On Stacy's face

Stacy's head rang with the impact, her eyes screwed up in pain as something warm and wet landed on her face.

She screamed around the thing, and reach up to throw it off only to feel it wriggle into her mouth and latch onto her tongue.

She sat up, eyes wide at the side of six inches of slimy flesh wiggling in her mouth and grabbed it, only for her hands to slide off as they failed to gain purchase.

Inside her mouth, her tongue felt weird. Something had bitten down, but the pain had vanished to be replaced by a sucking, pulsing sensation.

It's drinking my blood!

Stacy grabbed at it again, trying to twist it around her hand for a better grip, but instead it contracted, pulling itself further into her mouth. She could feel its... mouth? sucking down more and more of her tongue, crawling deeper as it tried to escape from the outside world.

Stacy stood up, slipped and stood again, looking around wildly before opening a drawer and grabbing a knife. She tried to hold the thing still, not wanting to stab herself in the face, but she was running out of time. There was barely two inches of the thing visible outside of her mouth now, she wasn't even sure if cutting it would stop it.

She braced herself, held onto the knife with both hands and swung as close to her face as she dared.

A slicing pain seared through her mouth and for a moment she was certain she'd slashed her own face by mistake. Dropping the knife, she ran back to the bathroom to see the final inch of the creature disappear between her lips with a deep wound on its tail.

Stacy staggered backwards in horror, grabbing at her neck as the sensation of the worm burrowing into her continued beyond her tongue and into her throat. A piteous gurgle escaped her lips as all she could do was lie on the bathroom floor and endure the foul wriggling sensation that occupied her mouth.

Minutes passed, and the creature did not advance. Stacy had feared that it might her to , but instead she felt the meat of its body resting against her tongue.

That it had eaten.

Stacy felt the tears welling up, her sobs muffled and warped by the oversized thing blocking her voice.

What was going to happen to her? Was it some kind of leech that bled you to ? She'd heard of one guy who'd had one stuck up his nose for years, too fat to fall out. But this thing wasn't a leech, and she dreaded having to call an ambulance, mumbling over the phone until they sent someone to check on her. Would they cut out her whole mouth? Would she spend the rest of her life missing half of her face? Or would they just lock her up in quarantine and experiment on her while they tried to figure out what it was?

Her despair was broken by a sudden rushing sensation in her mouth, as though water were being drained from a balloon and at the same time, she felt the lump in her mouth deflate.

She rushed back up to the mirror, opening her mouth to see the grey tail of the creature disappearing down her throat. It was definitely shrinking, even as she watched and before long it had shrunk itself down so much that she could breathe properly.

It had shrunk down to the size of her tongue.

Stacy stared. She tried to move her tongue, but only felt a twitch in her throat as the stump tried to move a tongue that wasn't there. She was about to close her mouth when after a second's delay, she saw the worm move. Exactly the way she'd tried to move her tongue.

She tried again, and this time there was barely any delay at all. She tried to stick her tongue out, and the worm obliged, sticking out... and out... and out...

Four inches of the worm hung from her mouth, limp and grey. Stacy tried to push it further, hoping that the worm might simply drop off, but it stopped there. She tilted her head to the light, thinking that she might be able to see its mouth where it had latched onto her throat and was puzzled as she saw that the flesh changed from grey to pink as it went further back.

Again, as she watched, the colour gradually crawled from the back of her throat along the grey flesh, as though it was stealing her blood to colour itself. The texture changed as well, softening and growing a field of tiny bumps on the upper surface as it widened and flattened along its length, tapering to a fine tip at the end.

A tip with a scar.

Stacy stared at the new tongue - her tongue - in terrified amazement before her tongue withdrew back into her mouth of its own accord. As she struggled to push it out again, she felt an electric tingling sensation running from her throat to the back of her neck and her body went suddenly limp.

She collapsed in a heap on the floor, her arms and legs spasming and her breathing shallow, but the sensation continued to crawl slowly up her spine, burrowing deep into her head when it reached her skull.

Stacy awoke, cold and cramped on the tiles of her bathroom.

She lay in confusion for a moment before the events of that morning came back to her, and she leapt to her feet again, her mouth open in the mirror.

Her tongue hung from her mouth, much longer than any normal tongue, the scar still on its tip. She tried to waggle it experimentally and it rippled along its length in response.

"What the fuck," she said, glad at least that she could talk again. Despite being so much longer than it should be, her tongue somehow stowed itself quite neatly in her mouth.

Her body didn't feel right, as though she wasn't really herself. Even though she recognised the woman in the mirror as Stacy, it was as if she were looking at someone else she barely knew. It was weird, watching this other, naked woman licking her teeth experimentally, raising her hands to touch her face, as though she had entered the head of some stranger off the street and now controlled them like a puppet.

The woman in the mirror looked worried.

"I... am Stacy... right?"

The other Stacy looked uncertain.

She was just about to reach out to touch her reflection when a sudden knocking from the front door shook Stacy from her trance.