Little Pop of Horrors

I examined the bump on my leg in the semi-darkness of the room, using only the glow from the streetlights outside to avoid waking my sleeping roommate.

I was a freshman in college and had just returned to my dorm room after a grueling tech week rehearsal for Little Shop of Horrors, the musical being staged by the university that fall.

For the past several weeks, I had been tormented by this painful bump on my leg that wouldn’t go away. I had thought it was just a very ambitious ingrown hair, the kind that when pulled out is somehow longer than any other hair on your body and has more twists and turns than the large intestine. 

Then suddenly, seemingly overnight, it ballooned to the size of a monstrous pimple, red and bulging and excruciating to the touch. I could feel it if I ran my hand over my pants and walked around campus in a self-conscious haze, terrified that my peers could see the third boob I was growing on my leg. 

Even in the semi-darkness of my dorm room, I could see the raging red ring circling around its bulbous head. As I laid back on my pillow and the sheets floated gently down, their cloud-like touch sent a spike of pain shooting up my leg. 

In Little Shop of Horrors, a meek plant store worker named Seymour stumbles across a very strange plant at an exotic plant shop. As the show progresses, we learn that Audrey II, as Seymour names him, needs human blood to survive. The more Seymour feeds him, the bigger he becomes, and soon it becomes clear that Audrey II’s plant species is hungry to take over the world. The show ends with the cast–some of whom have been eaten by and become part of the plant–begging the audience “whatever they offer you, don’t feed the plants!” 

The show features four plant puppets, each of which represents a different stage of Audrey II’s growth. The fourth plant is ginormous; it takes up most of the stage in Act II and is controlled by a puppeteer from the inside, who must use their arms and legs in unison to control the giant mouth of the plant. 

I wasn’t sure where exactly the bump had come from. I only knew that, one day, when moving this final, achingly heavy and stinky puppet, my leg scraped against part of it and I felt a sharp sting. A tiny splinter from some part of the plant had lodged itself into my leggings, but I quickly pulled it out and continued on. I practically forgot about it until the bump appeared in the exact same spot.

As more time went on and the bump grew bigger, I began to think of it as my own Audrey II—but, unlike Seymour, I wasn’t willingly giving it my blood. It was gorging from within of its own accord. 

As opening night approached, my parents and older sister, Madeleine, made plans to come spend a night in my college town and see the show. On the phone with my mom discussing their plans, I casually mentioned my bump.

“Yeah, I’ve got this bump on my leg,” I said. “I think it’s maybe an ingrown hair.”

“Ok, we’ll check it out when we get there,” my mom’s voice crackled through the line. Her laissez-faire tone immediately informed me that she wasn’t concerned in the slightest. In fact, the second we hung up the phone she promptly forgot, consumed instead by the pressure of keeping alive a rapidly dying orchid that was somehow simultaneously over- and under- watered. Maybe she should have tried blood. 

My family lived about an hour and a half’s drive away in Los Angeles. Upon their lunchtime arrival in my quaint college town, brimming with family-owned eateries, bakeries, and diners, all they could think about was In-n-Out. 

We all piled in the car and drove past the best local spots to the chain restaurant where they could have gone any other day. It was as we were wolfing down our hamburgers, making idle chatter about the show, that I remembered how desperate I was to show them my bump. By now, it was downright impressive. 

“Oh! I need to show you my bump,” I exclaimed.

“Sho’ us when ee ge’ to the ‘otel” my mother said through a burger-and-fry-induced speech impediment. Her eyes never stopped roving hungrily over the food in the red tray in front of her. With the orchid now thoroughly dead, I had been sure the bump would have grabbed her attention. But I was outdone by the tray full of fried food. 

I was not to be deterred. As we crammed our engorged bodies back into the car, I rolled up my pant leg and put my foot up on the center console. 

“Here, look!”

Did I want my family to acknowledge that the bump looked painful? Yes. Did I want some sympathetic “ooh”’s and “wow”s? Yes. Did I expect the bump to get the reaction it received? Emphatically, no. 

The moment my family’s eyes locked onto the bump, pandemonium was unleashed. 

I heard my sister scream, “Oh my God!” My father’s hands tightened over the steering wheel; he was close to a heart attack. My mother fainted. The sky darkened, and the Bump unleashed a high-pitched, evil cackle that will haunt me for the rest of my days. 

It protruded from my leg like an ugly, giant pimple, and was adorned with a tomato-red ring an inch around, the sign of a raging infection. And, to my horror, it was alive. It winked up at me with malice as it laughed at my family’s terror. This was not the type of bump they were expecting. This was a Bump. An ungodly, oozing, water-ballooning Bump. 

Anyone walking through the quiet, deliciously fragranced In-n-Out parking lot would have no idea of the delirium that had erupted in our car. As I strained at my pant leg, trying to cover the Bump and restore some semblance of peace, my sister cried and bemoaned my having ever been born and my mother used a defibrillator to restart my father’s heart. Somehow, through all this chaos, she whispered to him between his gasps for air, “we’ve gotta pop that thing”. 

Since this incident, I have become the leading expert in North America on how to handle boils, those that viciously laugh at your pain and those that do not. The most important rule: do not pop the boil. 

But pop the boil we did. 

After single handedly restarting my father’s stalled heart, calming my sister, and ensuring me that I was not actively dying of gangrene, my mother devised a plan to secretly gather instruments to pop the boil. 

On the pretext of doing some shopping to pass the time before the show, she insisted we stop at Kohl’s on the way to the hotel. While I wandered aimlessly through the store, she beelined to the men’s dress section where she slipped a pin off one of the mannequins. She thought this would be the best weapon to defeat the Bump—a stolen, horrendously dull pin from Kohl’s. 

We left shortly after she had secretly acquired this. 

Once back in the car, she mumbled to my father, “pull into a gas station if you see one.”

I didn’t think anything of it until we stopped far away from the pumps. 

“Are you getting gas?” I asked, like a fool.

No answer. 

My mom opened her car door and slipped inside the store.

“What is she getting?” 

No answer.

A few moments later, she re-appeared with a pack of matches. Neither of my parents smoke.

“What are those for?” I inquired with a bit more urgency as she climbed back into the car.

She turned quickly, and I jolted back in horror. Her blue eyes had changed to a reptilian red, pupils no more than slits. Her lips curled back malevolently over yellowed fangs. Her obsession with the boil had turned her into a monster.

She drew the pin faster than a gunslinger, and it gleamed feverishly in the sunlight.

“To pop, my dear, to pop!” she growled menacingly, reveling in the terror that had washed over me in a wave of heat from head to toe.

“NOOOOOOO!” I screamed, and reached for the door handle. 

But my sister was faster, and with scaly hands she bound me with the unused, middle seatbelt. She shrieked with delight and croaked to my father, “drive!” 

My father stomped on the pedal and the car zoomed out of the gas station, and I found myself held prisoner by the three monsters that had overtaken my family.

It was a pleasant enough hotel room. Two queen beds, a desk with a nice chair, a sizable bathroom—nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly nothing I could distract my family with to delay or prevent the torture from beginning. My sister’s youthful fascination with hotel mini fridges had, unfortunately, vanished in adulthood, and after a quick break for the complementary chocolate chip cookies from the front desk, my mother was once again ready for the torture to begin.

“You know,” I began slowly, “I looked it up, and you actually aren’t supposed to pop boils.” 

“LIES!” my mother screeched. 

With the ting of a drawing sword, my father unsheathed the pin. 

“And now,” my mother said, producing with relish the box of matches, “we must ‘sturalyze’ it.”

To my delight, this butchered pronunciation ground the proceedings to a halt. The glint in my father and sister’s eyes faded. My forehead crumpled. We all looked at my mom.

“What?” we all said in unison.

Just what I needed, I thought happily to myself. Something to distract them! And I led my family into a merciless round of taunting my mother.

With the dramatic flair suitable for a theatre major, I retold the story of a time I had gone with her to a L’Occitane en Provence, an overly fancy lotion store where she was looking for a gift for my dad. She was known to pronounce the word “men” as “min”, and it proved troublesome to her that day. 

“Do you have any lotion for min?” she asked the clerk.

“I’m sorry?” the poor, confused clerk had asked. She had no idea she was entering a tennis match with a woman who couldn’t pronounce the word “men”. 

“Lotion for min.”

“Umm…I don’t think we have anything that smells like mint—”

“Not mint, min!” 

“Ummm…”

“MEN!” I finally exclaimed, exasperated and leaning against the counter in exhaustion. 

My father and sister took great pleasure in this story, and I thought I was in the clear until my mother screeched “ENOUGH!”

She scratched the match over the side of the box, and a bright orange flame burst to life. Placing a tissue on the wooden desk, she proceeded to hold the pin in the fire to sterilize it, right over the tissue. 

This concerned me more than the boil.

“Are you sure you want to hold fire over a tissue on a wooden desk—”

And, as if on cue, the tissue burst into flame. 

With the skill of someone who had accidentally set fire to something before, my mother successfully extinguished it before the entire hotel lit up in flames.

She held the sterilized pin out to me with a horrible glint in her eye.

“You may begin.” 

They sat me at the desk, in a chair one might think was too comfortable for torture. I took the pin grimly, and rolled up my pant leg.

The boil gleamed a sickly bright red in the dim lights of the hotel room. Once again, the sight of it and the prospect of my pain had a fantastical effect on my family—they were all three transformed instantly back into horrible monsters. My father cackled and wrung his hands, one bulging eye rolling around in its socket and the other zooming back and forth between the boil and the pin. My mother’s eyes once again glinted red, and her scaly fingers twitched in anticipation. My sister darted around the room feverishly with no real purpose, knocking over furniture and laughing maniacally.

“Pop it, pop it, POP IT!” she screamed in hysteria, hands clenched in excited fists.

With grim determination, I poked at the boil with the pin. A lightning-sharp burst of pain shot through my leg, and I yelled out.

“This is crazy!” I protested. “I really don’t think we should do this.”

My protests went unheeded—if anything, they only spurred the creatures on more. 

“If you can’t do it, I’ll do it for you,” the creature that had been my mother growled with pleasure. This prospect was even more horrifying. She had, many times during my childhood years, dug craters around splinters with a joy on her face only otherwise seen while opening Christmas presents.

She lunged for the pin, but I cradled it to my chest.

“NO!” I shouted. 

I tried again.

The pin, impossibly dull, only succeeded in creating an indent in the boil, which immediately ballooned back out like a sponge when I lifted it away. I was already dizzy with pain, but the monsters spurred me on with degrading remarks. 

“People used to have surgery with no anesthetic,” my mother hissed. “This is nothing, you baby.”

“Wimp, wimp!” my sister echoed, knocking over a lamp. 

So I continued, digging at the infected, tightly pulled skin of my leg like a miner trying to excavate a diamond from a wall of stone with a plastic spoon. 

The process was long and arduous. Finally, I had made a slight headway, and could see a bit of liquid begin to ooze from the lump. I was near delirious from the pain, and had begun to feel an odd kinship with Aron Ralston of 127 Hours, who cut off his own arm when it became trapped between boulders.  At least he had a sharp blade. 

“Ok,” I said faintly, “I see liquid. I can stop now.”

“Ohh, no no no,” my father crooned, gliding over with unnatural grace. “Now it is time for”—somewhere, a violin screeched—“the squeezing.” 

Thunder and lightning clapped through the sky as my father burst into evil laughter.

“Squeeze, squeeze!” my sister cheered, pulling out clumps of her hair in excitement.

“No!” I cried in horror, but it was too late. My father grasped the boil between his forefinger and thumb and squeezed as hard as he could. 

I fell backward in the chair, slumping down low in the seat as my face clenched in pain. It was as if he had stabbed me straight through with the pin.

Liquid oozed out, but not enough for the monsters. 

“More, more!” they all cried.

My father squeezed again.

I screamed in agony. 

My sister stood behind my father, jumping up and down and clapping while chanting “let me have a turn, let me have a turn!”

My father put all of his strength into a final squeeze that nearly rendered me unconscious, but it did the job. 

The boil erupted, and bodily fluid splattered all over the windows of the hotel room. Finally, the once round protuberance was nothing more than an oozing crater on my leg. With a solitary show of mercy, my mother handed me a tissue to mop up the mess of liquid on my leg. 

Slowly, my family shook off the craze that had possessed them and returned to their normal selves. They leisurely found seats in the hotel room as if nothing had happened. I watched each of them warily before my eyes closed in exhaustion.

Sprawled out in the desk chair, leg throbbing, I was ready for death. 

“Well, that must feel better!” my mother said cheerily. 

A few minutes passed, and my rapid, shallow breathing began to return to normal. My eyes fluttered open, and I sat up a bit in the chair. The pain was still coming in steady drum beats, but it was lessening. My family were still in their respective seats, my sister lounging on one bed, my mother on the other, and my father relaxing in an armchair, scrolling on his phone. 

 Suddenly, my mother broke the peaceful quiet. 

“You know,” she said pensively, “that would have been a lot easier with a sharp needle. We should have gotten you one instead of that dull pin.” 

“That would’ve been smart,” my dad chimed in. “But I’m looking it up now, and you’re actually not even supposed to pop boils.” He held out his phone to show us the results of his research. “You’re just supposed to use a hot compress for a few days.” 

I arrived at the theatre that evening like a soldier returned home from war. No one, cast or crew, knew of the horrors that I had just survived. Aside from perhaps a slight limp, all looked normal.

My family loved the show. They didn’t quite seem to grasp the irony of their sudden case of bloodlust before attending a show where a plant convinces an otherwise charming man to feed him people so he can take over the world, but they liked the singing. 

The show’s final song, which warned the audience against listening to their base, greedy desires, echoed in my ears long after the curtain had fallen.

To me the message was clear—no matter what desperation it causes your family, how bloodthirsty they become, how fervent they are for your pain—don’t pop the boil.