THE SUSURRATION OF LEG AND MANDIBLE

THE SUSURRATION OF LEG AND MANDIBLE
by Ben Serna-Grey

He was watching, silent observer of the rabbit in the road. Its nose twitched in small waves, each wave sending out a rivulet of dread as the inevitable creeped upon the pair. He could not move from where he watched, outwardly numb and internally crying out anguish because he knew, he knew what was coming but was helpless to stop it.

Howling in the distance. The rabbit froze. Please, oh god please! A blurring roar and the rabbit was pushed to the ground, all hard angles and wrong places, head crunched back to stare at him with one pleading, accusatory eye. It opened its mouth and screamed.

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Kenneth did not jolt up with a gasp. His eyes didn’t bolt open to reveal his bedroom, sheets soaked in cold sweat. No, none of that, not anymore. His eyes scraped open, dog tired, as dread gripped his guts in a tight fist. He looked over to his phone, docked in a desktop clock radio. 7:10. Twenty minutes before his alarm this time. He pushed up to sitting and rubbed grit from his eyes. Blades of light pushed their way in around his blinds and he breathed a heavy sigh. A sharp pain on his neck made him twitch, then hit again. He felt around where the pain was, and picked something from his neck, holding it in front of his face. A beetle ran around his fingers, mandibles chomping angrily in the air and at his skin.

He yelped, smacking the beetle hard into his hand where it squirmed and bit. He flung it across the room. Kenneth jolted out of bed and got dressed, pushing out of the bedroom and using the front bathroom to take care of his morning ritual, feeling phantom itches the entire way.

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At work, at his desk, he kept being pulled away from everyday drudgery with absolute conviction that a beetle was crawling down his arm, wending its way out of his sleeve. His workday went in a blur of silent panic, smacking at his arms and body, thankful for the cubicle that shut him off from most of the world as he flailed, teetering on the edge of tears.

He stopped off at the corner store on his way back home, picking up a pack of hard ciders and a pint of ice cream, pinning everything on the efficacy of old standards of comfort. Friends reruns smeared through the night in mashed globs of sound and video-grain, ice cream turning to fearful dry mouth as Kenneth ate. Cider after cider was downed, smudging focus into one single, tremulous point: Kenneth was so filled to the brim with tension and fear that everything threatened to collapse. He smacked at a phantom beetle crawling across his torso and burst into braying sobs.

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The rabbit’s nose twitched, one eye rolling back to uncanny angle, staring. The spine crunched down into a harsh V and the creature opened its mouth with a piercing wail, a flood of black pouring out.

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Kenneth jerked up from the couch, a deep and harsh pain inside his ear pulling him awake. The TV had gone long black, and as the cumulative fog of alcohol and anxiety began to clear he grew cognizant of the ripping noise trawling through his ear like static. There was something in there, burrowing. Vomit began to rise.

He stumbled to the bathroom, teetering all the way. It’s doing something to your inner ear, the fist of anxiety screamed into him. Get it out NOW.

He jammed a Q-tip in there, swirling it around. He ended up pushing whatever it was deeper, and screeching with pain as it thrashed around, scratching, growing louder. Familiar pains began to surface, reminding him of when his eardrum burst as a child when he’d had an ear infection.

Panicking, Kenneth ripped the hydrogen peroxide from the medicine cabinet and tipped it into his ear, wincing at the immediate fizz. The scratching stopped, then lifted up and out. He stared into the mirror, eyes bulging, as a large black form pushed its way out of his ear, then began to crawl toward his eye, gaining speed, mandibles gnashing the air. Kenneth screamed, shaking hands smacking at his own face hard enough to sing pain all through his body, eventually smacking the beetle off onto the floor, where he brought his foot down. The first stomp did nothing. The second only slowed it down a little, the back legs faltering but still it pressed forward toward him. The third stomp finally immobilized it, head writhing around, mandibles chomping air.

Kenneth’s scream had devolved into a sickly whine, and he sank down to the floor, weeping.

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Later, after trying and failing to choke down another cider, when Kenneth managed to brush his teeth and head toward the bedroom, smacking and scratching, knees shaking as they threatened to deliver him to another cowering breakdown, he froze, hand on the knob. He could hear them. Scratching. Scuttling. Crawling. Tunneling. Feel their mandibles in the air. Moving in a mass, a dark swarm of gnashing. He was trapped by the fact of the doorway, the knowledge that beyond that threshold slouched a gnawing terror. He could feel them, in his stomach, his heart, his lungs, he could see them in his mind, massed on the bed, waiting just for the signal of a crack in the doorway.

He remembered the technique his therapist had taught him when he was little. A deep, slow breath in, counting to ten. Hold ten. Let the breath go to the count of ten. Repeat, holding for one less second each time. His heart slowed to normal, and vowing to contact the apartment office tomorrow about pest control, he slowly turned the knob, pushing the door in with a creak. Nothing.

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The spine was already broken, head angled back to gaze in revulsion at its voyeur. Ears canted straight along the pavement, curling up at the ends, each tipped in a little spoonful of blood. He held his breath as the rabbit’s mouth eased open. No scream this time. A deep, dark flood. The roar of water.

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His mouth. It was in his mouth. Gnashing at his tongue, the inside of his lips, leaving the sour taste of bug shit behind with every step. Kenneth opened just enough, feeling the crazed shuffle of the creature exiting, crawling onto his face, down to his neck. Tears rolled down to puddle in his ears.

He didn’t stop its crawl, pricking legs winding their way down beneath his shirt, leaving an itching trail. Coughs burst their way out painfully and he sat up to find a spatter of beetles plopping out onto the sheets with each convulsion. They were inside of him. They scattered onto the floor, and Kenneth pushed up from the bed, stumbling his way to the bathroom, every few steps the occasional squish of a bug underfoot. They were still falling from his mouth. His entire inside itched, and he wanted to rip his skin open and tear the bugs out, just fucking get them out.

In the bathroom mirror, in the sterile white glow, he could see them crawling, peeking out from his nostrils, could swear he saw a bulge moving up, up, up his face to force its way out from his eye. He tried to scream and found his throat choked off, and he could feel the writhing black mass forcing its way up.

Everything blurred as he fell back, dimly acknowledging a shard of pain that forced its way into his consciousness as he hit his head on the toilet seat on the way down.

Eventually the pain gave way to a sort of endless feeling of air rushing out from his lungs, and the wooshing feeling he used to like when getting drunk was still enjoyable. When Kenneth came to, he found himself lying on the cool tile floor of his bathroom, a blessedly small pool of blood under his head.

He was cleaned out, as if he had suffered through two nights of food poisoning and had nothing left inside. He pushed up to standing, noting only a few black specks on the floor where dead insects lay after being crushed under foot,  beyond that there were few signs of their ever having been there.

Out in the bedroom, sitting on his bed, wreathed in the unbroken whisper of flailing tiny legs, stood a shadow form of Kenneth, constructed of writhing insects.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, Kenneth felt at peace. All the sorrow, all the unease, had left him. He was an empty vessel. The shadow form stood up, and Kenneth walked forward to embrace it, swallowed by the susurration of leg and mandible. They became one.

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He was dreaming. He was lying flat on the road, unable to move. Violent static ran up his spine, screaming at him that he was being watched. He wound one eye, gaped open with unwieldy horror, back, back, back. A truck came howling down the road, wheels cleaving spine in two. Beyond the blur of tires, he saw himself outlined in squirming black shadow. He screamed.

Fiction © Copyright Ben Serna-Grey
Image by D. Strohl