WARNING: This story contains material and themes that some may find disturbing 
or triggering. You have been warned.

  The Touch

When it first began, there was only horror. My very existence had become hell. 
I was a disease, a destroyer. I had become death itself against my will, and 
without warning.

I placed my hand upon the cheek of a lover, a young brunette with whom I 
desired to spend the rest of my life, and she smiled. The smile faded to 
confusion, and she placed her hand on top of mine on her face. Quickly, the 
confusion flashed to panic and pain as she pulled away from my hand and cried 
out, running to a mirror.

"Ow!" She exclaimed as she ran to the bathroom sink." What is on your hand!?

I glanced down at the hand that had been touching her. It looked completely 
normal. "Um, nothing? What happened?"

"Ah! God, it really fucking hurts where your hand touched me!" I entered the 
room behind her to see her leaning over and examining the skin of her cheek. 
It was deeply reddened, as though I had slapped her with all my strength. 
"God, people are going to think you hit me. Look at this welt!" She 
straightened up and turned the cheek toward me. The redness had begun forming 
into a raised area of skin and spreading. As I continued examining her, 
within seconds, the flesh began boiling.

The boils appeared, grew, and burst as though the skin of her face--and now 
her neck, and now her scalp--was a liquid on a hot stove. Where the boils 
burst, her flesh was no longer present. It had evaporated and sizzled away, 
eating away in the same fashion at surviving nearby flesh. The entire p
rocess took less than 5 seconds.

All she could do was scream.

As she clawed at the damage, it worsened. She screamed and clawed even more. 
Her flesh flaked, melted, boiled, evaporated, and was gone. She screamed and 
clawed. Her vanishing, cooking, sizzling skin was no longer there. I watched 
it disappear. She screamed and clawed. Then her muscles, her eyes, her teeth,
her hair, and every other part of her cooked itself into nothingness and 
boiled away. She collapsed into an atrophied fetal position on her knees, as 
though burned alive, and no longer moved. A charred, human-shaped husk 
crouched down in front of me, flaking away sightly like carbon-black ash, but
otherwise motionless.

I ran. I ran out of the apartment, down the stairs, and out the front door. I 
ran down the street. I didn't know where I was running. Eventually, I made it 
to the underside of the old bridge where the homeless burned their barrel 
fires. I stopped, exhausted, and looked at my hands. Had I done this? What 
was I? I gathered some old clothes nearby, stinking and rotten, and wrapped 
them around my hands. I bundled up. I covered myself completely, bundling 
myself in old clothing except for a small slit for my eyes to see. If I was 
to destroy that which I touched, I would touch no more.