As Within, So Without

We pulled a switcheroo this episode and had Kevin write the story, while I narrated it! 

This episode made me acutely aware of how clearly you can hear I have crippling allergy problems when I talk. And now you, the listener, can hear that too! 

Transcript

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You woke up curled into a ball next to the stone facade of one of the old government buildings downtown. Despite the chill in the air, you were covered in sweat under your jacket. A cold humidity that couldn’t have been more unpleasant. The slick granite spoke of an unchanging sturdiness in the face of time, faceless processes for the masses. It also made for a sore back. This wasn’t where you were supposed to be. This wasn’t where you belonged on a chilly spring evening. You wanted to go home.

Rain spat from the sky as you stumbled your way down streets that felt somewhat familiar, just shy of deja vu. Passing headlights highlighted the distorted face that reflected in the oil-slicked puddles littering the sidewalk. It wasn’t quite what you remembered. The hands that pulled worn fabric closer around your torso were not quite right. You were young once. You had plans once. You needed to go home.

The houses in this neighborhood were all old brick, tarnished by industries whose doors were shuttered years ago and not yet renewed by the free flowing money of gentrification. In the growing darkness, you saw the sun set behind creeping ivy that had long since escaped the bounds of the garden to climb among mossy rooftops and chimneys that breathed no smoke. Time had passed these houses by and touched each of them. You mustered the courage to go home.

You arrived at the front door. Weathered wood set inside an aged storm door, an old yellow light to the side reflecting cobwebs across concrete worn by the passage of many feet. The mat at the bottom of the step said “Welcome”, but you weren't sure you believed it. Once, this was your home. A place of comfort away from the emptiness of the world. Now, it was a house like any other, save for lingering memory and a certainty that this was not right. They couldn’t stop you from going home.

You reached into your pocket for the key, then paused a moment before slowly pulling your hand back out from pockets empty of the sliver of metal that promised warmth and belonging. Fortunately, you recall with a sad smile, you had always kept a spare hidden behind one of the loose bricks of the porch. Shining metal ready, shaking hands unlock the door and in your excitement, you throw it open, loudly proclaiming to terrified faces within your home that they are about to have a visit from the Podcast Outside Your House!

By Kevin Schrock and Annie Marie Morgan, with today’s episode written by Kevin Schrock and music by Hex system.

Season 3 Episode 13 - As Within, So Without.

Everyone on the internet has something different to tell you about mental illness, but not all of them say it with their words. Pristine teenagers in sterile beige houses lecture you about your eating habits. Anonymous activists preach in defense of brand-name lifestyles that cater to their self-proclaimed diagnosies. Armchair psychologists run blogs that can link you to dozens of surveys that will disclose all the ways your relationship struggles, your impassioned interests and your zodiac sign mean that you are different. Special and unique. Just like this post, subscribe, and share yourself with your friends. That 32 year old lady making perfectly shaped muffins to scratch a mental itch on YouTube does not have an OCD diagnosis. I would know.

Last Tuesday, the air in my bedroom smelled a bit off. A little mustier than usual. A certain tang in the wind from the carefully dusted air vent in my compact one-room apartment. The scent drove me out of bed at 4:00am where I proceeded to scorch the inside of my mouth with an entire glass of mouthwash. I haven't been back into that room for three days.

Life for those of us with serious mental illnesses is not something that the general public really wants to know much about. Sure, every once in a while there's a low budget YouTube documentary that focuses on some of the “interesting cases”; multiple personality disorder, schizophrenic hallucinations, and, of course, anyone that's gone around committing murders. But for those of us who wash our hands more than 26 (but never more than 35) times a day on a religious basis simply don't rise to the level of getting our own shows. 

Frankly, I prefer it that way. I don't need other people prying into my life. My apartment is organized exactly how I want it to be, and any sort of guests would bring the risk of dirt, illness, and the nastiness of the outdoors into the one place I can stay safe from the horror show that is the outside world. This also has the side effect of keeping my weekends completely free from distractions.

My Saturday schedule is extremely precise, and I couldn’t make myself divert from it even if I wanted to. I wake up at the same time every day, I wash up in the same order every day (left to right, top to bottom), place the same order for groceries that I do every week (no contact delivery has been a blessing) and I settle into my desk chair to continue my remote gig work employment that affords me my rent until the grocery delivery arrives. 

I cannot explain to you how important it is that I stick to this schedule. It’s this pre-organised plan that lets me push back against the ever-looming sense of doom that lives in the back of my own head telling me that if I miss one spot in my morning shower a lethal fungus will take root there, or that if I order new brands of food I will find myself spending hours over the toilet as my stomach rebels. I know full well that this makes no sense. Logically, millions of other people do these things every day without issues, why would I be any different? But telling myself that doesn’t help. It just sets me into a spiral as that dark and sick part in the back of my brain tells the logical part “are you sure you would be safe? Wouldn’t it be easier to just go quickly wash up again to be certain?” And when your own brain is fighting against you, well, I end up showering again several days each week.

This Saturday was different. I woke up huddled in a ball on my couch, careful to remain only on the left side as I tried to stretch away the ache of long hours spent hunched over the bright light of a screen. The glow of the monitor still lingered in my vision, despite the curtains being drawn tight to keep the rest of the apartment in thick darkness. My mouth felt dry, and my stomach churned uneasily. Something felt wrong, like my skin was crawling just beneath the surface.

At first, I thought it was the usual panic, the misstep in my routine. The change in sleeping location forming a splintering crack in my perfect schedule. But then the sharp tang in the air hit me again. This time, it was worse. The faint odor I had noticed on Tuesday had grown stronger, thicker, more unbearable. It clung to the walls like oily sweat, pooling stagnantly in the corners. My breath caught in my throat. I stood up slowly, my legs unsteady.

I did a full inventory before I let myself take another step. I checked the position of the kitchen chairs, the table legs and the trash can lid. I even counted across the tiles on the floor searching for deviations and imperfections, but everything was where it was supposed to be. Nothing looked wrong, and that somehow made it worse. The smell had no source. No spill, no rot, no obvious failure I could remedy with bleach and repetition.

I scurried away toward the far corner of my room and covered my mouth with my shirt before finally allowing myself to gasp another breath of that tepid, foul air, before breaking into a coughing fit as the inhalation revealed a raw soreness in the back of my throat that had definitely not been present last night.

Once it started the coughing lasted for what felt like minutes. It tore up from my chest in dry, rasping barks that left my eyes watering and my hands trembling against the cloth on my face. Each breath scraped like it was being filtered through sandpaper, and with every inhale the smell grew sweeter, like rotten fruit, sinking into my sinuses and sticking there. I tasted it on my tongue. My first instinct was to run for the bathroom, to rinse and spit and scour my mouth until the taste was gone, but the bathroom with the shower, the one I kept my mouthwash in, was attached to the bedroom I had evacuated earlier in the week, and I had no desire to see what the air was like in there if the rest of the apartment was in such a state.

This is about the point where a normal person would open their front door and leave. Evacuate for fresh air and greener pastures. I am not a normal person. I had a routine I needed to complete, essential steps that needed to be done in a precise order before I could even contemplate doing something as dramatic as leaving the house.

Anxious steps and quick shallow breathing let me make it as far as the kitchen sink before my hands started shaking. The routine here is simpler than the bathroom and I turned both taps on evenly, just enough to let the water trickle down into the drain without touching the sides of the basin. I washed my hands once. Then again. On the third pass, I noticed the skin along my knuckles had gone pale, almost translucent, the veins beneath standing out in a dark, branching web. I rubbed harder, waiting for the familiar sting, the reassurance of irritation, but there was only a strange numbness, like my fingers had fallen asleep. When I pressed my thumb into my palm, the flesh didn’t spring back right away. It held its shape, a soft, sunken impression that made my breath hitch and eyes widen in incomprehension. I stared at it for a long moment as the water kept running. Then I began to panic.

I pressed again, harder this time, digging my thumb into the dent as if force alone could shame my body into behaving correctly. It didn’t. The skin yielded with a wet, doughy resistance that turned my stomach, the depression widening beneath my touch instead of rebounding. A thin sound slipped out of me—half breath, half whine—and I snatched my hand back like I’d been burned. The shape stayed. My heart began to hammer so violently I could see my pulse jittering under the pale surface of my wrist. This wasn’t possible. Skin was elastic. Skin remembered itself. I rubbed my palm briskly with the heel of my other hand, then slapped it, then pinched until sharp pain finally bloomed, bright and desperate. The dent remained, a small, obscene hollow in me, proof that something fundamental had gone wrong. My breathing broke apart into short, choking gasps as heat crawled up my neck and behind my eyes. I scrubbed my hands together under the running water again and again until they were slick and raw, until the sink filled with steam and the sweet rot in the air felt merged with the humid spray and soaked the front of my shirt and, and my brain, that dark primal, diseased part of my brain whispered to me  that no amount of pressure was going to fix this. That I was permanently marked, that I was being disfigured and that I had to do something, anything to hold it off. To make it stop.

The smell was everywhere now. Not just in the air—inside me. Every breath felt like it dragged something sticky down into my lungs, something that didn’t belong there and didn’t intend to leave. One moment my throat burned, raw and swollen, then it numbed, then burned again. I swallowed painfully and felt the motion hesitate on the way down, like my body had to think about whether it wanted to accept it.

I turned the taps off. That was a mistake.

The silence roared in my ears. Without the steady rush of water to anchor me, I became painfully aware of the other, unplanned sounds I tried so hard to drown out during the day. The screeching of tires on city streets, the buzz of thousands of people all taking to each other and the low beat of the music played by rude, inconsiderate assholes who just couldn’t ever shut up! I covered my ears with my hands, trying to block the outside world. To keep its loud and disorderly mess out of my head. But then, I became aware of something much more persistent and much more uneven: the sounds coming from inside my own chest. A wet crackle on the inhale. A faint whistle on the exhale. I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and felt something shift, grinding sluggishly under my palm like settling mud.

This was the point where I should have called someone. A normal person would have reached out to friends, to family! But I had learned years ago that calling someone always managed to mean hospitals. Fluorescent corridors that never felt clean no matter how hard they scrubbed, vinyl chairs slick with other people’s sweat, the sour sting of antiseptic barely masking the deeper smells underneath. Blood, sickness, decay. It meant strangers in paper gowns asking ever so sincerely why my hands were raw, and why I wouldn’t eat their horrifically intermingled and unsanitary food, and what medications I take, and if I have a psychologist. And then my mom would start rambling about me, spilling everything that was personal, that was mine, out for the whole disgusting building to see with her too loud voice and faux concern, and shaking in fury and fear I stood there with my phone in my hand. Its screen lit my fingers in a sickly blue that made the veins look swollen and unclean through thin skin that was probably already halfway to infection. All I could think about was the triage desk, the clipboard passed from hand to hand, the way they would make me sit and wait, and wait and WAIT while something inside me settled and spread. My thumb hovered over the emergency number, trembling, but my stomach clenched hard enough to steal my breath. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t step into a place where nothing stayed sterile, where routines were broken on purpose, where they would cut and probe and my mom would tell me to just trust them. I let the screen go dark once again, hiding the divot, the rotten imperfection I had dug into the back of my hand.

I couldn’t go on like this. I couldn’t let myself think about infection, couldn’t let my mind convince me of the horrible idea that was taking root, that the smell has made it’s way inside my body, molding away my flesh from the inside. No, I’d get rid of these delusions by getting rid of the smell. If the smell had a home, a birthplace, it would be in the bedroom. The sealed, abandoned space I’d once spent 90% of my time in, now left to fester untouched for days. That was where it had all started. That was where it had been allowed to grow. The thought landed in my mind with a sort of hysterical certainty: this thing couldn’t be inside me yet, the divot wasn’t that bad, not really. The smell was something environmental! External! All the damage so far was cosmetic! Fixable! My pulse steadied just enough for the plan to form, sharp, symmetrical and absolute. I didn’t need a hospital. I didn’t need family, I needed bleach. I needed gloves, and masks, and every bottle I kept carefully arranged under the sink lined up in order of height. I needed to reclaim my bedroom before whatever was rotting in there finished soaking into the walls, and into me.

The bedroom door loomed at the end of the hall, closed, patient. I wiped my damp hands on four segments of paper towel, ignoring the way the skin dragged, and took a careful step toward the door, already cataloging the sequence in my head. Open the door. Ventilate. Strip the bed. Bag everything. Scrub. Nothing skipped. Nothing out of order. If I could just make it clean again, properly clean, then everything would go back to normal and the smell would have to leave. It would have no choice.

I tied a dish towel across my face before I touched the knob, cinching it so tight the fabric bit into the corners of my mouth. The door opened inward with a soft, swollen creak, and the smell rolled out in a warm, intimate wave that felt almost affectionate as it wrapped around my head and lingered in the pit on the back of my hand which tightly gripped the doorknob. My eyes watered instantly. I forced myself over the threshold and began the cleansing process. I ransacked the cabinet under my sink and drug out all the supplies I would need into the bedroom, carefully not disturbing the shower curtain or revealing what disgusting horrors might be accumulating near the drain.

According to my plan, I needed to do the windows first, even though I hadn’t opened them in months. My fingers fumbled at the latch, slick and clumsy, the draft coming in through the cracks in old, imperfect wood hinting at the moist August heat that would probably slip inside and do nothing to dilute the odor, only thickening it with an undertone of wet and mildew while the open window brought to full blast the cacophony of sounds that seemed to blare at max volume constantly across the whole city... Fine, then. I left the window closed.

Next was stripping the bed. I seized the comforter and yanked, but the effort sent a violent tremor through my arms. My muscles quivered as if I had been hauling rocks rather than trying to lift cotton, and the fabric was rough against my skin, pulling aside what should have been tendons and knuckles like scraping mud off of a pair of shoes. I dragged the blankets into a trash bag, pausing every few seconds to cough, to swallow, to press my wrist to my mouth and check whether the scent was coming from my breath. I was careful not to look at the drooping, deformed mess that was my hands out of the corner of my eye. The room was tilted subtly to the left. My pictures weren’t level. My books weren’t arranged by height. Everything was off balance. Or maybe I was.

The bleach came next. I poured until the chemical sting burned through the rag tied ever so tightly to my face and into my sinuses, a clean pain I welcomed like an old friend. I scrubbed the baseboards on my knees with a sponge, counting each stroke until I reached a safe number before allowing myself to move an inch to the right. Somewhere around the third repetition my vision began to waver at the edges. Tiny black gnats swarmed across the corners of the room. I blinked them away, ignored the buzzing, the itch of small creatures dragging themselves across my neck, and kept going. The floor felt soft beneath my palms. Not like my pale grey laminate, but soft like soggy dirt. Each press of my hand left a faint impression that lingered a second too long, made me wonder if it was the floor shifting under me, or merely my flesh sliding into a new, imbalanced, uneven, configuration. My stomach lurched. I doubled my efforts, scrubbing harder, faster, until I felt my skin split and a thin ribbon of red threaded down to mix pink with the bleach. I told myself that was good. Proof I was still solid. Still structured correctly.

The slickness of the blood merged with the slimy residue of skin exposed to bleach as I progressed my way across the bedroom floor, making progress in the only way I knew how. My mind locked into the rhythm of spraying and scrubbing and counting, moving at a deliberate and regimented pace just fast enough to keep the sheer terror out of my thoughts as I inched around my bed. I hid myself within the repetition, within the obsession that if I could just make one more pass, if I could just get a bit more of the bleach into every groove, the room would be okay. I would be okay.

The floor still wasn’t right. I pressed my hand against the laminate again, scrubbing furiously, but it wasn’t the same as the material I stood up on every morning when I got out of bed. The thin plastic layer gave way under my hands, fake woodgrain melting into something viscous and unfamiliar. My fingers slipped, not in the usual way, but as though the skin itself was giving out beneath the pressure. I stopped, instinct forcing me to stare at the hands I had so studiously been refusing to acknowledge. The skin on my knuckles was too loose, sagging like wet cloth, the veins beneath them bulging unnaturally. I flexed my fingers, but they didn’t respond with the usual tautness. Instead they dragged, stiff and slow, the tendons beneath stretching and snapping in ways they shouldn’t, clearly visible in the divot I had pressed into the back of my hand.

The flesh on my wrist had begun to thin, becoming almost translucent, and I could see the darkening veins snaking under the surface, swollen and bloated, like they were struggling to hold the structure of my body together. I brought my hand up to my face, fingers trembling, but as soon as I touched my skin, it felt wrong. My cheek felt puffy, soft, too pliable. I ran my fingertips down my jaw, and there was a faint, dull ache under my skin, as if my bones were shifting, warping. My body wasn’t holding itself together anymore.

I stumbled backward, on hands and knees, my legs unsteady beneath me. They were too heavy, uncooperative, as though they were sinking into the floor. The pressure on my joints was unbearable. I could feel the tightness in my knees, the way my muscles weren’t responding as they should, like something inside me was slowly failing. I reached down to steady myself, but when my fingers brushed my calf, the skin there felt… loose. Like it was slipping off the bone, too thin to stay taut. Unstructured. Unorganised.

I forced myself to stand, but my legs buckled, sending me sprawling back to the floor. My knees hit with a sickening softness, completely improper for the jolt of pain it sent through my body. I stared at my reflection in the dark window across the room. My face, my body, nothing looked the same. Everything was slipping, sagging, like the image in the glass was a horrific wax sculpture pulling away from the mannequin beneath. I didn’t know where to focus anymore. On the floor? On my hands? I had come in with a plan right?

I reached for the bleach bottle again, instinctively, desperately, because it was all I had left. But my fingers wouldn’t grip it. They were too loose, too weak, and the bottle slipped from my hand, spilling bleach across the floor to mingle with the sweat and the red I had poured out of me trying to fix things. My routine, my perfectly organised balance that let me make it through each day had been completely ruined. I couldn’t clean any longer, and my body, my life, was melting apart in front of my very eyes! Something had to be done! I needed to make a change, take drastic action to resolve the disaster unfolding within my apartment, my safe space, my little world! And if I couldn’t fix the room, if I couldn’’t cleanse this rot from the floors, from the walls, from the air, then maybe I could cleanse it from myself.

I crawled to the kitchen, my knees making a sound like heavy luggage dragging through mud. I didn’t use my hands to pull myself up; I used my elbows, fearing that if I gripped the counter too hard, my fingers would simply stay behind, stuck to the wood like old tape.

I reached for the utility drawer. It was the only drawer not organized by size, but by utility. In the back, nestled against the spare lightbulbs, sat a roll of industrial silver duct tape and a pack of extra-long zip ties. Beside them, was the heavy-duty staple gun I’d used to tack down the weather stripping last winter. 

"Structure," I whispered, the word whistling through a throat that felt like it was lined with velvet. "Organization. Symmetry."

I started with my left wrist. The skin was draped over the bone like a tablecloth too large for the table. I gathered the excess flesh, pinching it until it was taut, pulling and stretching it toward the back of my arm. It didn't hurt, it was more like the ache of a stretch. The release of tension held too long. I wound the duct tape around my forearm, tighter, tighter, until the veins stopped bulging and the surface was a smooth, silver cylinder of evenly spaced tape. Then the other arm, holding the tape still in teeth that felt all too loose in my mouth so I could get perfectly even application.

Better. I felt my stability return. 

I moved to my legs. I sat on the kitchen floor and began to bind the softness. I wrapped the tape like overlapping scales, starting from the ankles and working upward. Every time I encountered a pocket of that doughy, unresponsive flesh, I pressed it flat and cinched the tape with zip ties until the silver bit deep into the underlying mass. I wasn't just cleaning anymore; I was sculpting. I was correcting the errors of a biology that didn’t care about appearance. That didn’t care about what those subtle imperfections did to someone like me.

When the tape ran out, I turned to the staple gun.

I looked at the reflection in the oven door. My jaw was sagging to the left, an asymmetrical insult to my sense of order. I gripped the skin near my ear, pulling it back until my eye stretched into a sharp, predatory slit. Smoothing out the pale clay-like flesh that mocked me. Click-thunk. The first staple went in just above the hairline.

I didn't flinch. The sensation was magnificent, a cold, metallic anchor holding me in place, keeping things in order. I followed the line of my jaw, pulling and pinning, pulling and pinning, until the left side of my face was tight as a drum. No wrinkles. I did the same to the right, cleaning up the dripping lines of blood so as to preserve perfect symmetry. 

Next was the face. The mouth that other people, that my mom always expected to smile, to say cheerful lies and breathe the same contaminated, polluted air that they expelled from their lungs. Click-thunk. Click-thunk. Click-thunk! The staple gun brought me together, matching me to what the world demanded of me, making me functional.

My work all done, my artistry complete, I stood up. I was no longer a melting thing of uneven flesh and blood. I was a construction. A series of rigid lines and silver surfaces, perfectly aligned to my purpose. Evenly spaced and organised I felt... firm. I felt curated.

The smell was still there, circulating in my apartment, but it didn't matter now. It couldn't get in through the tape, and the infection and rot within me couldn't escape through the staples. I walked to the mirror in the hallway, my gait precise and rhythmic. The sound of my taped legs rubbing together was the most beautiful music I had ever heard. It was the sound of something machined to be precision perfect.  It was the sound of someone who had finally taken responsibility for their own health, for their own maintenance.

I looked at myself. I looked incredible. My skin didn't sag. My face didn't droop. I was a masterpiece of symmetrical geometry.

Then, there was a knock at the door. Not the hurried shuffle of a delivery. Not the bored, nasal call of someone eager to leave. Three familiar knocks. Evenly spaced. Patient.

My heart, structured, reinforced, secure, stuttered once.

“Sweetheart?” The voice came gently through the wood. “It’s Mom.”

For a moment, I simply stood there, staring at the door. She wasn’t supposed to come today. Sundays were for calls. Tuesdays were for texts. Visits required notice. Visits required preparation.

But today, I was prepared. I realized I had already opened the door. I hadn't even thought about it. For the first time, I wanted to be seen. I wanted someone to appreciate the effort, the sheer discipline it took to look this perfect.

My mother stood in the hallway, one hand still half-curled from knocking. She looked smaller than I remembered, softer around the edges. There were faint lines at the corners of her eyes I didn’t think had been there before.

“Are you wearing some kind of… headband?” she asked, squinting vaguely at my hairline before losing interest. “That’s new.”

I stared at her. The smell was pouring out into the hallway now, thick and syrupy, curling around her ankles. It was in her hair. In the fibers of her cardigan. It coiled between us like breath on a winter morning. Didn’t she smell it?

She stepped past me without hesitation, walking straight into the apartment I had tried so desperately to purify. Her shoes, outdoor shoes, pressed into the floor that had felt like mud under my hands. They left no impressions. No soft depressions. Just ordinary, dry contact.

“Oh honey,” she said, glancing at the trash bags, the scattered cleaning supplies, the faint pink streaks drying along the baseboards. “You’ve been overdoing it again.”

Again.

Her eyes softened with something like pity. Not fear. Not confusion. Not even curiosity.

“You don’t have to scrub everything to be okay,” she said patronizingly. “It’s just anxiety. You always think something terrible is happening.”

Just anxiety.

The words hung in the air between us for a long moment.

She reached for my hand. The left one. The one wrapped smooth and silver from wrist to elbow. Her fingers closed around it easily. She squeezed.

And she didn’t react to the unnatural firmness. To the lack of warmth. To the way my fingers didn’t quite bend back into shape afterwards.

Instead, she gave my hand a comforting little shake, the way she used to when I was small and inconsolable.

“See?” she said. “You’re fine. Nothing is wrong. This is just one of your little spirals.”

I’m fine.

Behind her, in the darkened hallway mirror, I saw us standing together. She looked perfectly composed and ever so reasonable.

And beside her stood something tall and rigid and gleaming, its skin pulled too tight in places and not tight enough in others, faint wetness seeping through the tiny, perfect punctures along its face.

The smell was strongest near the staples.

I smiled.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Podcast Outside your House! To hear every tale of terror as they are released, subscribe to our show on your podcast app or on Youtube or follow us on Instagram, Tumblr and Bluesky. And, Until Next Time, remember that no matter what they tell you, it’s who you are on the inside that counts.