Aster Olsen

The Stages of Contagious Desire

1. Exposure

Post an ad online for attentive inoculation. Escape your cleanroom and rip off your well-worn personal protective equipment and prepare yourself to accept her virionic validation. Slow your breathing. Smile. Do your hair and makeup and douche. You are receptive. Repeat that. Picture her capsids entering you and blush.

2. Adhesion and Incubation

Meet her at a cute dive bar that has creative cocktails that cost four dollars too much but are strong enough to lower innate inhibitions. Wear that sweater that really emphasizes your plump cells and put your hair in pigtails because you are in a mood from sexting about the size and shape of her collection of insertion peptides. Take a covid test to make sure you are host to only her eager protrusions.

Sit outside on the heated patio and wait while you gulp a glass of anti-inflammatories and ignore that she is late. Ignore your overactive immune system, how your T-cells seek out and attempt to destroy her gift. They attempt to tell you that she is standing you up, that she is uninterested, that she was just being nice. They attempt to clear away what she has implanted within you, what you can feel growing, and replace it with a seeping sense of doubt. The T-cells leave familiar abrasions, scarred membranes from your immune system’s panicked flood of cytokines. 

Do not worry as your guts swell and her infection breaks down long held internal structures. Do not worry that your body fails to fight it off. Sip your drink and do not let the white blood cells rip apart the fledgling seed she’s implanted. You are not too exotic, not too much of an experiment, not too forward, or too tall, or too masculine. No, you suffer from an overactive immune system. Finish your drink and flood yourself with inviting immunosuppressants.

3. Invasion and Prodromal Period

Put away your EpiPen. Let your immune system surrender to what swirls within you. Fight against your impulses. You’re good at pretending to be okay. You didn’t spend an hour on your hair and makeup to have a breakdown in a trendy bar on a Wednesday night in front of a couple attempting mundane cytokinesis. 

Go into the bathroom to recompose. Look in the mirror. Look how hot you are. Your eyeliner is so good tonight. Your eyeliner makes you so fuckable. Text that thought to your allergist. 

Ignore The Silence of the Lambs quote your attempt at confidence dislodges from wherever it was previously buried. Reassure yourself that no dyke would turn down the opportunity to smear your neatly drawn lipid bilayer, to merge her membranes to yours and drown your feeble antibodies. Make yourself believe that. Please.

Lose track of time when she arrives. Switch on your charm receptors and forget the previous half hour. Forget you were worried about her multiplying within you. Feel your  cell pathways rewire, her presence pulsing within you, how it could take you over if you let her. 

Let her. 

4. Infection and Illness

When she drags you into the bathroom an hour later and pushes you to your knees and pulls your face into her, ingest her and let her kill off the remnants of your immunity. Hold her face to your binding sites and moan as she pinches your surface receptors and envelops your soft membranes, and let the future week-long soreness be a reminder of your unquestionable desirability. Let her fuse into you as she coos at you, as her green eyes hunger for your dripping cytoplasm, take on the freckles of your eyes as her own. Shudder and squeeze down on her invading capsid until it breaks apart within you. Fail to cover the moans that burst from your lungs as your cells lyse, soundwaves that undulate towards the closest sterile hospital like hungry flagella. 

Let her mRNA encode you with purpose, transcribing herself into you. When she tells you she doesn’t want a wall of jeans between your insides and her invasions, don’t worry that it’s too cold. You’ve had a fever ever since you let her enter you. Administer sheer stockings and a dress. Remember the first time you wore tights all those years ago as a child? Remember that old, septic shame that pumps through your circulatory system, leaking into organs and bone and flesh, through ion channels and across lipid bilayers, fusing to neurons, a latent infection always prone to resurgence. Let it gush out through the holes she’s stretched into you. Is the arousal you used to feel meaningfully different from the arousal you feel now imagining being her host? Is there a way to ever know? Are you intellectualizing your arousal instead of embodying it? 

Let her into every cell in your body. Let your mind shut off and your lust, her lust, embed itself into your brain. Let it take up permanent residence, eat out your anxiety and leave you spent and breathless and brainless. Remember that fungal parasite you read about that controls an ant’s body, takes over its limbs and guides it to glorious ruin at the tip of a thin twig, latching its jaw into a death grip before the head erupts, shooting forth a stalk full of gorgeous spores? 

That could be you. If only you could stop thinking so much. Thinking leads to inaction. It leads to wasting another decade of your life weighing options, evidence, and risks. It leads to an overactive immune system and an impenetrable blood-brain barrier. You are a vector of a woman and your cell machinery has long since been taken over, slippery fistfuls of foreign proteins shoved inside of you leaving no room for doubt or self-loathing or depression. No room for peroxide that would wipe you clean. 

Focus on polymerasing. Get dressed for your second date.

Wear sheer stockings and a micro dress to the downtown hotel she booked. Get cleaved against the top floor window, your sunset silhouettes assembling into one and erupting, spreading your consciousness toward the streets and sidewalks. See how you bubble to the surface now, release and float on the wind and spread easily, how you drift towards the ants below, how you taste their waiting absorption and eager adherence. Leave with scratched stockings and blooming hickeys and erect glycoproteins, signs of a successful maturation, an irreversible insertional mutagenesis. Catch the bus and sit down, pressing her fingerprints into the seat. 

5. Convalesce and Transmit

Turn to the uninoculated woman wearing a baggy hoody who sits next to you two stops later. Puff out a wink of capsids, let her breathe you in. Watch her immune system shut down and invite her to grab a drink.