rubbrfrk9

HYPNAGOGIA: A Rubberborn story

Shiny black rubber face.

Shiny black rubber hands.  

In the dream: they grow from the shadows.  They clump against the walls and seethe in the corners.  I know in my rational brain that these are simply the places the light can’t go through, the trunks and limbs and branches of the trees outside my windows, whipping frenziedly back & forth in the wind of a nor’easter.  I know that the long black void cast by the slightly-ajar bedroom door is a natural phenomenon, and that the reason it moves slightly back & forth is the intense wind, sneaking through every minute crack of the house that it can find.  

The only light in the room is from the streetlights, outside.  I need a little bit of light to sleep - the absolute dark, well, that’s obvious, isn’t it, what it does to me - 

And I see it, sometimes, even if it isn’t happening, and it fills my head with such a buzzing, squirrelly fear that I can’t focus on anything else - the horrible, evil lift of the black-faced figures from the pooling shadows, their slow, inexorable creep towards my beside - 

Feel their creeping invasion, their glossy, shiny hands on my shoulder - 

I scream, and my partner screams, and we both jump back to our own sides of the bed.  His face is crawling with the crossing, un-crossing shadows of the trees - but also alarm, concern.  “Honey,” he draggles out of his sleep-churned mouth - “Are you okay?  What’s the matter?”

“Dreams,” I say, and pull the sheets up to my chin.  “Just dreams.”

“Just dreams,” mutters my partner, already having loosed himself down the slide of unconsciousness.  

“Yeah,” I repeat, eyes as flung-open as shutters in a hurricane.

Outside, the nor’easter competes for attention with the frantic skirl of an ambulance, or a fire truck, or a police car - I can’t tell which.  It rises and falls, like a giant with breathing difficulties, lowering itself at our windows.  The glass rattles in the frames.  

It’s an old house.

Sometimes I feel like it’s probably haunted.  I mean, you can’t have a house that’s this old and not have at least one ghost.  Too many past inhabitants not to have at least one snarl of psychic energy, somewhere - probably the basement, or the attic - in any case, neither place me or my partner have ever had to enter in our two years of living here.

Come to think of it, the trouble with my dreams - with the shadows - only started about a month ago, right around the time I came on the rubbrfrk9 tumblr for the first time.

I guess it makes sense that encountering a new fetish would spike some kind of interruption in the normal dreaming habits of a person.  I’d never really given it much of a thought, rubber - but something about these pictures, man, they grabbed me, they arrested me, they grabbed me by the chin and made me stare into their endlessness.

It was a dude - single from what I could tell - who lived somewhere in the city.  In the background of his pictures, I could see familiar skylines - skyscrapers, even - so I knew that he was local.  But in a city of this magnitude, that’s still a near unspannable distance.  So I followed the tumblr, I lurked, I scrolled every picture he’d ever posted.

In every single one, he was wearing a full, head to toe, shiny black rubber suit.  In some pictures, he had on other clothing to accent it - but in every shot, the rubber was what stood out.  And it wasn’t just shots in his apartment, in his bedroom, in the bathroom, in the shower even - it was out and about, on the streets, in broad daylight, or in parks at night time.  The night shots, I’ll admit, were my favorite - his shiny, depthless black superimposed on the night’s sallow dark - he was more night than the sky was, at least in the city.  

There was, however, a problem, in that my partner was incredibly vanilla.  He allowed for my endless fetish-related scrolling on tumblr, even had tried to get enthusiastic about my various paraphilia, but to no avail.  We had sex, and we had great sex, but something about “just sex” never got me to the edge where I could truly feel liberation from my libido’s constant demand.  I didn’t know how to explain to him my new-found obsession, and thus, found myself keeping it secret from him, like a Catholic with a sin - and just as suffused with guilt.

But still, rubbrfrk9 had awakened something inside of me.  Something dark, something shiny, and something mute.  It gave me a boner like nothing ever had before, and I yearned to be encased, too, like he was in every one of his pictures.  I yearned to be side-by-side with him, maybe even be rubbrfrk10, if that’s how it all was to go down - 

But no!  I had to restrain myself from these kinds of fantasies.  I had a stable, loving life with my partner, and we both had dayjobs, and our parents even knew each other now - 

It was just one of those things that would have to be relegated to roleplay.

I did take one step - I went on eBay, and I got one of those old-school gas masks.  The ones you see in the films about World War II, with the long rubber trunk and canister.  I paid for it, and eagerly watched, day by day, as it inched closer to me.

The day it arrived, I put it on immediately, as my partner was still at work and wouldn’t be home for hours.  I stared into the mirror at my blank face, my eyes obscured by the filmy glass of the eyepieces.  I could tell from the quality that it was a replica - no one in their right mind would actually use it to filter gas out of the air - but still, somehow, the rubber of the mask felt so good, fitting so closely against the skin of my scalp and my cheeks, under my chin and tight against my forehead.  

I don’t know how long I stared at myself in the mirror, standing there with my mouth hanging open inside the mask, breathing in and breathing out, hearing it hollowly, distantly, in my ears.

Shame was what woke me out of it.  Shame and fear and regret.  I stripped it off of my face (not without some longing, some lingering, foreign despair) and bundled it into a place under the bed, to hopefully be forgotten about.  I’d gotten it out of my system now, right?  

Wrong.

This is when the dreams started.  The goopy, inky shadows, stretching out their hands for me.  Whispering, even though stoically mute in their fluid motions towards the bed - these were not zombies, these were not monsters … if anything, they were alien creatures, glistening in the streetlights beneath my windowsill, inching towards the bed - 

I yell, and it wakes up my partner again, who is this time less supportive, and more irritated.  “Honey, take a pill, wouldja?  Or drink some water milk … I dunno, just … sleeping good…”  He trailed off, and pulled the sheets up around his chin, turned off, and snorted his way back into comfortable sleep.

I’ve drifted off again into the dream.  It seems like, every time I dream lately, it picks up where it left off - the alien faces, the shiny rubber hands, they are even closer to being able to reach me.  I can see the reflection of the light on my pale, white skin, in such contrast to theirs - oh god, oh god - am I reaching out to them?  To them, as they get ever closer?  Am I helping them narrow the gap?

This time, I don’t yell, but I jerk awake in the darkness, teeth chattering even though the heat is thick and filling the room.

A trailing waft of rubber-smell tickles my nostrils, and I sneeze, violently.

Part of me is afraid to turn on the light.  

The other knows I must.  

When my trembling hand reaches over to the switch, it flicks it fast and withdraws back to my body as quickly as a mouse to its wall-hole.  I almost want to comfort it with murmurs and words of solace, but I too am suddenly brought to a shudder when I realize that the ill-purchased gas mask is sitting on the bedspread, between my knees, staring at me with its blank, glassine eyes, almost accusing.  

Of course it isn’t there.  It’s still beneath the bed.  

I quietly roll out of bed and crouch by the side, jamming my hand into the jumble of clothes, boxes, and other things beneath - yes, I can confirm that it is in fact still where I wedged it.  Not on top of the bed, staring at me.

I’m hard as a rock in my basketball shorts.  The skin of my face is prickling, almost like I’m having an allergic reaction to something - little, millimeters-big needles sinking into my flesh.  It’s pre-occupying, but not intensely irritating.  Just feels kind of peculiar, a little rippling wave of heat.  I should go to the bathroom and splash some water on my face.  I am probably just overheated from the dream.

The dream!  Can it be, in fact, that I’m still dreaming?  Will I walk down the hallway to the bathroom only to find that shadows bubble out of the faucet, like in every horror movie ever?  I’m feeling oblique, fuzzy waves of doubt and vertigo - in the thick of the night, like this, with the wind howling its head off down the street, it’s easy to become slightly unhinged.  The rain taps and staccatoes its way along the windowpane - one salvo followed by another, like empty bullet shells from an automatic weapon hitting the asphalt.  

In the bathroom, it’s a little quieter.  The light is harsh, anodyne - I keep meaning to get a softer bulb.  It makes my face look even more pale than it is - a ghast stands before me, one eye half-lidded, the other wide open - I look like I’ve gone a couple of rounds in a boxing ring.  My hair sticks up on one side of my head, where it’s mashed flat on the other.  

I bend over to splash some cooling water on my face, and it leaves me feeling strangely aroused.  My belly sort of drops as I feel the cooling patter of the drops hitting my face - much like, I imagine - the windows of the building outside.  

I feel that intense vertigo again, my eyes closed, leaning over the sink, wobbly a bit more than I’d like, when I feel the rumble in my gut tell me it’s time to take a seat on the toilet for a minute or two.

Somehow, I have my phone in my hand, and before I know it, I’m straddling the toilet and scrolling my tumblr feed, instantly navigating to the magnifying glass, searching: 

rubbrfrk9, I type in, and feel a long line of drool suddenly separate itself from the corner of my mouth and splat on the tiles below.  My screen is instantly filled with the calming influence of rubber - black on black on black, shiny rubber hands and shiny rubber faces.  

The sink, the pipes, make a bad metallic gurgle, as though clearing their throat, and in that sound I can hear voices - distorted, but voices, and they are saying

All hail the Rubbered One

And I’m up in a frenzy, pulling my shorts up around my waist, panic striking at my spinal cord.  “Who said that?”  I say out loud.  I grab a fingerful of skin in between two fingers and pinch, HARD, to make sure I’m not still dreaming.

Pain riots through me, blood surges up to fill the injured area, turns my skin blotchy and red.  Nope, not dreaming.

And then my eyes wander back down to the phone in my hand.  It’s still bright and alert, still filled with images from the tumblr.  

Has it moved?

No, that’s impossible.  

Perhaps it’s a .gif, or one of those Boomerang photos.

But no, nothing to mark it as such.

This is the one of rubbrfrk9 outside, in some kind of wooded area.  Maybe even in the park near to my house.  It could be.   He is head-to-toe in his blanked-out black rubber suit, even wearing black, 14-eye Dr Marten boots.  Every last bit of him is obscured.  He could be someone’s silhouette, rather than an actual person himself.

I can feel my cock start to leak precum at the thought.  I feel it dribble down my thigh and join my drool on the tiles.  

All hail the Rubbered One, I hear again, but this time, I hear it in my own head.

The drone - for that’s what it is, a rubber drone, rubbrfrk9, according to the watermark on the picture - is slowly, ever so slowly, turning his rubbered head towards me on the small surface of my phone.

I should scream again, but my mouth is clamped shut.  It’s just a dream, I tell myself, feverishly.  Any second now, I’ll wake up and my partner will be scolding me, the wind will be banging against the walls - 

But no such thing happens.  The rubbered man is moving, so slowly that it could be all of this is just a hallucination - he is turning his head, staring blankly at me, he is lifting his arm, his shiny rubber hand - he is gesturing to me, he is crooking a finger - he is turning his hand, raising his arm - 

The wind in the trees is rustling the bushes behind him.  

This is no longer a picture on my phone, this is a portal.  There is no screen.

The small bathroom fills with the intense, the overwhelming, plastic smell of rubber.  

A moan escapes me.

I see, out of the corner of my eye, the shadows in the kitchen merging, coalescing, black drop by black drop, hearing the whispers in the wind as it surges against the side of the house - 

I see that the corners of my phone are being taken over too, by the shadows - small tentacles, writhing, lashing, as the Rubbered One stretches languourously towards me, his arm skewing the screen’s perspective in a tilt-shift manner that makes me dizzy - 

All hail the Rubbered One!

“All hail the Rubbered One!”  I say, helplessly - 

And I’m awake in my bed.  

I’m staring thoughtlessly at the wall ahead of me.

The wind is calm, and the storm has passed.

Next to me, my partner is slumbering, tossing and muttering to himself.

My hand reaches out towards his naked shoulder.

His poor, naked shoulder, about to meet the touch of my

Shiny, black hand - 

In the corners of the room, in the deep of the hallway, the silence rustles.  On my bedside table, the image of a wooded area - some bushes to the left, a pine tree to the right, is oddly empty.  One might think, looking at it, that it’s a strange thing to take a picture of - a foreground, with no subject.

A smile curves my lips, but you’d never see it.

REBORN

I HAD A NAME. I used to be somebody.

I had a profession, dignity, a position in the class structure.

Nowadays, I see through a cracked lens - society is broken, and the people participating in it are all prisoners.  The people you see shuffling in the great to and from, every morning, every evening - they’re miserable.  Ask any one of them if they wouldn’t leave their life, and - perhaps after some hesitation - they would say Yes.  

Even the ones who have kids - the ones in love - all of them.  In fact, those with ties to other people are the first ones to get in line.

For me, it was curiosity that opened the door.  If one follows the classic Hero’s Journey, the arc that every myth and story takes, I heard the Call - just like you - through a buzzing, pixelated source… the great and sordid world of the internet.  

One wrong step can put you on an entirely different path.  

When you look back, the path you were on is obscured by the surrounding environs - pressed firmly closed, as though no thing had ever once passed through.

I should introduce myself before I preach anymore.  I am rubbrfrk9.  You’ve read the stories on the website, you might’ve seen my name watermarked on pics as you scroll by on your tumblr feed.  

That hasn’t been our name always.  But what our name was before does not matter.

All hail the Rubbered One!

And if you’re reading this, then you’re as curious as I was.  

Do you dare follow your own Call?

If you do, keep reading.

THE CALL COMES FOR YOU. You don’t come for it.  The Call has been there, waiting, for you to pick up the other end, for as long as you’ve been alive.

Like I was saying, for me, it was curiosity.  It seems like it is for you, too.

I was always a curious guy.  It’s how I became a teacher, I guess.  I loved to learn about shit.  Endless amounts of shit.  The subjects that interested me were sucked dry by my voracious need to know.  On top of it all, I was cursed (blessed?) by a need to collect, a completionist’s frenzy, and so I found myself needing not just to know, but to know it all.

Everything.  A question could not go unanswered.  I was a very vocal kid, always asking the dread “Why?” to anyone who had the faculty to answer.  Of course, I learned quickly that faculty does not imply ability; and later still, that ability does not imply honesty.  Soon enough, I started shutting up and consulting other avenues of information - books.  I loved books.  I read anything I could find, from my mother’s tawdry romances on the back of the toilet to magazines at the doctor’s office - but my preferred genre was Horror, without a doubt.

I loved to read stories of unfortunate people, blind to their predicament, be lulled to the predator in the story.  I loved how the protagonists were slowly overcome by a sense of dawning knowledge, and were thus able to conquer - or not - the abiding horror.  The best ones were when the hero failed, in my opinion - those dark, twisted passages of despair and helplessness …

I was a weird kid.  

I didn’t have very much luck making friends.  I didn’t really understand what a “friend” should be.  I knew that it was some sort of social construct, but I hadn’t figured out how it worked yet.  Taking the time to do that analysis set me back, quite substantially, in the invisible school of society.  Maybe, at heart, I was always a bit of a freak, even before I came out.  

Funny to think of that, now, sitting here, writing from behind my gas mask and full rubber suit.  

All hail the Rubbered One!

I love how tightly it encases me.  How tightly it erases me.  

Slowly, now.  Don’t give up too quick.  Finish the story first.

As I was saying.  Curiosity.  After college, I became a teacher.  A professor.  Very highly regarded in my field, but poor with social interactions.  Dates?  Of a professional courtesy, only, and as awkward and dry as a lecture.  Actually, for me, lecturing was my second home, aside from my tidy and obsessively-ordered apartment.  I loved standing at the podium, talking about the books we read together.  How they are structured, and how events, following a certain chain, can be transformative.  

Although sometimes, horrific.

Life that is contained entirely within the snowglobe of acadæmia becomes brittle, after a time.  Even the most relentlessly anti-social of us have a heartbeat, a pulse, and a sexual drive.

Most sexual drives will tend towards the obligatory, the procreational.  Attractiveness, physicality, congruence, intercourse, and then the subsequent emotional tangle.  Sex is more than just a body meeting a body a-comin’ thru the rye - it is a rendezvous of energy, some of which we can’t even begin to understand.

Some kind of cosmic interplay happens during sex.  

Something so bright, so chimeric, that I was blinded just thinking about it.

I fled from it, like a medieval monk from a vision of God.

SPARE TIME. I spent most of my time in my apartment in my bedroom, perched with my skinny knees up, my face obliterated by the powder-white light of my phone.  I’d scroll endlessly.  And always pictures of men.

I’d known I was gay way before most people do, but I’d never bothered to “come out” or anything that obvious.  I just kept my feelings to myself, for as long as I could - which may not have been the healthiest thing to do, in hindsight, and when they finally vibrated at the seal on the pressure gauge, I spewed it out all over the internet.

Tumblr was my outlet.  You could find something for every kink, from men transforming into donkeys to using politics as a sexual tool.  I considered myself omnisexual.  I could be convinced, really, to like anything.  Except a few things.

I never really got into the big “full fetish” scene.  I’d, of course, seen the pictures go by - of Folsom, Folsom Europe, even some kinksters trying to make a name for themselves, become influencers, with pictures so heavily edited and filtered they almost looked fake.

But for me, my kink was - get this - intimacy.  I loved pictures of men, beautiful men, kissing, embracing.  Tangling together, with bliss inscribed on their faces.  And it was that expression that did it for me - the bliss, the complete and total walling-off of any worldly concern but the physical, the presence of another’s lips, breath, proximity -

It got me off, every time.  Imagining myself in those positions.  Wearing those clothes.  Caught up in those bedsheets.

Then, I’d stare into the mirror, and flex my coming-along biceps.  My quads.  I’d get dressed for the gym, and I’d go work out for an hour.  

I loved my routine, even if I felt the dreary recalcitrance to wake up every morning and head to work, just another body with the other bodies, shuffling to and from.  The night time is when I felt the surge of life - I would be free of the grimy shackles of the city, I would pound through the tumblr feed, I would shower, I would go workout.  

Life was half-bliss.

But as anyone who has half of bliss will tell you, it is never enough.  You must go searching for the second half of bliss - and I found mine on the night in question.

Knees up, one foot tapping a heel in idle, anxious rhythm.  Eyes greedily consuming, picture after picture, and then -

My thumb hovered over the screen as if about to lay a fingerprint down on a reader.  I stared.

The picture, my gateway, was a bedroom picture much like any other I saw in my daily feed, except for one crucial ingredient - one of the men was entirely encased, from head to toe, in shiny black rubber.

The rubber was so shiny, so depthless, so reflective, that it almost seemed as though its host was Not - as though there were some kind of blotting-out, erasing, blankening … And yet, this Not Person was being encircled by the arms of another man, a strong man, by the looks of it, his biceps bulging around the Rubbered One.

Even now, looking back on it, I find it insanely difficult to pry my eyes away from the memory of that reflective rubber.  That shiny, reflective black rubber.  And the detail!  I could see the hollows of the eyes, the imprint of the big toenail, the curls of the ears down to the tragus - it was truly as though this was not a suit being worn, this was a suit that was animated, had breath and energy of its own.  

Perhaps it was, in hindsight, seducing the man which embraced it.

I don’t know how long I stared at the picture.  A long time.  I was fascinated with everything about it - the mess of clothing on the side of the bed, socks and shirts strewn around, as if someone had melted and left only their garments as markers that they ever existed at all.  Even a pair of glasses lay askew on the carpet, next to a pair of jeans and Chucks.

If I listened, I could almost hear my own heartbeat, beating in time with the glints of light off of that rubber surface, as though the Rubbered One were moving, in infinitesimally small increments, writhing on the bed in either pleasure or agony -

I blinked, shook my head, and pressed down deliberately on the screen, for the little “Save Image” dialog to appear.  I needed to see that again, sometime.

It was a lot sooner than I thought.

I had to excuse myself from my lecture.  I was shaking, and my breath was wobbly in my mouth.  Words had come out gummily, and I was worried that someone would be convinced I was having a stroke.  I’d send in a TA to finish off the lecture, not that anyone in the darkened hall was paying attention anyway.  

I went into the nearest bathroom, a single-room lavatory, and sat down hard on the toilet.  Instantly, my hands fished out my phone from my pocket and called up my Photos.

There, on the top of the digital heap, was the faraway glisten and shine of the Rubbered One.  I sighed in relief, in pleasure.

You would too, if you’d seen the picture.  Don’t judge me.

A whisper of triumph, of pleasure, of satisfaction, threaded through my mind as I opened up the picture.  There it was again.  That endlessness, that Void, that Nothing.  I craved it, and I didn’t know why, and I needed to know why, and to know why, I needed to keep looking.  I needed to keep looking to stop looking.

The Rubbered One had moved.  I remember its legs being in a different scissor - left on top of right, and now it was right, on top of left.  

This did not frighten me.  Perhaps it should have.  Pictures are not supposed to move.

But in my addled state of mind, I was blissfully unaware of the warning - or even, really, of the thought itself.  It slid right out of my head, as if on a glossy sheet of black ice.  I smiled, warmly, the shuddering ceasing.  

Then, surprising even myself, I unzipped my pants, and hauled out my cock.

Nothing would stop me.  I was a man determined.  I could even smell the rubber, could feel it lifting, wafting out of the screen of my phone.  That smell, that smell that I have no words for - something utterly inorganic, but somehow seductive for that very reason.  

I jerked off, right there, in the bathroom around the corner from the lecture hall.  I sat so still, my hand doing all the work, that the motion-sensing lights clicked off, leaving me alone, lit only by the powdery light of my phone.  There, in the enclosing, mummifying dark, I jerked myself off and came with a jagged, oblique moan that slid out of me, catching me by surprise.  

I may have even been in such a hurry to get inside that I didn’t even lock the bathroom door.  This suspicion came to me as I exited, stuffing myself shakily back into my khakis and my blazer.  You see, the door had opened seamlessly, with no hint of a lock dis-engaging.  

In fact, the momentary thrill of being caught as I masturbated to the Rubbered One flicked a little shiver of pleasure up my shaft anew, and I started shuddering so much that I had to grab the wall for fear of falling over.

All hail the Rubbered One!

There was no way I could go back to my lecture now.  I fled the campus for the safety of a local coffeehouse.

OTHER THINGS STARTED HAPPENING. Like how I thought I was having a stroke, before?  I found that, when I spoke, my mouth felt oddly compressed, as though I had lockjaw.  I went to the doctor, but when they told me to “open wide and say ahhh” I had no trouble - my jaw, seemingly re-oiled, complacently opened its full width, and I made the obligatory noise.  

Nothing wrong with my temporo-mandibular joint, advised the healthcare professional.  

And yet, as soon as I left the office, trying to speak to the Uber driver, to give him directions to my apartment, the same muffling, mysterious pressure returned, and I was only able to speak in tight, restrained tones.  

It didn’t occur to me until much, much later, that this was the voice of someone wearing a rubber gas mask, much like the one I am wearing now.

After awhile, I stopped talking altogether.  Of course, this did make it rather difficult to be a professor, and so that had to stop, too.

But what does a mute member of society do, when the one thing they have in life is a degree in English Literature?

Well, the first step is despondency, and denial.  I spent a month at least, just searching tumblr for more pictures of the Rubbered One.  Sure, there were plenty of pictures - the fetish for rubber has never been a subtle one - but none of them had that same irresistable sheen and shine, that fathomless Void, of the Rubbered One.  I’d exhausted most of the blogs.  I kept returning to the photograph I had saved to my cloud - and jerking off to it, again and again, like a desperate man.  Like a junkie.  If I went without, or even thought about going out, my hand developed such a tremor that I looked afflicted with tardive dyskinesia.

It got so bad, and the attacks so frequent, that I eventually just made the picture my home screen on my phone.  That way, if the tremors started, a quick pocket-dig and finger-flip would open up the likeness of the Rubbered One, and instantly, I would calm.

And (he?  It?) continued to move.  Perhaps, now that (he?  It?) knew that I had noticed the movement, it happened more and more, and faster, as though I were watching a video rather than a photograph.

Now, in addition to the slow, sensual scissoring of its legs, the Rubbered One was turning its head, away from the suckling devotion of its prey and turning to look at me, choosing me, directing its energy towards me.

I already had my rubber in the mail.  It took some doing, some difficult work, some self-measuring, but before long the order was placed and the shipment was made.  It was, of course, a link that I’d seen on tumblr, from one of the many rubber fetish sites.  Drone, and a series of numbers, I think.  One of the ones that’s talking about being absorbed into a Hivemind, a Central Core.  Nothing that ever really appealed to me.

The only thing I wished to absorb into was the Rubbered One.  

I ached, yearned, to be the man in that picture.  I was even jealous of him.  Who was he to show his devotion to such a being, such a beautiful entity?  Would not I be a better candidate for the first apostle position?  

But I knew, somehow, deep inside, that I wouldn’t even be considered until I had donned my own rubber.

Here’s where it gets a little weird, right - this is usually the point when in the story, the protagonist gets a little real, sizes himself up, maybe learns something about themselves.  Call me crazy, I know, but at this point, I just knew on the inside, so strongly, that I would never be worthy of the Rubbered One if I wasn’t Rubbered myself.

And so I waited, agonizingly, nearly tearing my hair out, for the package to inch itself across the ocean to my apartment mailbox.  I’d ordered the full suit, of course, the one that most closely approximated my photograph.  

I was utterly consumed, I was ablaze with obsession.  For the first time in my life, I felt an utterly overwhelming feeling - a lack.  I felt as though I lacked something that I had had for just a moment - one sweet moment, hovering, crystalline - and now that I no longer had it, I could never live a whole life again.

And everywhere I went - watching with a hawk’s eye the slow drainage of funds from my bank account - I smelled it.  Rubber.  There was even an auto repair shop, blockaded on one side with piles and piles of tires - I altered my daily neighborhood walk so that I could slowly amble by it, inhaling the thick, gray smell.  The more of it I could get on me, the more I wanted.  If there were a cologne that smelled of rubber, I’d wear it - hell, I’d bathe in it!  I twitched for it to be near me, on me, inside of me.

THE DAY MY NEW FACE CAME IN THE MAIL. I was wearing rubber gloves, made for chemical and construction workers, pressing them to my face, and inhaling as deeply as I could, when my phone made its little ringing noise to signify that a package was Delivered.

It could only be one thing.

It would only be a matter of moments before I could prostrate myself in front of the Rubbered One.

I hooked up my laptop to my flat-screen television, where the Rubbered One had also become my desktop wallpaper.  I opened up the picture file and let it sit, in the middle of my living room, the picture of Him.

Again, I fell far into His Nothingness, His All-Consuming Void - He turned on the bed, in the picture.  He silently got up.  He moved so subtly that it was impossible to tell if my hallucination was real, or some sort of digital magic.  He kicked, as if insulting, the pile of clothes left by the bedside.

The whole time, He kept his head, His black eyes, His shiny face, impassive and monstrous, but so aloof, so superior - His direct gaze - riveted on mine.

All hail the Rubbered One!

With barely a shimmer, He stepped out of the frame of my television and deliberately into my living room.  Tendrils of black squirmed out around the square of my screen, lashing to and fro idly, almost amusedly.

None of this seemed unreal, or even fantastical.  It was simply as it was - I was in a sort of ecstasy, like the kind the saints have, all-consumed, raptured.  The Rubbered One had chosen me!

Go, He told me without speaking.

I was on my feet, I was sprinting, I was dashing, my hands, still in their gloves, slippery on the door knob.  I was down the stairs before I realized I was barefoot, or that I was still wearing the heavy-duty black rubber gloves.  And there it was - my Rubber.  It was, of course, still in the box, it needed to be freed -

I cradled it in my arms.  I inhaled, as deeply as possible, again.  I could smell it, whining at the edges of my nostrils, begging to be freed.  I felt it, inside its cardboard prison, shifting and rustling.  Whispering.

I brought it upstairs with as much care as a mother would bring home her day-old newborn, but once inside, slamming the door behind me, I pillaged the drawers for the scissors, tearing into the box that would dare imprison my -

And there it was.  Still in a sad, folded-up heap, but it was mine.  

Now, said His voice in my head.  I didn’t have to turn around to know that He, the Rubbered One, was standing behind me - had moved silently from the living room to the kitchen.  I felt Him questing at the edges of my consciousness, starting the interview process.  

I felt a strange mix of craven desire and hot-blooded lust twist through me.  How I wished to possess the Rubbered One!  And how I wished to be possessed by Him!

I began to don my Rubber.  I felt it coo as it met my skin, as I replaced my own with its black sheen.  I saw my toes go, then the top of my foot - ankles, calves and shinbones, kneecaps and thighs - I watched as the black tide continued its creep up my body, as quickly as night follows dusk.  

The Rubbered One put His hands on me and I was nothing, I was everything.  I was part of a gigantic, moaning chorus of voices, I was absolute silence.

I saw Him reach out to me, his Nothing fingers and Nothing hands, his Void arms, his Void body.  I saw Him pull my self to His, and I felt us as we docked, somehow, for an imposssible moment, sharing the same physical space.

Then, with a sound that reminded me of a slurp and a sucking, closing noise, I was no more.

RUBBERBORN. I ceased to exist as I knew myself.  

I had a name.  

I wasn’t much of somebody, but I was somebody.  

Now, I was part of a growing, aching consciousness - I was part of a vast, growing hunger.  My thoughts were no longer my own.

All hail the Rubbered One!

I buzzed and chirred, excited beyond words.  I was ramrod hard, even in the rubber, which smoothed everything away, everything - all emotion, all thought, all nerve, all worry.  All features of my face - gone.  All features of my body - slurped up.  

I stood in front of the mirror.  All sign of the Rubbered One was vanished.  I could see, somehow, through my suit, though it had no eyeholes.

I saw through Rubber eyes.

I understood that I was Rubberborn.  That this was my destiny.  

The words “my” and “me” and “I” and “mine” were erased, scratched out heavily.  I was plural, now.

We were plural.

We stand in front of the mirror, staring at ourselves, our new body.  A mere morsel in the face of our hunger.  

Do you feel it?

As our eyes swivel slowly, tracking across the room, away from the mirror.  Looking into the camera lens backwards.  Do you feel the chilly fingers of our gaze landing on you as you read?  Playing along your bare shoulders, the pliable, delicate skin of your arms?

The Rubberborn understand and acknowledge that this body can be used for purposes that satisfy the hunger.  

They gave it the name rubbrfrk9.  The name you know, the author of these stories you read, curious in your own way to know how the rubber feels.  The same name you’ve seen watermarked on pics of us as you scroll by on your tumblr feed.  

Or maybe you already know - maybe you’ve already felt the ecstasy, struggling into your own shirt or pants.  Gloves or socks.  Mask or hood.  

Perhaps all of the above.  

Perhaps the voice of the Rubbered One is even now mingling with your own thoughts.  Sinuous, twisty, shiny and smooth.  Silken whispers, just an undercurrent of sibilant breath in the background, there.  If you strain, you can make it out.  Can hear our voices.  

We can sense you.

We know.

We are coming.