Love Is in the Air: a Valentine’s Day series by Jennifer Weigel
This is the fourth installment in a Valentine’s Day series of shorts by Jennifer Weigel in which unsuspecting lovers succumb to deadly gases. You can read the first three installments here:
Episode 4:
Joe looked lovingly at Dianne. Even after all these years, she never ceased to amaze him. The kids were grown and had flown the coop, they had both retired, and now it was just the two of them in the great big house. Dianne continued to play homemaker and was making Mexicali rice for dinner, sitting at a stool at the countertop sautéing some leftover chicken from the night before with some salsa.
“Can I help?” Joe asked.
“Nothing for you to do honey,” Dianne called back.
Joe reached in his pocket and caressed the carved wooden heart hidden within. He liked to bestow Dianne with trinkets to show she was loved, sometimes it was a card or a box of chocolates, or a pair of fancy earrings, but this time was special. There was no special occasion, just a profession of his feelings for her.
Joe had taken up woodworking upon his retirement and had been whittling away at this heart in his spare time as he learned the trade. He had burned their initials “JMS & DAS Forever” into it the smooth surface once he had sanded it down and then polished it to bring out the natural wood grain. It was the first real thing he had finished. Dianne knew nothing of it.
She had finished her cooking and was dishing up the meal, scooping a bed of rice onto each plate and then blanketing it with the chicken and salsa mixture before adding some shredded cheddar cheese to melt over the top.
“Can I at least get the table ready?” Joe asked.
“Sure, it’s just about time,” Dianne replied.
Joe arranged a fork, knife and spoon at each place setting along with a glass containing three ice cubes and water from the tap for each. He placed the wooden heart atop Dianne’s folded napkin before helping to bring the plates in from the kitchen and set them down.
As Dianne sat at her place, Joe remarked, “That’s for you. I carved it myself.”
She picked up the wooden heart and looked at Joe.
“I wanted you to know how much you mean to me,” he continued. “After everything we’ve been through together, the kids and grandkids, this house…”
Dianne turned the heart over in her hand, studying the smooth surface and running a fingertip over the initials. “Oh honey, it’s beautiful. Thank you. It’s been quite the adventure!”
As they leaned in and kissed one another, a faint odor crept in from the periphery. It smelled old and stale, like corn chips and wet gym socks masked with lilac perfume. At first neither noticed, and still later neither said a word about it hoping it would just pass and unsure whether it was something they did.
Finally Dianne spoke, “Honey, what is that terrible smell?”
“I don’t know,” Joe responded.
Dianne sniffed at her meal and glanced back towards the kitchen. It wasn’t the food and she hadn’t left the stovetop on.
It seemed to be coming out of the air everywhere, like a thick invisible noxious cloud. It was pungent but even worse, it was a bit disorienting. Joe and Dianne both felt dizzy and a little nauseous. Dianne had enough sense to press her LifeAlert button around her neck before she staggered and fell to the floor, but by the time the paramedics arrived both she and Joe were already dead.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
Yeah yeah, the insects tend to get ALL the attention here on Nightmarish Nature. But honestly, this one takes the beefcake. It’s the New World Screwworm Fly, and it’s as terrifying as the name suggests. And they aren’t limited to the Americas, there is an Old World version as well, as they can be found pretty much anywhere tropical or seasonably suited.
Revolting Little Buggers
The Screwworm Fly is a parasitic fly larvae that burrows into its host to feed, named because it seems to screw deeper and deeper into the flesh over time. This process is called myiasis and do NOT look it up online, you WILL regret it. They blur those images out for very valid reasons, trust me (and not because of pornographic content). And these maggots will continue to burrow en masse, rather than staying put as a botfly larvae would.
Do Not Do an Image Search on Screwworm Myiasis, Like Seriously – You Will NEVER Unsee That
The female Screwworm fly lays her eggs on an open wound or orifice of her chosen host… And not just one egg or a couple of eggs, no – hundreds, even thousands of them. Let’s let that sink in a bit, shall we? Or screw in as it were. Although any warm-blooded animal is a prime target, cattle are a fly favorite, costing millions of head of cattle to this sick and disgusting horror annually. And if beef isn’t on the menu, Fido or even yourself might be.
The Great American Worm Wall
In fact, this particular feature here on Nightmarish Nature is so terrifying that the United States has made agreements with all of Central America, even including countries that do not generally share its interests, in order to create a “Great American Worm Wall” to prevent them from spreading back into the United States. I’m not going to go into all of the creepy and juicy details of this bizarre science fiction freak fact, you’ll just have to watch it here on Half As Interesting’s YouTube channel.
Essentially, the Worm Wall is a complicated byproduct of scientists studying radioactivity on the flies’ maturity as well as the flies’ sexual lives and using this information against them to nearly eradicate the species and banish it from much of its former range. So, Peter Parker, if you thought everyone was messing with your love life before, be glad you weren’t bitten by a radioactive Screwworm.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
You’ve almost made it to the end of the finger spiders here at Haunted MTL! Because I made A LOT of unfulfilled requests for a spider out of fingers, I will continue this snarky little AI art series with NightCafe and Canva through the month of September… In case you missed out, here are the other parts of this series:
Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: hand that is a spider; spider legs as fingers; fingers becoming spider; spider all fingers.
Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders Keep Trying! Yeah, I’m sure you don’t remember being bitten. Because of the ways they warp time and space, and the natural chemical reactions involved, the AI art generated finger spiders’ bite isn’t typically felt. They are still attached to you, feeding… You have to get them off… Keep trying!
Images: Overall design aesthetic of fashion / design advertising spread in muted tones with four AI art rendered images of spiders, built spiders, and spiders on hands, with any given number of legs on spiders and fingers on hands as you’d expect from AI interfacing at this time. Prompts used from top left to lower right include: spider leg fingers; spider made out of hand fingers; hand spider picking banjo; fingers as spider playing banjo.
Text reads: Creepy Crawlies Finger Spiders That’s All Folks! Well, I guess that’s that then. It’s been nice knowing you. Enjoy your new form. Nothing left for it but to play the banjo…
All of the AI art images used in this series were generated on Thursday, June 13, 2024. If you want to see more freaky spiderness in art here on Haunted MTL, check out Bitten and Soul Catcher. More AI art graphic narratives from Jennifer Weigel have explored Little Red Riding Hood and Into the Deep Woods. Oh, and the Tiny Brain Computers exploration. To see more such devolutions into AI generated art, check out the Will the Real Jennifer Weigel Please Stand Up? blog.
We just can’t get enough of spiders here on Nightmarish Nature… so here are some more creepy spider facts for you to consider, outside of the giants, eating and mating habits, and wasp predation as previously mentioned in this series. Plus the finger spiders have taken over the whole of the month of September, so strap in because they’re here too – no goofy drawings this month just more terror unleashed in the form of AI art, courtesy of NightCafe.
Spiders Are Baby Mama Machines!
Spiders can lay hundreds and thousands of eggs in their egg sacs at a time. And when they hatch, all those tiny baby spiders can balloon, flying to new homes on airborne strands of silk as if raining from the sky… So if you suffer from trypophobia and are weirded out by large quantities of clustered small and tiny objects (especially when they are alive and moving) you may want to steer clear of these little bug bombs.
Spiders Are Athletic Archdukes!
Jumping spiders can leap as far as 40 times their body length. And wolf spiders can run up to 2 feet per second. In movement, spiders have four feet on the ground and four in the air at all times. And they have six knees on each leg for a total of 48 knees – that’s a lot of potential kneecapping, I’d try to take them down a different way if I were you…
Other Interesting Factoids
Spiders are on every continent except Antarctica and there are over 40,000 identified species of them. All spiders produce silk for all that they don’t all make webs, since some prefer to live on the move or ambush from hidey holes. There is a known species of herbivorous spider, the Bagheera Kiplingi, but most are carnivorous or omnivorous. And the longest lived spiders can survive for 40+ years.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
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