Nightmare in a Jar

When Lisa’s husband goes out of town on business for four days, she plans to spend her days writing and doing artwork. But when a woman named Marty shows up at her door one morning to sell her a special cream that will make her face as smooth as vanilla pudding, things change for Lisa. At night a man shows up at her door asking for a beer and a cigarette. Later he appears in Lisa’s room while she is sleeping, spreading his grotesque body across her ceiling and surrounding her with his flesh, putting her head in his mouth and smearing his slime across her body. Although the memory begins to fade after she awakes, it happens again, this time even more grotesquely. Lisa begins to feel uncertain about what her reality really is. After applying the cream to her face for a few days, Lisa goes to town and encounters people who are shocked at her appearance; asking if she has been sick. One man even calls her husband, concerned, saying her skin is so thin he can see her veins. When her husband arrives back home and sees that she is as beautiful as ever, his worries about her health disappear. Then Lisa tells him about the story she is writing that will “scare the shit out of him.” The story is a combination of Lisa’s own reality and a story she has been working on.