Hatch
written by: Stella Jay
The insectile hum tore him out of bed.
“Tinnitus, my ass!” Diego whimpered, face hot with threatening tears.
The doctor swore up and down that his ears were empty, utterly bugless, no earwigs in sight. But the vows of a PhD fell flat when the hum of the eighth plague wrenched a man from sleep at 3 AM. The sound reverberated through his body, making his bones vibrate.
How is a bug in my ear making my whole body buzz, they’re burrowing into my brain gnawing at my nervous system giving me twitches and shakes-
In the bathroom, Diego grabbed a cotton swab and shoved it into the dark dampness of his ear canal. His wild-eyed reflection gaped at him above the jack-o-lantern gel clings stuck to the mirror as he scraped at already-raw skin. His teeth chattered when he exhaled. He stared into his bloodshot eyes, certain that he would see locusts waving at him from the windows of the too-wide pupils that sat like fat spiders on webs spun of blood.
Movement in his peripheral vision made him jump (oh god they ARE in my eyeballs), sending the cotton bud deep into his ear. Sharp pain exploded through his skull, doubling him over the sink with a canine whine as wet heat filled his ear canal. Pain and pressure pulsed like the abdomen of a fat queen bee wedged into honeycomb. He pressed a trembling hand against his ear to create a vacuum and suction the damn thing out like pool water, pumping violently despite the stab of pain that came with each sucking pull. Wetness oozed onto his palm.
Slug! His stomach twisted, wringing the courage out of him.
Diego barely kept his feet as last night’s dinner flew into the sink. Vomit splashed his white knuckles. The room spun. Wet gasps punctuated the surges of gagging, half pain, half panic, ooze running out of his ear and down his jaw. He closed his eyes and envisioned a green slug melting down the side of his face, still pulsing as it died.
Somehow, he didn’t pass out. It might have been better if he had.
When the heaving stopped, he swiped at his jaw and confronted the ooze on his fingers. Blood, of course. Blood from the self-inflicted injury. Dr. Xiong and the Q-tip box had both warned against shoving small objects into his ears, damn him. Another involuntary shudder rattled his bones and buzzed in his head. The bloody ear was noticeably quieter.
“Dammit, Diego,” he hissed.
Another look at his reflection revealed the source of the movement that had scared him so badly. It wasn’t a bug in his eyeball. The Halloween gel cling in the top right-hand corner of the mirror, a skeleton wearing a red bow tie, had slumped forward as it began to peel away from the glass. He yanked it free and whipped it into the trash, disgusted.
The kids were with their mother until November 1st anyway. They wouldn’t miss it. His ex-wife had plenty of Halloween decorations, and he’d have to be Thanksgiving-ready come November if he wanted to measure up. Assuming the bugs hadn’t eaten his brain by then.
Diego ran the faucet to rinse his mouth, drown out his still-chattering teeth, and confer with whatever crumb of sanity he still possessed. If he called 911 now, hysteria would earn him a sedative, a straitjacket, and a stay in a padded room. Mariah would get full custody. That was not an option.
He’d clean up the gore first, then make some medicinal mac ‘n cheese. Eat his feelings, get his heart rate down, and drive himself calmly and rationally to the hospital, where he could calmly and rationally explain his problem to a fresh doctor who wouldn’t dismiss him. Maybe a pretty, sympathetic, single female doctor who specialized in human parasites.
***
The maw enveloped him utterly.
In the dark, he quaked with fear. Its slimy walls stiffened to stifle his shivers. It squeezed him (his ribs his legs his arms), forcing him to move. Every moment, he was sure it would pulverize him, that it would squeeze and squeeze until he was ground into dust. He was shrink-wrapped. His teeth, the only bits of him not encased in pulsating parasite, clicked together noisily as he trembled.
The monster forced him into a bow and wrenched his jaw open, spasming against his bones. It squeezed so hard his fingers ached. Something wet, something the parasite expelled from between his jaws, splashed against his teeth. The thing was within him as well as outside of him.
That was the worst part: the life inside him, the frantic heaving that forced his ribcage to rise and fall in seasick waves. It had colonized him absolutely, and it was wet and throbbing inside his hollow places. A network of rubbery tunnels pumping hot fluid pressed against him and wormed into him, forcing stinking dampness even into his pores.
Terror kept him frozen, limp but quivering like a windswept sock on a clothesline. Every moment, some new facet of horror sapped the strength from his limbs. If not for the maw, he would have clattered to pieces on the floor, robbed of the nerve to keep his feet.
Then again, if not for the maw, he would have run.
The heaving slowed. The parasite wrenched him upright and moved his legs again; the shock of their combined weight radiated up his tibia. It squeezed his arm out and twisted his fingers. There was a flash of heat. Something hotter than the beating wet warmth of the parasite– a wavering, arrhythmic heat he understood in his very marrow.
Fire.
***
Diego was reaching for the cupboard when his right arm threw itself onto the glowing blue burner.
His funny bone reported the impact before he registered the heat; pins and needles radiated from his elbow down to his fingertips, where his nerves exploded into fireworks. His lungs deflated as the breath wheezed out of him.
Then his nose crinkled against the stench of burning hair.
Then the flames lapped at his stunned nerves, overtaking the pins and needles. A gasp tore noisily down his throat as his muscles twitched, creating a series of tiny convulsions in their failure to lift his suddenly-heavy arm. He was so weak, so abruptly feeble as if there were a thousand pounds of vibrating lead at his core.
My arm is so heavy why can’t I lift it up, what happened to my muscles???
The despair over his sudden frailty was short-lived, replaced by something worse when his elbow locked in defiance of his straining bicep. His right hand froze into a fist he couldn’t relax; overgrown fingernails cut into his palm. Beads of sweat stood up on his skin.
His arm wasn’t heavy, he realized. It was insubordinate.
THEY’RE IN MY BRAIN!!!
He grasped the frozen fist in his left hand and pulled– even the left arm wouldn’t pull as hard as it should like he was trying to move it through tar. Each movement was a slow-motion walk of nightmares. There was a tension inside his own body, a push against his pull that resulted in paralysis.
Had the bugs ever been inside his ears? Was the disgusting buzz just a hallucination begat by the misfire of bug-nibbled neurons? Maybe they had been in his brain the whole time, larvae wiggling through folds of gray matter, biding their time until hatch day. Oh, god, his doctor was going to get off on a technicality. She’d tell everyone that the parasite had entered through some other orifice– probably his anus, that would be his luck– and that her stupid patient had led her on a wild goose chase kvetching about his ears (which the stupid patient had then willfully destroyed with a cotton swab, like a butt-parasite-harboring idiot). Outrage pulsed through him.
His arm slid a few inches. For a moment, Diego thought he’d regained control.
Then the fist opened, the arm twisted, and his palm flattened against the burner. His fingertips curled around the metal circle. A high whine hummed against the roof of his mouth. His chest heaved as the blue flames justly ordained for mac ‘n cheese licked the skin off his treacherous hand.
Diego jerked the uninjured hand to the stove controls only to find that one locked, too, rigid with its fingers extended, reduced to a flipper. Unable to grasp and twist, the bugs having nibbled their way through the wires that carried commands from his brain to his fingertips, he pawed at the knob. Oh, god, he had never properly appreciated having access to opposable thumbs.
On impulse, Diego threw himself backwards. There was a sound like the skin coming off a peach. He nearly jerked the rebel arm out of its socket, but his full weight flying in the opposite direction was enough to free him. The back of his head cracked against the island and his joints released, arms flying out to either side.
He lay sprawled on the checkered tile floor, chin against his chest, the air whooping in and out of his lungs. His forehead, rather than the site of impact, throbbed.
Concussion, he thought, slammed my brain against the inside of my skull, hope I squished a few, maybe that’ll teach the fuckers. In his mind’s eye, he saw a row of bedridden flies wearing full-body casts.
Howling laughter threatened to choke him out. The bugs in his mind were surrounded by hospital gift shop stuffed animals (plush earwigs and cockroaches) and GET WELL SOON! balloons. The sexy nurse was a black widow, white skirt stretched tight over her red hourglass.
I shouldn’t sexualize the nurse like this, Diego thought, with real guilt, watching black sparks dance before his dizzy eyes. She’s just doing her job.
A violent shiver vibrated his head further down the island. His teeth chattered, biting his laughter into chunks.
Still, the nurse was very sexy. He hoped sexual attraction to a spider in a sexy nurse Halloween costume was the result of traumatic brain injury and not a reflection of his truest self. What a terrible way to find out he was not only disgusting, but weird.
A low moan broke through the cackling as Diego drew his burnt arm to his chest. Blood spattered onto his shirt. His fingers were immobile charcoal hooks. The burnt circle stamped into his forearm was black around the edges. His flesh had melted, run, and stuck to the burner, leaving several inches of exposed ivory shining in the fluorescent light. Up and down his arm, further from the core of the burn, his skin had split open like the crispy exterior of a roast pig, oozing fluid. If he were so inclined, he could have grabbed that skin and pulled it off like a sleeve.
It would be just like exfoliating a perfectly burnt marshmallow. Peel off that crispy black marshmallow skin to get at the molten goo inside.
***
He fell.
White hot pain nailed the back of his skull, pain so bad that it seared all the way into the tips of his canine teeth. Stunned, ragdoll-limp, he couldn’t resist the parasite’s squeezing and pushing, and it moved his limbs freely.
When the shock started to abate, he discovered new sensations. There was an easing up around his arm like the maw’s snakelike outer layers had loosened. Like it was losing its grip on the bone.
The other sensation was hope: the soft tickle of air fluttering against his radius.
An opening.
He’d done it. He’d burned an opening in the thing’s flesh.
He jerked his still parasite-encased left hand toward that opening, dug his fingers into it (nausea rolled through him as the wet blight squelched against his filthy radius), and pulled, ripping up fistfuls of oozing growth. The maw squeezed all around him, squeezed against his ribcage and his feet and his pelvis, trying to smother him, trying to immobilize him. It wrenched his jaw open again to shriek through his teeth.
He was stronger, he realized, as the thing failed to overpower even his still-enveloped left arm. Had he always been stronger? Had the parasite’s power come from fear alone?
He, the skeleton, did not stop tearing at his arm until his fingers could run up and down the blessedly empty space between ulna and radius. Then he grabbed the hand he’d cooked, tightened his grip around the parasite’s flame-loosened rind, and peeled it off like a glove. The air kissed his exposed fingertips.
The thing squeezed and relaxed, rocking them back and forth as he worked. The mind-numbing rhythm in his chest made the less rhythmic motions– the horrible ones in his skull– even clearer, hideous in their irregularity. The slick swivel of wet, slippery balls wedged into his eye sockets was all at once too much to bear. Both hands shot up to his face and found the fat beads rolling and twitching. He jammed his fingers into his eye sockets hard enough to knock his skull against the hard surface behind them again. The balls ruptured and oozed around his fingertips, twin ticks speared on his distal phalanges.
The thing yowled through his teeth as he ripped the leaking, deflating sacs out of his head– he scratched and scratched the thin layer of tissue still vacuum-sealed to the curves of his sockets–
And he could see.
He thrust his trembling arms out in front of him and saw the parasite for the first time: smooth beige fungus growing all over his bones, molded around him just like a glove, wet and covered in fine hair. He gagged, his torso convulsing forward. The thing responded by wailing through his open jaw again. The grotesque, oyster-like muscle living between his jaws– its larvae?– writhed against his teeth.
His fingers wormed into the wet mess growing on his jaw, grasped the slippery maggot, and found it firmly rooted to the bottom of the cavity. The flailing little leech wiggled out of his grip again and again as he tried to jerk it out of his mouth. Finally, he pulled it taught and bit through it, spitting its length onto the black and white floor. Hot fluid oozed from the stump and flowed over his teeth.
A gargling caterwaul reverberated in his skull. The parasite heaved inside his chest, forcing his ribcage to rise and fall and stretch and relax in oceanic swaying movements– the very first horror he had suffered, the one that had terrorized him from the moment he woke up: its presence within him, its lurking in all his hollow places, its muck bearing down on him, its weight throwing him mercilessly about.
He was stronger now, he thought, as it stretched against his ribs again.
He bore down on it, still trembling with fear but sick of being pushed around, squeezing it as it had squeezed him for so long.
***
Diego couldn’t breathe.
Iron fetters bound his lungs. His hands tore at his chest, his belly, his throat, and he didn’t know if he was the one doing the tearing or not. He thrashed on the kitchen floor, blind and mute, flopping around gape-mouthed like a marooned goldfish, unable to see, unable to scream, unable to breathe, not because there was anything in his throat but because there was no space for air in his chest, no room for his lungs to inflate, the breath smothered right out of him by the confines of his own ribcage and he was going to die, he was going to choke and die right there on the kitchen floor and it was murder, he was murdered, murdered by the bugs that had crawled in his ears and hot-wired his brain and burned him and clawed out his eyes and how would he know when he was dead if everything was already black and oh god oh god it was still buzzing, every bone in his body shaking, and suddenly there was a muffled screaming, a screaming that came from inside him but wasn’t his because he had no breath, and it was getting louder, louder as the clawing at his skin first hurt worse and then hurt less, hurt less while the screaming got quieter and quieter, and there was a loud, electric ringing in his ear-
Tinnitus, he thought drily, THAT is tinnitus, Doc.
The muscle he still had was limp, loose… relaxed, dizzy… but he was still moving… still being moved… his whole body pushed and pulled… this way… and… that… damn. bugs.
***
FISHTALE DIVIDED OVER SKELETON CASE
Discourse surrounding the death of Diego Hernandez continued to heat up on Thursday, coming to a head when Alice Marshall struck counter-protester Reverend Maurice Ashman in the face with a papier-mache skull. After sharing that she was always happy to punch a bigot, Marshall, 24, informed reporters that this was the very same skull which will star as Yorick in Fishtale High School’s upcoming production of Hamlet.
“Tickets are available at FHS dot edu,” she added.
The Reverend, who chose not to press charges, called her several words not suitable for publication.
“A man was just murdered by his own skeleton,” said the Reverend, “and these people are trying to secure its civil rights. We don’t know where it came from, or if it’s catching. We want it gone. Incinerate it and send it to hell.”
This incident is a reflection of rising tensions both inside and outside the courtroom. In February, police discovered defendant John Doe (who is a skeleton) partially enclosed in the remains of Diego Hernandez. Officer April Hudson described the scene as:
“… grisly… At first, I thought Diego was screaming, but he couldn’t have been, could he? The skeleton had already pulled out most of his guts by then. His intestines were on the floor… you could smell the feces… his throat was gone by then, too. We could see his spine. The skeleton had got a Cutco knife from the knife block.”
The unique circumstances of the case surrounding the first sentient skeleton have complicated standard legal procedures. Initial debates surrounded preservation of evidence and abuse of a corpse after Doe was taken into custody while still affixed to Hernandez. After several days of threats from Doe’s attorney, Chloe Lopez, the Fishtale Police Department brought in several hundred thousand dermestid beetles to strip the remains of Hernandez’s flesh from what activists argue is John Doe’s body. Lopez disclosed that Doe plans to sue the Fishtale Police Department for emotional distress…
“C’mon, let’s get out of here,” Lopez muttered, “you can look at your face in the paper later.”
John Doe bobbed his head in the affirmative and pushed in his seat. He only spoke inside the courtroom– with a clear, quiet voice and the extensive, occasionally mispronounced vocabulary of an avid reader– and only when speech was demanded of him.
Every day, he sat quietly beside Lopez, wearing a heavy suit jacket that fit too tight across the shoulders, too short in the arms, and too loose everywhere else. A charismatic red bow tie provided a much-needed splash of color. Doe was a sloucher, his shoulders always folded inward, his grinning skull ducked as if in response to a good scolding. He fidgeted constantly, bouncing his leg or crossing his ankles. On the first day, he’d kept folding his hands on the table in front of them, clasping and unclasping his finger bones with a disturbing, inhuman clicking sound that could have lost them their entire case. At her order, he had since donned a pair of white gloves in public.
Today, there had been less slouching. Doe had periodically leaned back in his seat to take a sweeping look around the room, turning his head to fix his eye sockets on each person. Because he lacked the flesh necessary for facial expressions, it was difficult to know what he thought. Maybe he looked at each person and saw a skeleton trapped inside.
Lopez felt the hair rise on the back of her neck. She was careful to stare rigidly at whoever spoke in the courtroom. She could not be seen staring or poking at the thinnest parts of her skin, where the evidence of her own skeleton pressed outward like a knuckle through a latex glove.
Now, her client offered the newspaper back to the prosecutor, who had thrown it at him following a string of accusations. The prosecutor declined to touch anything Doe had touched. Lopez and Doe exited the courthouse. Doe’s number one fan, the Marshall woman, was shouting at reporters.
“… No one in any forward-thinking country is required to host another adult person on their body! You’re not even required to donate blood! Even if somebody’s about to freaking die! You get control over your own body. John couldn’t even see with Hernandez smothering him. He did nothing wrong. Nothing the rest of us wouldn’t do…”
Lopez put a hand on the back of Doe’s suit jacket, hurrying him toward the car. The protesters dressed in the Halloween skeleton onesies and catsuits erupted into applause. Someone had erected one of those twelve-foot Home Depot skeletons, stuck a giant red bow tie on it, and given it a sign that read JUSTICE FOR JOHN.
“We’ve got you, John!” Marshall screamed, holding up her hands in the shape of a heart.
John Doe turned his everlasting grin on her and affectionately laid a gloved hand over the left side of his ribcage, where once beat the heart of Diego Hernandez.
- Hatch - November 2, 2024
- Death Valley Scenic Byway - September 12, 2024
