and that it might have actually been a boon to the cause of her perpetual growth. All in her bid to get back to me, the body she had been “sprung from.” Like I was the Adam to her Eve or some shit. And I guess I was. I guess this was somehow all “my fault.” Even though it could be argued that it was Dr. Sabatini’s fault for being so, shall we say, thorough. I mean, really, many of those moles he sadistically chose to “nick” weren’t even cancerous. It was more like he got a perverse thrill out of doing it. As is probably the case for many dermatologists. After all, one doesn’t get into the skin-hacking business without gaining some sense of joy from the hacking itself. Not to criticize the doctors “just doing their job” with an “abundance of caution.” Maybe I’d be the same way too if I were a doctor, and everyone was always trying to slap me with “liability.” Except that you ended up being slapped with that even when you were hypervigilant, as it were. 

Only I was hardly in a position to sue Dr. Sabatini amid all the chaos of Miss Mola crawling through town like a languid snail. And oozing and seeping like one, too. Not to gross you out, but of course it (I’ve decided to no longer label the creature with a gender) was extremely disgusting. As even normal moles are. But a mass of lopped-off ones rolled into a single blob-like structure? Forget about it. You can’t unsee something like that. It is the stuff of hellscapes, not even nightmares. Anytime I need to induce vomiting (as bulimics do), all I have to conjure is the image of Miss Mola. Who thought it could take over Albuquerque without consequences. Which, for the most part, it did. Thanks to the brightly burning sun actually strengthening it. As Jimmy McGill a.k.a. Saul Goodman described Albuquerque, “It’s like living inside an Easy-Bake Oven. I mean, look out that window. It’s like a soulless, radioactive Georgia O’Keeffe hellscape out there. Crawling with coral snakes and scorpions.” Only now it was crawling with Miss Mola, to boot.

I’m fairly certain I was the first person to not only clock its presence in our blazing city, but to know, right away, what it was. It didn’t seem to be aware that the very thing that had caused it to end up in a pathology lab in the first place was the sun it freely writhed around under. The sun that had given me all those moles in the first place. Even after I doused my entire body in sunscreen to leave the house for something as simple as a quick trip to the grocery. It was never enough to keep a new nevus, “benign” (though, is there really such a thing?) or otherwise, off my body. They relished forming there, only to be seared or cut off later by Dr. Sabatini. 

It was him that I decided to call as soon as I spotted it. He was the only person who might believe me. Might believe that this was really happening. Perhaps I knew instantly what it was because it was technically a part of me. A very massive part of me, it appeared. And whatever it wanted, it surely had something to do with me. For all I knew, maybe it wanted to absorb me back into itself. Or to have me absorb it and become a giant walking biopsied flesh monster myself. 

I figured Dr. Sabatini could help me with the particulars (or at least the generals), but he was extremely off-put by my call and told me I was talking nonsense. Yet he was the first person I saw being interviewed by reporters on the news as he offered his “expert” opinion on the matter: “In all my years as a dermatologist, I have never seen anything like this.” So insightful. But yeah, this was definitely even more controversial than when the mole above Madonna’s lip mysteriously disappeared. Maybe it, too, joined the other biopsied pieces of flesh that were starting to rise up across the country en masse. No one knew what was going on, but obviously, it must have had something to do with the pathology labs. Because every single mole monster originated from one of the labs owned by Skin Is In Industries. Surely, that couldn’t have been a coincidence. Things in life rarely were. 

So while Dr. Sabatini insisted that the city of Albuquerque “waited it out” until the sun ultimately did the mole in (even though I was of the belief that the sun would probably only fortify it by making it more cancerous, therefore more “mutant”), I did some of my own investigating. The corporate headquarters for Skin Is In Industries was, unsurprisingly, in Fresno, California. Because why not have a major outfit in the middle of nowhere? That’s the best place to have such outfits. Even better than exporting all the lab work to China. Plus, God knows that country has plenty of its own mutant entities brewing without skin masses like Miss Mola adding to it. Not to say that plenty of lab work wasn’t exported there regardless. Just not from Skin Is In Industries. For whatever reason, they wanted to remain strictly “‘Merica.” 

Could it be, quite possibly, because they knew the best place on Earth for “stewing” monstrosities and miscreations was in the U.S.? I could think of no better explanation. And, upon driving the roughly thirteen hours to try to get some answers, I found myself no closer to anything apart from another “Miss Mola” trying to attack and prevent my entry into the building. Worse still, my own original Miss Mola had managed to follow me, somehow learning to pick up speed from the snail’s pace it had started from. I supposed it had managed to “evolve” that quickly. This is what happens when you’re dealing with lusus naturae. There’s no rhyme or reason. Not that there ever was even before my skin got so out of hand. Or rather, the skin that was once attached to me got so out of hand. And as I sat there in the boiling car, being obstructed by two biopsied flesh monsters, I couldn’t help but think that this was all nothing more than retaliation for being “rejected.”

They were like the unloved, abandoned children who grew up to be serial killers or something. And now, all Miss Mola seemed to want was to “eliminate” me. It didn’t really matter what nefarious source behind the scenes of Skin Is In Industries had allowed for this transmogrification. The point was, it was happening…and threatening my life now, in this moment. But then I had to question whether or not my life wasn’t always being somehow threatened by the hostile presence of a mole. Whether on my body or off of it.

I reckon that’s when I decided to just enter the void. It was too burning hot to keep sitting in that car playing a game of dermatological chicken. So I drove right into the Miss Mola that was my own, and, at present, as far as I know, I’m just part of the mass. Continuing to grow and wreak general havoc on the world…the way that all forms of flesh do. It’s done wonders for curing my bulimia though.