Day 8 of the 25 Days of Christmas! (Contains female to candle tf and melting, mild petrification themes)
Kat set out its spoils onto the table. The magical ‘wish granter’ as Kat referred to itself had been busy. Back in Vanessa’s home as its base of operations, Kat pulled three items from a plastic shopping bag. First was a brand-new doll, still in its box. Kat gave the doll a once over since it hadn’t really bothered when it turned that store employee into the toy. The box advertised the doll’s detailed clothing and accessories and realistic hair. It came with a few little things like a purse and a phone to play with, and Kat set it aside approvingly. Next came the big stuffed toy Kat had made from the couple in the pancake place. The plush was fairly firm, packed tight with the fluff within, but was otherwise sturdy. Kat gave it a big squeeze – it was fairly huggable too. Moving on to Kat’s latest item, it examined the snowglobe from a few angles. It was a snowscape, as expected, with a replica of a large, ornate house inside. On the front lawn of the replica house stood a figurine of a young woman, frozen in curious appreciation of the scenery, her arm outstretched to catch the falling snow. The detailing on this item was immaculate. If you knew her, you would probably be able to identify the figure as Maribelle. Kat shook it to simulate the snowfall and set it aside with the other two presents. Things were really coming along. Kat looked over at the present on the coffee table, wrapped up with a flattened and stretched Vannessa-turned-paper. It was pretty loosely wrapped – Kat could probably use the excess to give these other gifts some flair. Such projects would have to wait for now though, as a loud noise from the next-door neighbors drew Kat’s attention away.
Cheryl was bent over, hands on her thighs and her dyed blue hair messy with the repeated times she’d run her hands through it in the last ten minutes. The place wasn’t exactly a sty, but it was not clean. Dishes piled in the sync, the vinyl floor felt gritty to walk on with bare feet, and the trash bag was full enough to fight her attempts to pull it out, resulting in Cheryl throwing it against the wall in frustration. It wasn’t as if this was exclusively her roommate’s fault. The recluse upstairs didn’t do a whole lot to clean up, sure, but they also didn’t really make much a mess. Cheryl stood up and tossed her hair back out of her face. She knew what to do, and she knew how to do it, but it was still so hard to make herself actually do it. The only thing she didn’t understand was why. Why was it so hard? Here she was staring down the pile of dishes in the sink. The dish washer was right there, but the visualization of each individual step to rinse each individual dish began to overwhelm her and she had to turn away. The place stunk, and she hated that. She just wanted to live in a nice environment that was clean and smelled good, but her inability to push past her own overthinking made it frustratingly difficult for no good apparent reason.
She sighed, stooping to pick up a few more pieces of trash and setting them in the poor, abused receptacle. The young woman slumped on the couch, exhausted by her outburst and by the state of her surroundings. She chastised herself for dropping out of college, and for backing out of a startup with one of her old friends, and for just about every other hesitancy and mistake she could think of in the misery of the moment. She just wanted a clean place. She just wanted to not feel like crap sitting here.
“I just wish the place didn’t stink,” Cheryl lamented aloud.
“Is that all?”
Cheryl shrieked in surprise, leaping back with the springiness of a startled cat. The mysterious voice belonged to woman, older than Cheryl by the looks of her, with long wavy dark hair and a beanie, long winter coat and some furred boots. A million or so responses trampled each other for the opportunity to be said. What are you doing here? Who are you? Why are you in my house? How did you get in? But the only thing that made it out was a bewildered “Huh?”
Her face must have been amusing, because the stranger woman cracked a smile, “Your wish, just to smell good? No… to make things smell good.” She seemed to be talking at her more than to her, but Cheryl was still stuck on the who and the why of it all to bother trying to understand what she was saying. Cheryl opened her mouth to speak but was shushed by the woman stranger, “I understand. I’ll come get you later.” With that, she took her leave out of the front door.
Cheryl quickly locked the door and slid the deadbolt in. What the hell was that? Probably one of her weirdo roommate’s friends. She would have to give them a scolding later… not that it’d do any good. Trying to forget about the bizarre encounter, Cheryl moved to tackle the kitchen again. To her surprise, she did not recoil from the stench of multiple days of dirty dishes in murky water that was once sudsy. She sniffed and was greeted by a pleasant aroma of pine and… maybe cranberries? It was hard to tell, but it smelled festive. Cheryl wondered if it was that strange woman’s perfume or something lingering on her. Satisfied enough with that explanation, she used her desire to forget that creepy lady to overpower her desire to not do the dishes. Partway into doing the dishes, she felt something rolling down her forehead. It sort of felt like sweat, but thicker somehow. She wiped her brow, maybe she had the heat too high? Shaking herself she refocused on the dishes. She’d take a shower later, she resolved. Eventually, though, the sweat was starting to bother her more and more, and she finally pulled away from the sink, she immediately slipped and fell with a resounding… splat?
She pressed her hands onto the floor to push herself up and noticed a few things. First, her skin was a lot redder than normal, as if she were sunburnt. Second, her skin looked extra… wrinkly? Further inspection of both sight and touch corrected her assumption. Her skin was melty. As much as she was panicking, she had to slowly bring herself to stand without slipping on the waxy, red puddle on the floor. She was shaking. This was way too creepy. She needed to get help, and fast. Her feet were slipping, and she struggled to make it towards the stairs, but eventually Cheryl managed to hold herself up enough to stabilize and take stock of herself.
Red footprints marked her path through the home, and her body was steadily dripping thick, waxy droplets to the floor at her feet. She felt body droopy and sticky in a way. As slick as she’d been, her fingers were starting to meld together. It took quite a bit of effort to pull them apart. Her clothing was starting to fit weirdly on her as her stature and silhouette shifted with her melting body, and she could swear she felt something protrude from her head. Her skin had taken on a bright, cranberry red color, and the scent she’d smelled before was much more powerful. Cheryl felt her hair oozing down her shoulders, nearly indistinguishable from the rest of her.
“Heyyyy! Get down here!” she yelled up the stairs to her roommate, “I need your help with som-hnnnmm!” The moment her lips pressed together to form the ‘m’ sound; she was struggling to separate them again. She began to panic now, “MMM! Hmm-mmmMMMH!” Cheryl tried to pry her lips free from one another without success. Cheryl cursed the videogames her roommate was so obsessed with through her muffled grunts. Unable to get help that way, she tried to get outside for help, but her previous paranoia over the strange woman earlier was coming back to bite her in a big way. Her slick, fused fingers were incapable of gripping the deadbolt or sliding it out of place. The metal piece only dug into her waxy skin. Running out of options and with her feet already melting away into a thick puddle on the floor, Cheryl had little to do but wait for her fate to claim her.
Cheryl thought she heard the door open. It was difficult to tell since her ears had long since melted away, but she could hear major sounds. She’d made the mistake of blinking earlier, sealing her eyelids shut so it was the best she had. Her body had melted into a thick pile that was as strange to her as it would likely be to any onlooker, and she had little idea of what form she had actually taken by now. All that she knew now was that she was being lifted and carried somewhere. She would have been afraid, but in her immobile isolation she actually welcomed something happening. She was taken outside she thought, mostly because it suddenly got very cold. Then another door opened and shut, and she was set down into something, or maybe onto something. Then it got warm again. Then warmer. Hot. So very very hot, but not in a scalding way, Cheryl realized. It was a bubbling, melty warmness that permeated her being and smoothed out her imperfections.
Kat stirred the pot of melted wax, enjoying the scent while it prepared the wicks for dipping. It was fortunate this woman’s wish to make a place smell good also helped with Vanessa’s wish for more decorations around the house. These Cheryl candles were sure to help tie the room together…