trigger warning: body horror

(*Knock Knock Knock*)

I can hear it, but my body is glued to the bed. No light is shining in the windows; I made sure of that. Over the last few years, working the night shift has made a good excuse for the darkness in the apartment, but always in the daytime there’s the interminable scraping noise of the rats above. I know eventually they will dig through the flimsy drop-ceiling tiles just above my bed. I can picture an armful of them tumbling through and landing on my face as my body lays here exhausted, sheltered from the daylight by the walls of the ragged apartment but somehow still sweating like a drunk.

(*Knock Knock Knock*)

From a semi-lucid state of consciousness I realize, that is not the rats. That is the landlord. I can hear the fat f*** breathing outside the door- a gigantic, fleshy sack of blood and backed-up s***.

But when I said I was glued to the bed, I meant it. I can feel skin melded with thread in the sheets below me, sores forming in the points of heaviest contact. I hadn’t even thought about what I would say to that globby puddle of clambake sweat when I did finally manage to slosh and gurgle my way to the door.

“Sorry, I know you’re expecting the rent but, you see. . .

Once when I was just a little girl, my dad pulled 3 ticks off the back of my head and flushed them down the toilet. He didn’t know there was a fourth one. It stayed there for decades, burrowing ever deeper until it was buried in the muscle just outside of my skull. In spite of its depth and longevity under my skin, I didn’t become aware of its presence until I began to hear it whisper just behind my left ear.

I could hear it talking to me, but not with words. The parasite released chemicals into my bloodstream that began to communicate different simple desires. Go here. Do this. Eat that. At first, it was only strong enough to manage a subliminal urge or craving in my body and mind. But as its control grew, the desires of the parasite became my own priority as well. I would intentionally move the way it wanted, in order to avoid the increasing intensity of its chemical abuse if I tried to deprive it of any desires. Through this positive punishment strategy, I was being psychologically conditioned to fully contort within the will of the entity.

Soon, it had taken in so much information and recognized so many patterns about my body and life that we were beginning to have chemical conversations, back and forth. It became obvious that the insect craved- more than anything- my discomfort and terror. During these conversational episodes, it would feed ominous, morbid visions directly into my visual cortex while simultaneously plucking the strings of my nervous system at random, as though it were a child learning to play an acoustic guitar. It threatened to lay eggs in my spine if I ever tried to have it removed. Thoughts and visions of my own spinal fluid bubbling over with the children of the creature would haunt my days and my dreams.

As it began to exert physical control of my body, I first noticed it in my teeth. It started as a slight aching, then progressed to an intense throbbing. As the pain of the toothache invaded my thoughts, the insect was quick to take credit and advantage. It fed into me visions of rotting my teeth from the inside out and in my disobedience, it would go on to prove it was also very capable. When I pulled the tooth, I found it had been hollowed out and re-packed with the bug’s excrement that had traveled my bloodstream in order to collect there. I could feel infection and sepsis in the freshly exposed nerves and continued to taste the rotted tooth for weeks while images of insect shit traversing my veins played out stop-motion-style in my head. I chose to never again disobey it.

The disease of the insect began to progress exponentially when I finally gave up hope of being free of it. Together, we were becoming neither me, nor it. It was as though my psyche had been disassembled and stitched back together in a pattern that better suited the entity’s needs and bizarre notions. But in this mentally weakened state, my thoughts were difficult for the little beast to control. I would feel one of its cravings wander into my consciousness, but my body would begin to combat the pest with its own weapon- apathy toward punishment fueled by hopelessness and despair. In addition, I noticed that the daylight felt too hot and far too bright for it, causing an intense ringing of our ears and thoughts, which painfully reverberated through every nerve in our now-shared system like a clanged tuning fork.

Although it knew that I was gathering this information to gain an advantage over it, the parasite laughed off my attempts as nothing more than the pathetic last whimpers of a dying host, revealing its own delusions of grandeur. As it contemplated finding a new host, one whose receptors had not completely deadened to its threatening toxins, I felt it sift my thoughts for all of the juiciest candidates I knew. Somewhere locked deep inside of us remained a compassionate shred of my psyche that went unspoiled by the toxins of my body’s unwelcome guest. I steered it away from thoughts of those closest to me, my friends and family still living. Behind the scenes, away from its probing mental sutures, I frantically searched for a name to feed the tiny hitman…the name of someone who would deserve such a fate. The name I gave them was yours, you fat f***er. I purposely kept thoughts of you within reach of the parasite. The uncontrollable slides into thoughts about your decaying shrimp breath actually seemed to intrigue rather than repel the monster. And once it saw the amount of blood you were carrying, we had our target. Best of all, you came to us. We only had to wait until you came to collect the rent.”