Lake’s hungry belly and sore body were at war with each other. His body was telling him to head straight home so he could just flop into bed and pass out after a long day at the hospital, and after being on his feet for a day and a half, who could blame him for wanting to sleep? But his belly was grumbling anxiously, begging to be filled. And, having had to miss his lunch break to help with an emergency, who could blame him for wanting to eat?
        He wasn’t certain which was going to win, sleeping or eating. Each option was equally tempting, and he couldn’t do both; to do one meant skimping on the other. If he slept as long as he needed, he wouldn’t have time to get in a good meal before he had to shower and go back to work. If he stopped and ate, he wouldn’t get nearly enough sleep to completely recover from his last shift. Trying to balance the two wasn’t an option; if he did, he would just be tired and hungry both.
        As he drove down the highway, a red, flashy billboard for Schezuan House caught his eye. His belly growled at the sight, and Lake could feel his mouth filling with saliva as the thought of warm Chinese filled his mind. 
        Well. That was that.
        With a sigh, his body admitted defeat and he turned off the highway, merging onto the road below and making his way through the empty streets to his favorite restaurant. Usually this part of town was busy, but at 4am, even the downtown was sure to be empty. Lake found a spot without any issue and stepped out into the night. Thank God that Schezuan House was open 24/7.
        The place was nondescript enough, just a plain ol’ brick store wedged among so many others in the rundown Far East Plaza, and if it weren’t for him seeing that billboard on the way home from work every day, he would never have discovered the wonderful place. Aside from a tattered, dingy red awning and faded paintings of pandas and mountains on the front facade, there was little that made the place stand out.
        Inside was better, but not much. The floor was old linoleum from the 70s or perhaps even earlier, stained but clean, and the walls were wood panels from the same era. The ceiling was an off-white stucco, and all the tables and chairs were wooden, dinged up but solid and dependable. The only thing worth noting in the entire establishment was a paper boat that hung from the ceiling.
        It was long and narrow, beautifully painted in brilliant dashes of red and gold colors. Its bow flared up into an angry dragon’s head, and the stern was its opposite, a long, curled tail. There was no longer a mast, but the place where it would have once gone was obvious. It hung just over the serving counter, about a foot above his head.
        Lake had always been curious about what the boat was and what it was doing in the shop, but he had never managed to get an answer. Only the owner spoke English, and the few times they met, Lake never thought to ask. Was it a relic from the Old Country? Or a modern recreation of some sort of treasure?
        Today, his curiosity was stronger than ever. He just… had to know. If he couldn’t find out what it was or where it was from, he could at least see how it felt, right? The whole thing must have been made from paper to be hanging from a string so thing, but the painting was so detailed that the wood looked like real wood, the ropes looked like real ropes, and that gem in the dragon’s eyes looked like a real stone.
        He looked around. The place was full of the smell of wonderful Chinese cooking, but no people. The dining area was entirely empty, which was normal given the hour, and whatever cooks were in must have been in back, preparing for the next day’s special. No one was expecting a customer at this hour, which meant no one would be checking the front, which meant…
        Lake bit his lip. He shouldn’t, but almost against his will, he slowly, slowly reached up towards the boat and gently grazed the side. Even his whisper of a touch caused the boat to sway a bit, but Lake couldn’t help himself. He kept his fingers there, amazed at the texture. It wasn’t exactly paper, but it wasn’t wood either. It was too soft to the touch to be either of those. And cool, too. Could it be silk, or—
        “Nǐ zài zuò shénme?!”
        The angry outburst startled Lake, and as he whipped around to face the noise his hand caught the boat by the stern. His heart stopped as a loud tearing sound filled the store, and he looked back to find he’d torn the dragon’s immaculate tail entirely from the body of the boat.
        With a gulp, Lake slowly, slowly turned to see who it was that had yelled at him, and to his horror, he recognized the owner. 
        “I-I…” Lake stopped and swallowed to wet his throat, and tried again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t… I was just…”
        “Idiot!” the owner snapped. “That was heirloom, a lucky charm, you ripped it! You ripped my lucky charm!”
        Lake tried to apologize, but the owner began cursing him out in rapid-fire Chinese, and Lake could do nothing but just shrink away as the owner rushed to his boat and took it down. After quickly assessing the damage, the owner just looked up at Lake with eyes full of anger. “You just order. Don’t worry, just order. I fix you later, okay bye!” 
        And with that, he rushed back into the kitchen.
        By now, the entire staff had wandered out to see what the commotion was, but as the owner rushed in back, they all headed back to their work. Only one of them stayed out to take his order, someone Lake recognized as the owner’s daughter. She’d told him his name once in Cantonese, but he couldn’t remember. Her Americanized name was Moon, however.
        Moon looked up timidly at him from behind the cashier. “Well… I’m sorry about that. I get that it looks cool, but it really was a bad idea to touch it.” Her English was much better than her father’s, and Lake never did know why she rarely was allowed to work behind the cash register.
        Lake sighed and shook his head. His voice was still shaking from the experience. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have, I was just… so curious, you know? It looks like wood, but it can’t be wood, and, well—”
        “Oh! Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean!” Moon interrupted him with a grin. “Ever wonder where the mast went? I was just as curious as you when I was a child.”
        He blinked and then grinned, feeling a bit better. “Oh, you broke it too?”
        Moon nodded. “Yeah. It was an old good luck charm, passed down through our family for hundreds of years. Story goes it was gifted to us by an emperor, but that’s probably just hearsay. But… anyways, what can I get you?”
        Disappointed though he was at the conversation ending so soon, Lake was nonetheless glad to belt out his usual order and go sit down in the furthest corner of the empty restaurant. If he didn’t know any better, he might say that Moon had a small thing for him. He might be tempted to pursue it, but after what just went down between him and her father, the chances of that were as low as they’d ever been. 
        Soon enough Moon brought his food out— orange chicken on brown rice with some crab rangoon — but to his surprise, she also sat down a rather large takeout box in front of him. Lake shot her a confused look.
        “Peace offering, from my father. Just to show there’s no hard feelings,” she said.
        Lake raised an eyebrow. Perhaps there was hope for him after all? He opened the box and found it to be full of fortune cookies, each one stamped with a strange symbol. They certainly weren’t any chinese symbols that he recognized, and they were each different. 
        He picked one out and showed it to Moon. “What does this mean?” he asked.
        Moon looked at it, and a broad grin broke out on her face. “Good luck,” she said. Then, looking inside his box, her grin grew wider. “Good luck!”
        “Wait… these all mean good luck? But they’re all different symbols, they look the same, but—”
        “Good luck!” Moon said again, and with a small bow, retreated back into the kitchen.
        Lake watched her go for a while then sighed, smiling a bit and looking back at the fortune cookie in his hand. He had never really been one for them, but if it was a peace offering, who was he to say no? He broke it open and popped both ends in his mouth, chewing as he cleared off the paper and read what it said:
        “A filthy nose makes a filthy whore. No lucky numbers.”
        What was that supposed to mean? Was it an obscure Chinese proverb? Like, stay out of someone else’s business? Or, maybe it meant stay out of trouble? Lake frowned. Regardless, these things were always bunk. He immediately disregarded his fortune and dug in.
        It wasn’t long before he started noticing a difference. At first it was subtle— a tickle in the back of his nose, or the feeling that something was slowly creeping down it. He shrugged that off without issue. It could just be nasal allergies, or maybe the slight spice in his orange chicken was making itself known. Regardless, it wasn’t really a huge deal.
        Soon, a little strand of greenish snot began to trickle its way down his left nostril and onto his lip, just as he was about to take another bite of chicken. He paused just in time and tried to wipe it with his left hand, only to find that while it disconnected from his nose, it clung to his hand in a bright, gooey green ball. 
        Gross.
        Looking around to make sure Moon wasn’t seeing him, he sat his chicken back down and tried to rub the back of his hand off under the table. When he brought his hand back up, he just found that the snot had spread over his skin, still just as green and brilliant as ever. 
        He frowned. It wasn’t just that it had all smeared over his hand like paste, rather than been scraped off, but it seemed like there was more, like his snot had multiplied because he tried to get rid of it. Was that even possible? Racking his college memories for any possible thought of how that could happen, Lake came up empty. And yet, it seemed to happen.
        To make matters worse, another stand of snot had formed on his lips as he struggled with the first one. He didn’t notice until it tickled his upper lip. Lake sighed to himself and used his shoulder to wipe it off, not noticing that it formed an almost perfect globe on his shirt sleeve. 
        Whatever. He’d deal with it in a bit— the pangs in his belly were angrily reminding him that he was hungry! Lake just wiped the back of his hand on his pants and took another bite, not noticing that now both his pants and the back of his hand were now heavily stained with the stubbornly smeary, grossly glossy mucus. 
        The next few bites went well, but as he ate, yet another strand of snot formed, and as he leaned over a bit, a couple drops dribbled onto his food without him noticing. They soaked into his rice and nearly disappeared, and as he continued to eat more and more snot got on his food. He even started dribbling into his drink, the green goo with darker red streaks quickly dissolving in his pop, but leaving it a more noticeable green tinge each time. 
He didn’t notice whatsoever, more intent on ignoring the snot he obviously felt on his lip and just shovelling down his chicken before it got cold, but in one fateful instance, a thick, particularly nasty strand of sludgy, wobbly and sickeningly coagulated blood-stained snot-cobbler oozed directly onto his bite just before he put it in his mouth.
        The second that strong taste hit his mouth, he froze. The urge to vomit came but he fought it back. Lake knew immediately it was snot— there was no mistaking the salty taste of it— but there was something different about it. It wasn’t just that it was much, much stronger than usual, but there were hints of something else. 
For some reason, it reminded Lake vaguely of that one time he’d been forced to lick his fratmate’s pits as a hazing ritual. He’d just got done working out, and the taste was absolutely appalling; salty and ripe, tinged with a cloying flavor from the remnants of his deodorant. 
        The texture was equally as obvious. The breaded chicken was already soft and chewy from the orange sauce that gave the dish its name, but the snot was much thicker and chewier than the food was. What’s more, there were several large boogers mixed in with his snot, and the texture of that was unmistakable. 
        Despite the overwhelmingly nasty taste, the obscenely slimy texture, and the plain knowledge that he was eating his own snot, Lake continued to chew, chew, chew, and then swallow with a small gag. He burped afterwards, but there was no threat of anything coming up after that. 
        Lake could have spit it out, and he heavily considered doing just that, but in the end, he’d just eaten it so anyone looking didn’t see him spit out his food and think they’d done something wrong. There was no reason to make things even worse after he’d broken their family heirloom even more than it had been already. 
        Still, he had to take care of his snot problem. Though he was self-conscious enough as it is, the need to get the snot out of his system trumped the need to be quiet, and he grabbed a napkin and held it up to his nose, blowing hard.
        It felt like more snot came out of his nose with that one honk than had ever come out before by a long shot. It was like a constant, steady, if slow and goopy stream densely splurging out into the napkin, and when he pulled it away to see how much had come out, he was horrified.
        Snot thoroughly plastered a good third of the napkin, right in the middle, thick and abysmally dark green throughout. A dozen or so large boogers chunked up in cobbled piles throughout the mixture, and there were dark, sickening streaks of red peppered throughout that made his stomach churn with disgust.
Lake stared at it in bewildered abhorrence. Had he produced all of that? It was all so much, and so tremendously thick while being so uncomfortably ugly and vile-looking, too. It had taken him pulling it nearly an arm’s length away to make the strand between his nose and the napkin snap, and even then he’d barely managed to do it at all. The rest of the stubbornly clingy strand had thankfully stayed with the napkin, solid enough that it didn’t fall into his food. 
        Looking at it, Lake couldn’t square that… whatever it was with normal snot. Normal snot wasn’t so thick, and there wasn’t nearly so much of it. Especially not his snot! He usually made very little, and when he was sick, the stuff he made was runny and nearly clear. This stuff was thick, green, and surprisingly heavy. It was almost like lifting a coke bottle, it was so heavy. 
        He sighed, shaking his head. He hadn’t wanted to do this, considering the public area he was now in, but he hadn’t much a choice now other than to just go for it and pick his nose clean. It was a disgusting practice to be sure, and something he hadn’t done in public since he was probably a toddler, but desperate times called for desperate measures, and his need to just sort out his nose problem could certainly be called desperate. If there had been a bathroom in the establishment, he’d have just used that, but alas.
Taking a deep breath, Lake closed his eyes and slowly slid his pointer finger into his left nostril, cringing as he felt the warm, gooey mucus squelch against his fingers. He pushed his finger almost knuckle-deep inside his nose, much further than he’d ever gone before, before wriggling it around, cringing at the stupidly loud wet and squishy squelching noises that came from him. He was certain everyone could hear, but he couldn’t afford to look around and see.
        Instead he opened his eyes and slowly, slowly pulled his finger out of his nose. He gagged at the sight that greeted him. His finger was absolutely marinated in some serious sinus sauce, thick and chunky like goulash and filled with boogers of all different types. Of course there was an excessive amount of sickly, off-colored sinus blood clotted up with all that sinfully wretched booger cream. An incredibly thick bridge of mucus connected his fingertip and his nose, and as Lake pulled his finger further away, he could feel that bridge pulling more and more snot from his nose. 
        Jesus. How could his sinuses have so much snot?
        He began to pull the strand further and further, trying to snap it, but to his surprise he wasn’t able. By the time his arm was fully extended from his body, the snot bridge showed no signs of even thinning, and Lake began to get even more desperate. Without thinking, he brought his second hand in to try to cut the slime off halfway through, only to find that not only could he not break it, now it was adamantly glues to both of his hands. 
        Lake began to sob slightly, feverishly using both hands to try and break the snot strand without any kind of success. In fact, his efforts to remove the mucus from his hands and nose only seemed to serve to make matters many times worse! He rolled it out like taffy, using one hand to stretch it as far as he could before using the other to repeat the motion, but unlike taffy, the snot simply didn’t get thinner until it snapped. It just kept coming, and the sensation from his poor, abused nose grew more and more uncomfortable as larger and larger boogers began to form and slide out from his nostril. They would begin to get so big around and fat that Lake’s nostril would have to spread around them; Lake gasping as he felt larger and much beefier boogers dilating his left nosehole to make him feel that much more helpless, frighteningly confused and profusely worried. 
        Throughout all this work Lake began to pant with growing exhaustion and concern, tongue lolling out slightly. After a few minutes of this, a second strand of snot peeked out of his right nostril and slowly made its way down his lip and oozed down onto his lolling tongue. 
        Lake froze at the taste and retched, eyes watering at its sheer potency. How could his body make something so disgusting? He’d rather be eating shit! Tears began to well up in his eyes.
        He looked down at his hands, which were now just a disgusting mass of chunky snot and boogers, and gave up on it for now. That issue came second fiddle to the snot clinging directly onto his tongue. It seemed impossible to even grow to tolerate the taste; every second was just as rancid as the last. 
        Instead, he opened his mouth wider and brought both of his snot-covered hands up to his lips. Careful not to touch his tongue with his hands, he grabbed the middle of the strand attached to his lips and began to pull.
        To his horror, this one turned out to be much like the last. No matter how much he pulled, the strand refused to break, and all he succeeded in doing was to pull more and more snot out of his nose. It seemed never-ending, and Lake was really beginning to panic. What if there really was no end to this?
        By now, Lake looked like a total mess, and even someone watching from behind could tell what a mess he was in. His entire face below his nose was slathered in thick, green snot, interspersed with boogers of varying size and quickly congealing there, growing more and more putrid looking as the seconds passed. Copious swirls and splotches of hideously dark red nasal blood splattered the mixture almost artistically, and the whole thing looked as if it were beginning to move on its own… which it was.
        While Lake had been distracted with the disaster forming on his face and all over his hands and arms, the one mass of snot he’d managed to separate from himself, the stuff on the napkin, was slowly but surely inching its way across the table and up his cup. When it was finally on the rim it spread out across it, leaving the napkin behind before dropping with a heavy ‘plop’ into his drink, sending discolored soda splattering across the table from the splash.
        The drink quickly changed from a dark cola color to an oily, nasty looking green, the texture transforming from liquid into a custard-like, almost yogurt-looking sludge. It still bubbled from the carbonation trapped inside, but those bubbles moved incredibly slowly, and as they popped the stench of the drink worsened.
        Lake didn’t notice any of this. To his horror, the snot on his face was moving as well, pulling the snot attached to his hands and arms along with it. Though that did have the effect of clearing his hands and arms rather quickly, it was happening because all the snot was beginning to slime into Lake’s mouth, filling it with that nasty, putrid taste. 
        To his defense, Lake immediately closed his mouth the second he noticed it happening, trying to bite through the strand that connected his tongue to the rest of the snot, but he found he wasn’t able to even chew through it. Whenever he ground the strand enough that it should have snapped, it just bounced back twice as firm and twice as thick, forcing his jaw apart and allowing even more snot in.
        At first the extra snot in his mouth was bearable —after all, what was a little more when he was already gagging on the most putrid thing he’d ever tasted?— but as more and more snot drooled into his mouth, more and more of his tongue was covered, and as the different taste areas of his tongue were touched, he got to experience the taste in new and revolting ways. The texture made it worse, and he swore he could feel every single booger pressed against his tongue and the roof of his mouth. 
        His belly began to grumble and churn, no longer willing to put up with this combination of chinese food and snot. Lake shook his head, trying desperately to calm himself, but it was no use; in moments his mouth opened wide, and just as all the snot globbed into his mouth, it parted to let a stream of chunky projectile vomit jet out, all over his table and food. It kept coming and coming, longer than Lake would have thought possible given all he hadn’t eaten the day before, until finally all that came out was bile, and then, nothing. 
        Exhausted, Lake clutched at the table to steady himself and looked around. The entire thing was ruined. His orange chicken was floating in a pile of vomit, the half-chewed and half-digested chunks from his belly barely discernible from the actual meal he’d had yet to eat. The rest of his bile had covered the table, the chair across from him, and quite a bit of the ground. There was no recovering from this.
        Though he was done vomiting, all the snot was still in his mouth, and he could feel it all coaxing another bout of vomiting from him. Unsure of what else to do at this point, Lake’s eyes fell on his glass; it was untouched by the vomit. Perhaps if he just washed it down, he could swallow it and just be done with this whole mess? He could just go home, go to bed, and forget it all happened. 
        Lake grabbed his glass and, without looking, tipped it back to sip from it. Just in time, he noticed the disgusting, oily custard-like snot that had taken up residence in his glass, and immediately he tried to set it down. Unfortunately for him, the snot in the glass shot out even quicker than the snot on his face had moved, attaching the cup to his lips and forcing him to keep it there. The putrid stench from the glass was unbelievable. It was nearly as bad as the snot in his mouth tasted, and as he stared the snot down, Lake cursed himself for not smelling it before he brought it too close. It was like a mixture of bad body odor and unwashed swamp ass, mixed with a bit of raw sulfur. 
        The snot began to undulate, jiggling itself onto Lake’s lips and down his mouth. Two smaller tendrils sprouted from the top, wasting no time in spearing Lake’s nose, and as more and more of the snot slid inside his mouth, it began to push down his throat as well. As it pushed down and retreated back up to the beat of something Lake couldn’t comprehend, he realized that it wasn’t trying to get into his stomach — the snot was throat and nostril fucking him. 
        Lake began to gag and hurrrk as the snot purposefully triggered his gag reflex, and he could do nothing about it but hold onto the table and try his best not to give in. The bile was rising in his throat and Lake was just about to give up trying to fight it, beginning to sob from being so orally molested to such an egregious extent by his own mucus...when, without warning, the snot abruptly stopped. 
        He paused in confusion. The snot… stopped? Then, just as quickly as it stopped, it all started again, but instead of fucking his throat and nose, the entire mass and every god-forsaken curd of that coagulated nasal cobbler in the glass suddenly lunged and flung itself into his mouth with a loud, obscenely messy slurping noise; leaving just enough snot on his lips and drooling out of his nostrils to make anyone who looked at him gag while Lake was left speechless and horrified as to what just occurred.
        Consciously, Lake wanted to take the slight break to try and figure out what was going on, maybe try a few different methods to get the self-aware snot— that was what he decided it was— out of his mouth. But instead an urge came over him, and he found himself looking at the box of fortune cookies.
        Outside his own volition, his hand slowly reached into the box, rustling around a little while before drawing a cookie out. He held it in front of him like it were some sort of weapon, and honestly, it really sort of was. Whatever was held within this cookie was enough to ruin his life, much like a weapon could, though in an entirely different way. 
        Not one part of him wanted to do what he did, but body continued to move on its own. His hands broke the cookie, and the fortune fell to the table, miraculously missing all the vomit to land on one of the few dry spots nearby. Lake opened his snot-filled mouth and shoved both ends of the cookie inside, chewing slowly and deliberately. He didn’t even try to swallow. He knew that as his teeth crunched the cookie into mush, his snot was just absorbing it and incorporating the cookie into its already disgusting existence. 
        Slowly, nervously, Lake looked down at the fortune lying face down on the table. He reached down, picked it up, and with a sense of trepidation, turned it over.
        “Love will come incessantly to you. No lucky numbers.”
        It almost sounded like an actual fortune, something a company came up with that meant nothing and everything all at once, if it weren’t for the word ‘incessantly’. Lake was puzzled over it. What part of love could be incessant? This didn’t sound like a curse, it sounded like a blessing. Perhaps the fortune cookie box was a mixture of the two, blessings and curses all in one place? 
        All it took was the jingle of the door’s bell for Lake to realize he was wrong.
        “Schezuan House, what would you like?”
        That was Moon’s voice, he knew. 
        “Oh, well I would like… hmm, you know, I’ve never actually been here before. My wife and I usually go down the street, but they’re closed this time of night, y’know, and…”
        The second voice was deep, vibrous baritone, someone he didn’t recognize. Against his better judgement he turned to look, snot-covered face and all.
        It was a bull and his human wife, both standing at the counter and glancing over the menus. The wife was nothing special— good looking, Lake supposed, but in a generic sort of way— but the bull was almost unbelievably handsome. He was tall, had broad shoulders and a deep chest. His fur was a chocolate-chestnut brown, immaculately kept and shined, and his horns were long, ornately decorated, and deadly sharp. 
        “Hey, Angus? I gotta go to the bathroom, why don’t you choose something for us?” the wife asked. Angus nodded and took his wife by the arm, gently guiding her to the bathrooms nearby. He was a gentleman in every respect.
Angus turned around to see Lake staring at him. Normally he might have ignored it, or maybe gagged a little due to the snot all over his face, but today he stopped. And he stared back. His face turned flush beneath his chestnut fur, and his heart beat wildly inside of his chest. Something about Lake set his stomach aflutter and his heart aflame, something that his wife had never done. 
All his life being straight, all his life caring about appearances, his wife, it all went out the window. As the curse took hold of him, all that mattered to Angus was the perfection that was Lake, and more importantly, the perfection that was his snot.
Before Lake could realize what was happening, Angus rushed to Lake with a speed only an athlete could manage, grabbed him by the shirt, and pulled him into a firm, true lover’s kiss. 
Lake’s eyes flew wide open, but all of his protests were lost into the bull’s thick, wet lips slobbering all over his. Angus’s tongue plunged past Lake’s lips deep into his mouth, squishing into the mass of snot hiding inside, and the bull began to moan almost violently, eyes opening and rolling back as his cock flew to full mast inside his pants. His mind was short circuiting from the pure love that he felt from this kiss, from the taste and the feel of that snot, from the sensation of holding Lake close against him.   
        His kiss became even sloppier as the seconds passed, copious amounts of saliva gushing forth and splattering Lake’s lips, his chin, his nose, and even slathering all across his glasses, making it so that the poor human couldn’t see a thing. 
        He finally pulled away, and both of them panted, drooling slightly as they struggled to catch their breaths. 
        Angus was the first to speak. 
        “I don’t know who you are,” he said, “but I know the feeling you had on me. I’ve never felt so in love, I’ve never felt so alive! I-I-I don’t know what it is, but you’re my life’s desire, more than my wife could ever hope to be. I love you, I’m in love with your snot, and I want you to be mine forever.” The bull took off his wedding band and got down on one knee, offering it to Lake. The silver ring was big enough to fit on the human’s thumb.
        “I don’t know your name, I don’t know who you are, but. will you marry me?”
        Lake’s eyes flew wildly between the bull, the band, and the box of fortune cookies still open on the table. His heart beat wildly inside of his chest, but for entirely different reasons. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
        Despite his straightness, Lake found himself entirely unable to say ‘no’.