And here it is–the very last of the Summer 2025 Friday Flash stories! School started yesterday, and I’m adjusting to the new schedule and knuckling down on some new (and old) projects that have been resting all summer, just waiting for this moment. In the meantime, please enjoy this last, very strange story, inspired by the fact that I threw my neck out on Monday and it’s only now starting to get a liiiiiittle bit better…
Gummy Bones
A short, strange flash by Maggie Slater
Bryony shivered in the refrigerator-cold exam room and jabbed her fingertips into the bundle of angry muscle at the nape of her neck. “I don’t have time for this, this—” She couldn’t even pay attention to what the paunchy doctor had told her.
“Stiff-Necked Syndrome,” he said helpfully. He had a nervous way of avoiding her gaze, though whether that was because of run-of-the-mill misogyny or a harmless tendency due to neurodivergence, she couldn’t be sure. “I realize this may be a shock. While traditionally it’s a men’s ailment, it has been presenting more commonly in women within the past two decades. In your case, the calcification of your spine is the most advanced I’ve seen. You must have an incredibly high pain tolerance.”
Said pain was beginning to radiate up into the base of her skull, and Bryony jammed her thumb up against the bulge and felt a moment’s relief before the muscles clamped down again.
“There has to be a cure. I’ve never heard of anyone just…turning into some kind of calcified statue!”
The pain had started two months ago, right after the meeting between Bryony and her thesis advisor in which he’d drunk almost a bottle of wine himself and said her eyes were pretty and she’d told him to fuck off. The next morning, right before her AM basic anatomy lecture, she’d awoken with a blinding pain in her neck. It’d only gotten worse since then. Tylenol and Motrin didn’t touch it. Her roomate’s Percocet might as well have been Tic-Tacs for all the good they did. The thought of it getting progressively more stiff and painful was intolerable.
“I’ll do anything,” Bryony said. She had three months until her thesis defense.
Now, the doctor met her gaze without any difficulty. Bryony would have rolled her eyes at the smug little smirk on his face, but it hurt too much.
“Well, actually,” he said, “I do have a colleague running an interesting clinical trial…”
#
The DoaMatta injections helped at first. Bryony almost cried after the first one released all the muscles along her back and shoulders, allowing her to turn her head from side to side for the first time in weeks without a jolt of pain. It gave her a boost of energy, too, in part because she was finally able to throttle up her productivity without worrying about aggravating her spine. She threw herself into her dissertation and spent more than a few nights in the lab, sleeping on a camping pad, and made huge progress on her work.
When the pain came back, and it did come back, it kept her awake for thirty-two hours until she could get in for another shot. The clinical trial lead, a Dr. Hoffman, suggested a pump might be better for her, so she wouldn’t need to schedule emergency injections.
“If you won’t stop pushing yourself like this,” he said, with a note of grating condescension, “then it’s really the only option until the calcification reverses. But it will take longer and require higher DoaMatta doses.”
Bryony told him to do it. She had the pump installed on Thursday, and the pain was gone. She could feel her spine becoming more flexible and pliant, and it felt so very good after all the agony of the weeks prior.
When her colleague forgot to put her name on their joint paper, she was surprised how little it bothered her, even when he refused to apologize because he’d never agreed to be in charge of the byline. When her sister-in-law stirred up last-minute wedding planning drama for the whole family and demanded Bryony handle the bachelorette party despite it being only two days away, she found she could bend all the way over backwards without any trouble at all. And when her old college friends planned a trip to Vegas on the one weekend she’d said she couldn’t go, she found the normal irritation just bounced right off her like it was nothing. She was rubber, and they were glue. It made her giggle.
Then her fingers couldn’t hold her pen anymore. They flopped all over the place, boneless and squid-like. She couldn’t get any kind of grip on the DoaMatta pump to turn it down or tear it off. She tried to call Dr. Hoffman’s clinic, but the line was disconnected, and her lips and tongue wouldn’t cooperate to tell the hospital call center who she was trying to reach.
A month after the pump install, she collapsed in a study carol in the library and lay there for three days before her thesis advisor and her colleague found her. Her advisor sighed and shook his head.
“You know, not everybody’s cut out for a PhD, my dear,” her advisor said while her colleague shook his head sympathetically. “I mean, you gave it a good shot, but it takes a tough personality to withstand the rigors of academia, and you’re just…well, you’ve become…”
“Soft,” her colleague supplied.
“Yes, soft,” her advisor said with a sad shrug. “It’s really too bad. Come along now, let’s get you up, shall we?”
Bryony was too pliable to fight back as the two men picked her up and folded her gently into a large cardboard box they’d brought along and lined with her research folders and printouts. Then they shut it and carried it somewhere that sounded hollow like the old storage lockers in the basement, and Bryony caught a whiff of dust as the box dank suddenly into shadow, grinding across a cold floor. A clang of metal grating and the rasp of a key were the last sounds she heard before footsteps receded and Bryony found herself tucked away and forgotten.
Hi there! If you don’t know me, I’m Maggie Slater. I write speculative fiction of a variety of stripes ranging from outright horror, sci-fi, and fantasy to strange, humorous literary stuff. My work has appeared in genre mags like Apex Magazine, Metaphorosis (and even got translated into Mandarin for Science Fiction World), as well as in literary magazines like Redivider and The Core Review.
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