jessielowell

[jessielowell]

Critterman

Words: 1,549 Genre: Horror David taught himself how to self-soothe at the age of six after being locked in a closet by his older brother alongside his pet tarantula. He kept calm by counting the legs. That was the year he asked Santa for the ant farm. The ant farm that offered peace to every violent outburst from his father or all the evenings his mother chased a clatter of medication with merlot. The counting bought him reprieve from his burning mind as he aged. Now, in his late forties, David was a collector. Specimens lined the walls of the room his wife was too afraid to go into. As the stories of his childhood faded into the past like old newspapers in the sun, David’s hobby took over his life. Linda couldn’t make it up the stairs of their apartment anyway. Her weight issues left her rotting on the bowing plaid sofa since they were married 20 years earlier. This gave David the justification he needed to turn their one bedroom into an insect hotel. “You take better care of those bugs than you do your wife!” And she wasn’t wrong. David spent time encouraging local species to pollinate by setting up bug houses on their patio. He’d wander for hours at creeks, near local rivers and ponds, gathering what he could to help his in-house population thrive. He’d once read a story about when Charles Darwin was a teen, he’d been out rooting around some flora and came across two distinct species of beetle he didn’t recognize. On his way to bringing them home, he found a third. It was a marvelous specimen and Darwin had no other choice but to pop one of the original two into his mouth so that he could free up a hand to carry the third back with him. It was then that the beetle taking up temporary residence in Darwin’s mouth, secreted some kind of liquid which forced him to spit the bug out instantly. David recalled this story when he was down at the lake that Tuesday, staring at a peculiar insect that he thought resembled an emerald cockroach wasp with two already full hands. Unable to pass up the unique find, he took only the iridescent, green-shifting-gold bug home with him. David slept curled in a hammock that was suspended in his bedroom, so as to utilize all of the space he could for collecting. That night he set his phone alarm at one hour intervals to monitor the long legged jewel, since none of his books or Google searches had offered any significant information. For the first time in his life, David was clueless. He would answer his questions himself through observation. It was an around the clock job, but he didn’t mind. And when Linda would bitch, David took extra time to re-count the legs around his room. Now, in total, he had a current number of 3,652 legs. There are some things about bug keeping that David didn’t like. One being the inevitable stings or bites that you couldn’t avoid, though you tried anyway. It hurt him a little emotionally, too. Another was occasionally being incapable of providing for them. It wasn’t often, but there had been times where a species would have needs that David could not fulfill. It might have required particular plants that couldn’t be grown inside or struggled to thrive in the small beetle bank he’d landscaped around their porch. Full of hope that his new gemmy friend wouldn’t require high maintenance care, he was nervous. Such a lack of information wasn’t promising. It suggested that, most likely, it would carry too much of a demand to keep indoors. He also hated any time someone referred to his bugs as pets. Despite the fact he labored and cared for them just as a pet owner would, he never felt that they something he owned. The relationship was different. Pets, he thought, were something you trained, taught and they regarded you for it. He knew, even though it pained him to admit it, that the only relationship he had with his crawling treasury was that he was a caretaker. They didn’t respect him. Their existence in relation to David was the primordial thing it had always been. They didn’t acknowledge him outside of their fear-based instincts. To them, David was nothing. To David, they were everything.

His fascination with the now affectionately named Olive grew over the course of days. Much to his surprise, it ate nearly everything David thought to offer it. Even a sunflower seed he had accidentally dropped into it’s enclosure from his morning bagel. Olive was ravenous and seemed to exhibit behaviors that weren’t typical of any insect, let alone a beetle. Satisfied with his observations, David had learned a great deal about the bug but he wasn’t any closer to identifying it. What he had come to discern was that it was a clever juvenile whose attempts to escape confinement were more impressive than they were successful. It had an appetite that David had never seen in any other insect. It grew at twice the rate of anything else David housed and it’s accordion-like thorax stretched easily to manipulate itself into small crevices for hiding. He studied Olive in awe. He watched her grow. He recorded everything. The times she had learned to ask for food by hanging from the plastic slats at the top of her pen. He wrote about when Olive made what seemed like a bed for herself out of decaying bits of oak leaf. And on Saturday, at 10:37PM, David recorded the time she looked at him square in the eye, with a distinctly human effort and cocked her head. It wasn’t that David saw Olive as a formidable critter. It was rather that Olive saw David as one. Not only that but she could make it known to him in a way that transcended language, much the way a dog does to it’s human companion. It was that, as time went on, how they saw one another changed. Their interactions evolved beyond the student and the specimen. They communicated. They connected. So when Olive was anticipating her nightly meal on evening 30 while David had neglected his usual punctuality taking notes in a frenzy, she did something David was certain was impossible: she unlatched the lid to her enclosure and crawled to sit on his finger. This went on for a number of weeks. Olive crawling out of her container to come see David. And though David felt completely bonded and overjoyed at his new - dare he confess it - pet, he grew fearful every time he walked into the house, worried that he would unknowingly crush her beneath his feet. The undeniable fact lingered: she would need a new cage. Something she couldn’t escape so easily. He felt horrible the first night, but it was like ballet. A dance of delirium, his little jewel twisting and stretching against the walls of her plexiglass prison, unsure of where she was or how to leave to get back to her old home. He felt her unhappiness. It was a sting beneath his skin, an ache at the base of his skull and a stillness in his chest. Olive refused to let David hold her for a number of days after being moved into her new box. His concern for her overtook his ability to care for the other insects he kept. It was a day and night job watching Olive. And when her behavior began to change, David gave her every bit of his attention. It started with hoarding. She pushed all of what she was fed into a fissure and refused to eat. A little later, her once shiny exoskeleton began molting. Little flakes of shimmering color flecked off into the dirt like chipped nail polish. David recorded it all, panicked. He went through every book he could, but just as his searches had done in the past, he turned up nothing. Until  finally he came across a journal of his own. It was one he had written back in middle school. He remembered the cover, a dull neon orange and black that peeled in the corners from age. In it were notes he had taken about parasites. It had become clear to him now what Olive was trying to do. What she had been preparing for all this time. So that night, he snuck downstairs with Olive and listened to Linda’s ragged breath stop and start again through snores. On her next harsh intake of air, David carefully set Olive down onto Linda’s chest. The now lackluster beetle cocked her head once at David before burrowing in through Linda’s left nostril. The slow decay of Linda happened over weeks, which was a surprise that David noted in his journal. Usually, a parasite can overtake a host fairly quickly and as such, the execution is swift. Sadly for Linda, Olive had proven herself anything but typical and it was a full 16 days before Linda succumbed. When she finally did, Olive and her little babies poured out from clefts they had made for themselves, mostly between the damper slits of the body. But when they did emerge, David could hardly contain himself, counting the legs.

[jessielowell]

Ding Dong Ditch

Words: 915 Genre: YA, Horror Softening into her plush pink blanket, Megan curled her heels into the leather of her dad’s recliner and grabbed the remote. She checked her phone while deliberating between the new seasons of two of her favorite shows since her parents would return in three more hours from their weekly date night. The routine had existed since she had been old enough to stay home alone. The only changes had been that their dates grew longer as she grew older and this had been her first time staying alone in their new house. The new house she hated. The new house that was old and smelled like her great uncle Nikolai. An unpleasant mix of eucalyptus, stale pipe tobacco and dust. There were some things she liked about it. The way the leaves on the trees out front reddened quicker than the rest in the neighborhood in the coolness of autumn. The large porch. The small, rosy, stained glass windows around the doorway in the foyer. Still, she hated most of the house. They had looked at so many other places that she felt were better suited for her family. This place didn’t feel like it belonged to them at all. It was the outdatedness, she thought. In the curvatures of all the thresholds or the old loose doorknobs that hung a little in their holes, like they could keep nothing out or anything in. She thought they all deserved something more modern and clean like some of the updated houses on the street. Among the two rows of perfectly aligned properties, this house was the cavity of the block. The first time the doorbell rang that evening, Megan didn’t hear it. She was deep into the third episode of her favorite Netflix series and could hardly hear over her own snacking. But she caught it the second time. It chimed so loudly on it’s second ring that she nearly jumped. She checked the time on her phone. 10:37 PM. Her parents weren’t usually home so early and she doubted they would encounter any issues getting in, as forgetting their key would’ve resulted in a text. Reluctant, Megan decided to shoo away whatever new neighbor she figured had no manners so she could continue her evening in, undisturbed. Opening the door let in a small autumn wind but revealed nothing. The porch was empty. As empty as it was the day they moved in. Not even the toolbox she’d grown used to seeing up until that morning when her father had finally put it someplace else. Megan shut the door and went back to the recliner. The doorbell rang again just minutes later. Determined to ignore it, she turned up the volume for the last few moments of her show and sat upright, leaning toward the tv engrossed. Ding-dong. The sound came and went again as Megan fought back with another increase of volume but felt a swell of frustration build equally as loud. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. The remote rolled from her lap to the floor with a thud as she stood to rush the front door.  Yanking it open in a swift anger to find no one standing there. Just remnants of small laughter coming from the side of the house where the wind-bent weeds laid. Megan wasn’t sure what to do. To pursue the children she knew were toying with her or to assume they’d had their fun, ignore them and mosey back inside. Vexation consuming her, she shouted, “Wrong game, wrong house!” and slammed the door. Returning to the living room, her annoyance piled up. She’d forgotten to pause her show. Though just as she started to find the place she left off, the doorbell came again. Ding-dong, ding-dong, ding-dong. A rapid series of chimes echoed through the house, urging Megan to go back outside. As if they were yelling at her to open the door. Beckoning, bellowing, enticing her like a siren does her men, though the chimes blended together one after the other into a song that sounded more like a Banshee’s call. Megan moved silently in the shadows of the foyer, carefully using the loud bells as cover for her own footfalls. Creeping behind the large door, she hurled it open to find two young boys dressed warmly with snickering grins that quickly morphed into gapes of shock which just as quickly changed into expressions of horror once they saw Megan. Not the Megan who shouted at them just moments before. This Megan’s mouth slowly oozed open. A thick black hole whose chin dripped and melted toward the floorboards of the porch. Her eyes went misshapen, their lids moving up into her eyebrows which were bent crooked and growing upward, away from the rest of her face. The face that was no longer the face of a teenage girl but of a creature. Her once, bouncy blonde curls turned into oil slicked tendrils that reached for the edges of the threshold as if they meant to keep the rest of her contained. The boys tried to run away, but Megan took a deep, bronchial breath which sounded like a train’s movement through an old decrepit town. The breath locked them in place and turned them from their pink, cheery-cheeked boys to grayed-out shells of children, right before pulling the boys into the dark pit of her mouth and swallowing them whole. Megan spun the door closed and contentedly returned to the recliner, where Netflix asked if she was still watching.