Indecision: an Original Story by Jennifer Weigel
I was in a convenience mart when it began, standing at a pastry case looking at the donuts, trying to decide whether I wanted a cake doughnut with sprinkles or a glazed doughnut with chocolate icing. What I really wanted was a maple-glazed with bacon, but that was apparently too much of a culinary delicacy to ask of a simple gas station convenience mart such as this.
The fluorescent lights flickered in that static greenish way that they do when the ballast is going off. Nothing unusual. Then the loudspeaker hummed and crackled as if someone breathed too close to a microphone somewhere in the back and amplified a bit of spittle or a fleck of dust. The sound jarred me from pondering the doughnut case, and I looked up at a speaker in the ceiling.
It quieted briefly before it buzzed again.
Still, it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Just a regular convenience mart with its typical display of overpriced donuts, shipped in too early in the morning and having sat there for half the day until they were now well-past stale… The loudspeaker continued to hum and crackle intermittently.
I finally decided on the cake doughnut with sprinkles, poured a cup of coffee the consistency of motor oil into a to-go Styrofoam cup, snapped a lid on it (literally and figuratively), and checked out at the counter. The lights flickered again. The woman behind the register, who looked as though she hadn’t slept in years, mumbled “have-a-nice-day” as I paid with my Master chip card and left. At least, I think that’s what she said. The words fell out of her mouth like too many marbles all at once, slurred together.
They didn’t make sense.
The sky was overcast. I made my way to my car. The buzzing hum and crackle followed me. “ There outside must a speaker be too,” I muttered to myself. My voice echoed in my head, but talking Yodaesque gibberish with the words disordered and falling out of place and time.
The car was where I left it, second from the right facing the front of the convenience mart, aimed at the building from which the droning hum emanated. I didn’t remember parking there but then again I didn’t remember parking… Mine was the only car in the lot so there weren’t any other choices to be made or directions to pursue. Thank goodness. I felt a faint flicker of light dance through my periphery, but it was too fast to focus on. Must be a storm coming in…
I shook it off, unlocked the car with the beep-boop key fob, and got in. I sat down in the driver’s seat, placed my coffee in the middle cup-holder, and shut the door behind me. I opened the bag and looked at the doughnut. Blast it, I had thought I’d gotten one with sprinkles. But wait – there were sprinkles. They flickered at me as if coming into and out of being. They were too difficult to focus on, white, yellow and orange, too similar to the cake color of the doughnut. They became more white-noise static, further drowning out my ability to focus.
I could no longer see the doughnut for the sprinkles.
The car radio buzzed at me with the same crackly hum of the loudspeaker. But the car wasn’t on. That’s when it hit me. The… car… wasn’t… on… A faint flicker lit up the edge of my vision again, and the din of the static grew louder and closer. The car… still… wasn’t on… The doughnut-sprinkles flickered at me like points of light on a TV screen un-tuned to snow.
I tossed the bag with the doughnut in the passenger seat. I wasn’t in the mood to sit and eat it. Not now. Something was very wrong. The hairs on the backs of my arms prickled as they rose. But why? I opened the door as if to go back in, but changed my mind. What was I going to look for there? The confusion and uncertainty wouldn’t be any clearer. It wasn’t as if buying a chocolate iced doughnut would change anything. Or would it? That didn’t make any sense.
None of it made any sense.
I sat still and looked out over the dashboard at the building. The static grew louder. Everything was snow now. The doughnut-sprinkles, the bag, the passenger seat, the coffee, the dashboard, the car, the convenience mart… Even my own hand was flickering as I extended it out in front of me. The buzzing crackling hum had taken the shape of light as well as sound, and it was everywhere.
My surroundings seemed to flatten as they grew more and more disjointed, the flicker setting in like an old movie reel zoetrope. It was as if everything I saw was just a painting or a photograph, a stage prop and not a true-to-life experience. The scenery around me rippled like a plastic tarp over a swimming pool or a clear carnival bag bulging with water needed to sustain the goldfish within it, with me being the goldfish.
I noticed it faintly at first.
There was a crack or a fold in the space-time continuum… No, it was a small gash… It seemed to almost float in the midst of my vision. It followed wherever I turned. I was trapped underneath and within the tent of my reality, watching it bulge and flicker above and around me as the tear grew wider, threatening to burst and spill everything through me. My heart fluttered but I was frozen to the spot, unable to move.
The tarp of my consciousness ripped open in a sweeping encompassing motion and gave way completely. My surroundings pulsed into themselves before they swelled and broke loose. The convenience store, the car, the dashboard… all flew past me like a million star-points of light and shadow and flowed away. I was enveloped in light. A quiet solace engulfed me as I was bathed in the bright white curtain, feeling cold and warm at the same time, distant and wholly present.
Slowly, fuzzy shapes emerged from the light.
Murmured talking began to take form around me, as well as a rhythmic beeping coming into focus. “It’s going to be okay,” one of the softly silhouetted shapes spoke as it grew clearer and formed itself into a doctor in a white lab coat. “You had a minor stroke and have been in a coma for a few days. You’re going to pull through.”
I looked around. The room was sterile and white with a sickly blue-green-gray partition preventing me from seeing the other side. A series of plastic looking machines with all sorts of knobs, buttons, and switches beeped and lit up beside me. The doctor held one of those hand flashlights towards me to look into my eyes. She spoke but seemed very far away.
As the light flashed in my eyes, a buzzing hum began to emerge, quietly at first. The rhythmic beeping of the machines receded and gave way to the static drone. It grew louder and louder as I became attuned to the constant flicker of fluorescent lights. The humming sound grew, emanating from everywhere and burying itself behind my eyes to pulse through my being. The fluorescence soon began to engulf everything and the room flickered to steady snow.
Everything went fuzzy again, lost to the flickering fluorescent din.
A crackling loudspeaker jars me out of my reverie, amplifying dust, or spittle.
I look up at the speaker above me, standing in front of a convenience mart doughnut case. An underwhelming array of stale mid-day donuts scattered on trays calls for my consideration… do I want a cake doughnut with sprinkles or a glazed doughnut with chocolate icing?
This is the kickoff to a new series exploring nature that is kind of horrifying, at least in ways. Our first subject is Vampires Among Us. There are lots of animals named for vampires, sometimes due to folklore and sometimes for their appearance (like the Vampire Squid), but most of these animals don’t have blood sucking tendencies.
Bats & Birds
There are legit vampire leaf-nosed bats in Central and South America that drink blood. They feed on mammals and are often shown to feed on livestock. They’d be kinda cute if they weren’t so creepy. There are also vampiric birds: some finches in the Galapagos have developed the taste for blood of other birds, mainly seabirds that flock to the islands to raise their young.
Leeches & Lampreys & More
And then you get into leeches and lampreys and other denizens of the water that are known to attach themselves to larger creatures and drink their blood. Leeches were even believed to have medicinal value (and still are in certain circumstances). And there are also numerous plants that are known to be parasitic and feed on other plants, wrapping their roots or vines around others to steal nutrients.
Spiders
Now I’m going to drift off into the realm where this becomes truly horrific. Spiders. Now, spiders aren’t vampires per se, seeing as how they actually kill their prey – they don’t just feed off of it while it remains living and wanders about its business. But because of their structure, they cannot eat solid foods, so they have to inject their prey with enzymes to liquefy it so they can slurp it out like a protein shake. That’s sort of vampirism on steroids if you ask me, just the kind that no one is coming back from.
Bloodsucking Bugs
But let’s get back on topic. Now let’s consider mites and ticks and fleas and mosquitoes and the like. Some drink blood for their survival; others do so as part of their reproductive cycle (like mosquitoes which otherwise eat fruit and nectar but need the extra protein from blood to grow their eggs).
Ticks need to feed on blood once at every stage of their life cycle and can pick up diseases along the way (like Lyme Disease) but don’t always do so. Different ticks are more likely to come in contact with different things and often humans are not their preferred meal but they are opportunistic and will feed on whatever is available when necessary. Symptoms of illness from tick bites may take years to develop and can have really weird side effects (like the allergy associated with Lone Star Ticks which makes a person unable to consume mammalian flesh).
Anyway, here are some brief glimpses of vampirism in nature. Thank you for joining us for Nightmarish Nature and may you avoid getting bitten by any true vampires among us… And I still think spiders take first place in the creepy eating category here, even if they aren’t technically vampiric.
This story came to me in a sort of roundabout way from a rather unusual source. So I thought I’d share it with you, dear readership, and see if you can make heads or tails of it. – Jennifer Weigel
Dread Pirate Rum Tum Tugger could tell this was the right spot.
The site, beneath the sweeping limbs of the Live Oak, Spanish Moss swaying gently in the breeze, was a perfect match to the crude map he had bought off that soothsayer Deuteronomy.
The earth moved easily, as if it had been excavated previously. He dug in with greater fervor with each swipe. The sandy soil gave way to reveal something hard. He scooped and smoothed the remaining detritus from the surface as he uncovered a box.
The carton was simple.
No markings; no ornamentation; no writing. Just a plain cardboard crate, brittle from having been buried for so long but still sturdy. He hoisted it from its burrow.
“Ha HO!” he shouted to the passing breeze, rousing a small cloud of birds that erupted from a nearby thicket. They captured his attention for a moment, but he quickly refocused and returned to his task.
The box was locked but no difference.
Any self-respecting ruffian like himself could pick a lock in seconds. And he did so with panache, as was his way. He pried the lid open and licked his lips.
Inside was the legendary Kernel of Eternal Life, a small sparrow’s heart, still beating.
Artwork description: Myself as Dread Pirate Queen Miss Kitty wearing black bell sleeve shirt and black vinyl skirt with strapping leather belt over leopard print shirt and tights, with strapping leather boots, pirate head wrap and leopard cat ears.
Image text reads: Purr! Avast ye mateys, Dread Pirate Queen Miss Kitty invites ye to check out her booty stash and dig ye up a dungbie prize. Seek ye some buried treasure! Just grab ye a plastic litter scoop and dig… dig… dig… to ye heart’s content.
I created this image for a promotional poster for a performance piece in a charity art show in which I, as Dread Pirate Queen Miss Kitty, hawked a carnival sideshow style sidewalk installation. For a mere $5 donation to the animal shelter the show supported, gallery goers could dig around in a kiddie pool full of litter to find a prize: a cheap plastic trinket from the dollar store. I had some takers, including one kid who seemed to really enjoy the digging and whose parents were all in, saying “You know, you can totally do that at home too.”
For more cat antics, we invite you to read C-2747’s logbook here on Haunted MTL. Feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or on her writing, fine art, and conceptual projects websites.
Happy Mother’s Day to the Queen of Everything… nothing gets by you.
Artwork description: A Happy Mother’s Day card featuring a picture of a Nefertiti doll with swooping hair, glitter makeup, and elaborate gold and blue headdress and evening gown.
Image text reads: Happy Mother’s Day! You are the Queen of Everything and you shimmer brighter than the twinkliest star in the sky. Stay sparkly and shine on in your magnificent glitter bombasticness. You ARE truly everything everywhere all at once and you’ve seen and heard it all. Eyes in the back of your head and superpowered hearing mean we can’t get away with much no matter how hard we try. So Queen on and rule over home in sparkly sentinel.
And may this be a testament to why us kids shalt never get you out of bed too early or run amok while you are getting ready to start your day… Because being the Queen of Everything takes planning and preparation…
Feel free to check out this Mummy Dearest Mother’s Day card from 2021 here on Haunted MTL.
