by Madeline Lee
Trigger warning tags: gore, blood, self-mutilation, death
First of all, I want you to look me in the eye. I don’t look crazy, do I? Please believe me, or this entire conversation will be pointless. I understand that were I in your position, I would think that the person sitting across from me was, just by that statement alone, out of their mind. But I say this now in perfect confidence of my own sanity.
For months now I have been hoping to come across someone who would believe me. I suppose I want to talk about it so badly because, if I have just one listener, then maybe I can believe myself. The story of how I came to be in this position, and begging a stranger to listen to my story, is a horrifying prospect but, I promise you, it will not take long. I won’t steal any more of your time than is necessary.
I was no different than you. Not this distraught, nefarious creature sitting before you. I was neatly-dressed, well-kept, educated with a stable job, with the world working in my favour. I believed, in my arrogance, that I could live like that forever; find someone and start a family. Things a mundane person would wish for. Mundanity is often used in a condescending way, but when things become so abhorred and unusual, it becomes a blessing to wish for.
I was rudely awakened from my dream life when I had my car accident which, I figure, is the proper beginning of this tale. It was one of those incidents in which nobody was to blame but nature and my own haste. It was late and the roads were wet from rain. It wasn’t even a bad storm, just a light spring shower. I was on my phone which, in retrospective consideration of the numerous texting-while-driving dangers ads I have seen, was an illogical move.
What happened next is still blurry, even to the scrutiny of my memory. An animal of some kind, a hunched troglodyte beast, darted out onto the road. There it stood, eyes burned in the gloom, staring at bright, on-rushing death. It was far too late for me to stop, even if the roads had been bone dry. Inevitably, I crashed into it.
The car slid off the road and, I was told, rolled several times before hitting a tree. The only thing I could recall after the sound of crunching tendons and crumbling metals was waking up to the beeping and whirring of machines—there wasn’t even time enough for me to feel pain.
There was not a part of me that was left undamaged. I tried to lift the bed sheet to inspect my body, to see myself, but a grinding, sharp pain prevented me from moving my arm. I glanced over blearily and saw that it was in traction. As my vision solidified I saw that not only my arm, but both my legs were elevated by the complicated system of bright white straps and pulleys. I became conscious of the weight pressing down on my head. When I tried to move it, I found that my neck was in a brace, forcing me to keep still.
That moment, not the crash, represented the pinnacle of pain and misfortune for me in life; no other hardship that I had endured—bad grades, the loss of a parent, disappointment at my favourite volleyball team’s score—came close. Little did I know that my vocabulary of pain would, very shortly, expand in ways that I could scarcely have understood at the time.
…..scratch…hiss
A nurse came through the little privacy curtain that sectioned off my half of the room. It wasn’t long before she noticed that I had regained consciousness.
“How long have I been out?”
“Just a little more than a week,” she replied. Her tone was reassuringly dismissive, as if a week without consciousness was a common occurrence and was nothing to get excited about. As practised and professional as she was, it didn’t work on me.
It would have been less frightening if she had said I had been unconscious for months or years. In that time things would have changed drastically, beyond my control, and well-wishing friends would have kept my bedside table supplied with fragrant flowers and hideous get-well-soon cards. I could have started life anew.
Just more than a week would mean that the paperwork at my office would have built up. I would have to put in hours of overtime to catch up, I would have to deal with the tech company, and many of my friends and family would probably still be unaware of what happened to me, meaning I would have to contact each of them personally and tell the story over and over. Though I had just regained consciousness, exhaustion festered inside of me like a poison.
The nurse took readings off the machines and from my broken body. “The doctor will be in soon to talk to you,” she said, closing the curtain behind her as she left. The definition of “soon” seemed to have changed in the short time that I was out. I lay in my bed, staring at the digital clock on the wall. Time moved agonisingly slow. The only thing to break the monotony was the rhythmic beeping of the hospital’s machines.
And, strangely, the chirruping of a single insect on the wall opposite my bed. Two long chirrups, and then a pause, then two more, all with a regularity that was nearly mechanical. It appeared in my audible perception suddenly—as if I had been hearing it for some time but had only just become aware of it.
…..scratch…hiss
I thought it was strange that a bug could make it into such a starkly white and sterile room. That it just clung to the wall without moving only added to the eerie sense that grew the longer I stared at it.
Just when I began to think it would never move, gradual writhes and twists brought it to the cast on my leg. Closer up, I could see it in greater detail. It was a dark khaki colour, with burnt-orange blotches on its back that were themselves speckled with black. The legs were thin, discrete and lined, and aligned along the length of its body. It sat there, making its drawn-out chirruping, and seemed to stare at me through its red, bulbous eyes. Somehow it seemed as if it was considering me, sizing me up. I realised that after the fact, having experienced what I have now.
It began to scratch at my cast with its spindly, delicate-looking legs. I tried to shake it off but couldn’t move my leg enough to startle it. It scratched with a concentrated intensity until it had scraped away a thin layer of the cast, throwing up white dust in a small cloud around it.
It was starting to become scared—there was no telling why it was doing, what it was doing or how far it would burrow into my cast. Its small body dug feverishly and started to disappear beneath the surface of the cast. I called out for a nurse again and again in increasing desperation, but none came.
Now completely obscured by a mound of shifting white dust, I could feel it touch the skin of my leg. It used its preternatural strength to start tearing through my flesh. The pain was like ripping needles; its movements were tiny but relentless. I screamed, again and again until the room echoed, but still no one came to save me. Blood and pieces of skin flew out of the hole that it had made in the cast in wild, almost celebratory throws, turning the white dust and the bed sheets red. I soon had no more voice to scream with—it felt as if I tore something in my throat—but still I tried anyway, thrashing in the traction but no more able to move than before.
I felt it meet the bone in my leg. That’s when it stopped. Over my cracked and strangled voice still feebly calling out for help, I could hear it chirruping again.
…..scratch…hiss
Suddenly the curtain around my bed opened, revealing an older man in a white coat looking down at me. I looked back at him and tried to point to my leg with a bound hand, nodding toward it with my head. He looked down and looked at me, confused.
“Do you have an itch?” He said, “Casts do that sometimes.”
I looked down at my leg and the cast was whole and unblemished, not stained with blood and ripped pieces of flesh. I stammered and found that I could talk.
“There was a bug….” was all that I could muster. My voice was shaking too badly. The doctor smiled reassuringly.
“It’s just a bad dream,” he said, “I don’t want to alarm you but you’ve been out of it for over a week.”
He explained the severity of my injuries, how lucky I was to be alive, and the amount of physical therapy that I would have to endure. I tried to listen to him but my eyes were drawn back to my leg, expecting the insect to reappear at any moment. Nothing.
After he finished talking, the doctor gave me a fatherly pat on my shoulder and left through the curtain. Physical therapy was long and painful, but that pain was nothing compared to what I experienced the first day I woke up. I had almost convinced myself that it had been a dream like the doctor said—it wasn’t as if there was any evidence of what I thought had happened, nor had I had any incident, or heard any chirruping, since then. My body recovered as much as would have been possible.
The day came that I was to be discharged. I looked around my room, as if I would see another insect crawling around now that I was alone, waiting, but the air was as empty and sterile. The walls and machines were unblemished and unoccupied as if, moments ago, diligent sanitation staff had just left.
All was well but I couldn’t stop scratching. My legs had been itching for days, the blistered red skin turning to scaly scabs within minutes, demanding to be scratched. Running my hands across them, they felt dry. The feeling in my fingertips dulled.
I called a friend of mine and he brought a bag of clothes for me to change into, after which he would drive me back to my apartment. Poor Jun. If I had known what would happen to him, what I would do to them later that night, I would have just walked home.
Jun waited in my room while I dressed. As I stiffly put on my jeans I couldn’t resist another look at my leg—the one that I thought the insect had bored into—and, truthfully, I inspected my leg each chance I got since the cast was taken off. I felt the pain in my leg as it ripped pieces away; I felt the spindly legs and bullet-shaped body squirming inside me. Now it didn’t even twinge.
I slowly brought my hands down to take off my socks. It was instantly obvious how much worse my feet were. The skin was pale, cracked, and scales almost didn’t do justice to the serpentine pattern that was now etched into my skin. The inside of my sock was full of flakes. I shuddered at the thought of putting them back on. Standing, I tried to ignore the flakes which fell from my hands. I was sure Jun was staring at me. Freak. What normal person would let themselves get into this kind of a position?
The incident was so real to me that I could still remember the pain that the bug had caused; the sensation of a foreign body beneath my flesh and muscle; how it had nestled against my shin bone.
I finished pulling on my pants, zipped and buttoned them, and made to stand up. That’s when it happened again: a faint chirruping, only this time, it was muffled. I looked around desperately, hopefully, for another insect, an innocent and mundane one, which had somehow managed to find its way into my room.
There were none.
I began to relax, but as I did, I heard a muffled but nonetheless unmistakable, chirruping noise.
…..scratch…hiss
I almost ripped my pants to pieces in an effort to get them off. When I did I looked at the skin of my leg, the place where I had seen, or thought I saw, the insect enter me. It was still smooth and unblemished but the noise was certainly coming from that spot.
Fear and panic gripped me. It had happened after all, it was real, and that thing was still inside my leg. I scratched and beat at my skin in an effort to get to the bug inside, to make it stop its maddening noise. I must have shouted because Jun came running into my room. He asked me what was happening but in my panic I could only point at my leg and whimper. They pushed me back down onto the bed where I thrashed to get at my leg and quickly pressed the button by my bed to summon a nurse.
One came rushing into my room and made the natural assumption that I had somehow re-injured myself. She injected a painkiller into my arm and I calmed down, but became too woozy to tell anyone about the insect. It didn’t matter at that moment though, as the chirruping had stopped.
I was given another X-ray and we waited for the results. It showed, as I knew it would, that I had healed completely. I stayed quiet about what had really happened. It sounded ridiculous, even to me, now that all was silent. I was cleared to leave again long after night had fallen, the waning drug-induced stupor still strong enough to help me sleep.
I don’t remember the journey home, or Jun putting me into my bed, but that’s where I woke up. I looked at the digital clock beside the bed. The bright cyan numbers told me that I had only been asleep for a few hours. I was thankful I was awake, though. I felt that I had slept enough for a lifetime.
A shadow moving across the light that shined beneath my closed bedroom door told me that Jun was still there. We had taken care of one another while drunk many times, and he didn’t seem to be treating this incident any different. No doubt they had found the pillow and quilt in the hallway closet I kept for those occasions and was preparing to stay the night.
My thoughts turned to all the people I had to notify of my return. My phone was lost, destroyed in the accident, so I lazily rolled over to find the little red address book that I kept in my bedside table. I got as far as opening the drawer, wondering if Jun would let me borrow their phone in the morning when I heard it again: the muffled, drawn-out chirruping.
I froze in my rummaging. Chemical-induced sleep had blissfully allowed me to forget about the insect and its residence in my leg, but the last shreds of morphine were chased away when I heard the noise yet again. This time I didn’t bother to look around my room—I could recognize the sound well enough now.
I struggled out of my jeans and looked down at my leg, but again, there wasn’t even a lump to tell me where the insect was. It was then I felt it move: a tickling, itchy scrabble. In my mind I saw tiny, frail legs pressed down by red strips of muscle trying to find a purchase on my shin bone in order to move. And move it did, slowly climbing toward my knee; the tickling, itching sensation marked its progress.
…..scratch…hiss
Before I go on, I have to thank you for staying through the story this long. Most people make an excuse and leave by now if they’re polite; if not, then they just leave. Just to warn you, from this point on my story becomes even stranger and farfetched. If you’re up for it, then I’ll continue.
I scrambled in the drawer of my bedside table for something to relieve me from the maddening itch. I soon found what I was looking for: the box that my parents had given me for Christmas several years ago. I opened it and took out the ornate gold-colored letter opener within. The blade was dull, but it was at least five inches long and sharp enough.
I scratched at my shin. The chirruping became more frantic, the insect began to move faster toward my knee. I broke the skin with the tip and blood dribbled in a thin line down my leg. There was no effect, so I scratched harder. Skin peeled away in small strips. Pain blossomed and wilted in a red pulse with each drag across my flesh. I cried out, tears streaked my face, but still I had to scratch.
Jun came rushing in just as I felt the insect reach my knee. I tried to dig the tip into my knee cap, trying to pry it off. To Jun, the scene must have looked like madness: me, lying on my bed in my underwear, blood and strings of skin covering my leg.
They ran over to try and wrestle the letter open away from me. I’m not entirely sure, even to this day, what happened in those tense few seconds—him desperately struggling to take the opener away and me struggling just as desperately to hold onto it. I know I was shouting about the insect beneath my skin, now moving toward my thigh in a trail of itching and long chirrups, but that’s all I could be certain of. They were indifferent to anything but their attempt to, as he saw it, save me from myself.
During the struggle, somehow, Jun was stabbed. I immediately smelled the foul scent of faeces and urine as his bowels were perforated by the dull blade. I looked down and saw that it had slid to the faux ivory hilt. I let it go, their blood covering my hand. The insect had fallen silent again.
Jun fell backward and hit the floor with a hard thud. He made no noise but only clutched at the letter opener protruding from his stomach with a terrified expression, blood and other fluids pouring down over their groyne and across their legs.
I wanted to help them, I did, but it was then I felt the insect inside me reach my thigh. It started chirruping again. I furiously scratched at it, but my fingernails were not enough. I dashed past Jun lying pale on the floor. They reached out a pleading hand to me but I couldn’t stop—I had to help myself first or I wouldn’t be able to do anything for him with the distraction.
…..scratch…hiss
I stumbled into my kitchen and opened a drawer at random. Inside, digging through large spoons and other currently useless instruments, I found a cheese grater. I took it and rubbed it hard against the skin of my thigh, where the subdermal itching was now intense. It shredded my skin; blood dripping onto the floor in a pattern of thick red drops.
The itching and the chirruping stopped just as suddenly as it had started and clear thought became possible once again. Recent memory rushed back in a tide of black horror. It felt as though my stomach contracted into a small wrinkled ball. I dashed back into my room.
Jun was lying on the floor where he fell in an expanding puddle of his own blood. It had soaked into the carpet and turned it almost black. They weren’t moving; their skin was ghostly pale. The next thing I saw, however, was something new entirely. I began to see the mutilated carcass seemingly melt and spread across the ground beneath me. It continued to spread until the ground was nothing but living, pulsating flesh. That’s when, from the new fleshy landscape, spindly black bodies emerged, chirruping.
I panicked. My friend was dead on the floor of my bedroom and potentially at my hand. I grabbed my jeans and frantically pulled them on. The blood of my self-inflicted injuries soaked them immediately, turning them purple in large patches. And, to my eternal shame, I ran.
It’s not something that I will ever forgive myself for, leaving Jun to bleed to death on my own floor. If I had only been able to get the insect out of my leg, they might have been alive. But I could not allow the police to arrest me. I doubt they would believe me, and I would be thrown in jail or worse: an asylum. I’m not insane, I know it. Something that feels this real cannot be in my mind.
…..scratch…hiss
At first, a few weeks after the incident in my bedroom, I tried to talk to people, to get help. I hoped that I could find a solution to my problem whilst still avoiding the police. A life of poverty and homelessness would be bearable if only I could get rid of the bug that still remained resolutely inside me. People would only hear the first few sentences of my story before rushing off. My blood-soaked jeans, now crusted in a deep brown, drove most of them away.
Life, of a sort, continued on the street. I took shelter where I could, beneath overpasses or in deep doorways, and rummaged for food where I could find it—from dumpsters outside restaurants or trash cans on the sidewalk.
I begged for money, but that only took up a small part of my time. Most of my time was spent trying to find things that would help me remove the insect inside my body. I quickly wore my fingernails down scratching myself, but dumpsters and abandoned lots were full of things to use instead: rusty food can lids, broken knives and corkscrews, the sharp edges of chain link fences, and various other impromptu instruments.
The bug remained elusive, moving all over my body seemingly at random. Nothing worked to force it out. If you’ll—let me pull up my sleeve—look at my arm here, I tried to do a rudimentary surgery to remove it once and for all. I waited until there was a cloudless, sunny day and peeled my skin back to find the thing that was blighting me. My screams echoed down the alley and off the buildings around me as I cut open my flesh with a piece of broken glass.
It was all for nothing, though. I passed out from blood loss before I got too deep into my arm. But on the plus side, it was the longest sleep I’ve had—most times the bug starts its incessant chirruping and itching whenever I try to sleep.
I’ve given up trying to get it out now. I’m resigned to it staying in my body until it determines that it’s time for it to leave on its own, bursting out of my skin like… like a centipede, I suppose. I’m sure it’ll hurt enormously, but I’ll take it if I can be free of the blight of its occupation. Still, I cannot resist scratching at it when it acts up. It’s an unconscious reaction now. Most often I’m not even aware that I’m doing it.
Thank you for listening to me this whole time. It helps more than you think to talk to people. Here, let me get you another drink before I leave. I’ve saved up enough money from begging to buy one at least. I don’t need it for myself; I’m used to cold, half-eaten hamburgers and the like now. What do you want?
Oh, before I get it, I have to ask: are you using your fork?
…..scratch…hiss
