Dealing with the Devil: October Series by Jennifer Weigel, Part 3
Returning to our October story, Dealing with the Devil, we were onstage with Jonathan Menkhir and Satan as they delved deeper into Jonathan’s beloved wife Chloe’s history as he tried to win her freedom from Purgatory. Let’s see what happens next.
The devil never mentioned the box, nor did I. I could still feel its weight in my pocket as the curtain drew wide to reveal the bedroom set from Fiddler where we had enacted the nightmare scene together. The devil began to blather on about how this was the bedroom set we had picked out together, but it was not – I recognized it as the one from the stage production, and a lousy facsimile at that.
Everything about this setup felt less and less substantial as time wore on. Chloe began to look even flatter and further away, just a fading photograph of a memory depicted as one of those life-size cardboard cutouts. The scene that surrounded me was sloppily finished chipboard and nothing more, painted too quickly in a bad last minute attempt at deception. The more that I stared at it the less real it became, all just caricatures of my life. The chipboard began to erode away to cardboard, the corrugated surface subtly showing from behind the façade. The decadent velvet draperies were nothing more than flimsy sheets of paper. I pulled the ring box out of my pocket. The box itself was made of folded cardstock; the ring inside just a circle of wire with a pink sequin in place of the rose quartz. It was all an illusion, and the production value was terrible.
Satan continued pontificating on the bedroom set. He droned on like a sleazy car salesman, the kind that would sell you a lemon of a junker by trying to convince you it was first rate, who would move decals to a beater car in order to convince unsuspecting and naive buyers that the car was a genuine Rolls from back in the day. At any minute, I expected him to hold open his white silk suit jacket and try to sell me a fake luxury watch.
“Lies, all lies,” I called out. “Just what do you take me for?”
The devil stopped suddenly, fire rising in his amber eyes. “Aw, Johnny Boy, you have to believe. You cannot lose faith in your love for Chloe. She is waiting for you to make the right decision, and we’ve barely even started.”
“This has nothing to do with Chloe, leave her out of this,” I retorted as a sudden gust of wind knocked over the cardboard cutout standing in the middle of the stage. “I was right at the start – you never had a grip on her. This is not Purgatory or a game, it’s just a cheap knockoff to connive me into your clutches. I’m not buying in.”
The devil began fuming, heat and smoke rising from the collar of his ill-fitting white suit, which was starting to look like as if it were made of rice paper rather than silk and was now slightly smoldering. A shrill whine echoed forth from his yellow teeth, “Now, Now, Johnny Boy. You simply MUST believe. You can choose the outcome but you must choose wisely.”
I shook my head. “I don’t believe you. There are no choices here that hold any meaning: a cheap replica of our sweetheart ring or the prop setup from Fiddler? None of that matters now. What is done is done, Chloe is gone and I am alone and that is how it is. You have nothing to offer me.”
The wind that had knocked over the cardboard cutout pretending to be my beloved bride was picking up. The cardboard and crinkled paper stage eroded around us into nothing more than brittle dry chaff. What was left of the paper dream morphed into mere leaves as my yard again came into clarity, the piles I had been painstakingly raking now scattered again.
“So you’ve made your choice then, Johnny Boy. And to think, you two could have been so happy together,” Satan cackled, “my dear, Jonathan Menkhir, you have chosen… poorly.” Satan’s head rolled back on his neck as he erupted in a fit of laughter. As he cackled to himself, a grating squeal bellowed forth from the depths of the cavernous pit of his gaping maw. He seemed to turn inside out, doubling back and swallowing himself as he reverted to the form of a gaunt man picking up a pile of dog poop from where his Westmoreland Terrier had so fervently buried it. The dog turned towards me, smiled a wide yellow-toothed grin and winked before it trotted along with the dog-walker in tow.
I reached into my pocket and fingered a small box. As I took it out to examine it, I realized it was the exact box that the genuine sweetheart ring had been kept in before it had been lost. The burgundy velvet case was still intact and was the real deal, not a poor facsimile. Sure enough, when I opened it, the actual ring was there, gleaming at me as sunlight danced across the faceted rose quartz. The devil dog was nowhere to be found, but I could still hear him chuckling on the passing breeze.
And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
This time on Nightmarish Nature, in honor of Thanksgiving, we’re exploring scads of scat! And not just because of the aftermath of all that eating we’re going to be doing, given that everything that goes in must come out eventually. But because turkeys are weird.
But, how weird?
Apparently, the shape and size of a turkey’s poop can tell you the sex and age of the bird. Male and female birds poop different shaped turds, and bigger ones with age. Your poop can’t do that, we’re pretty sure. And no, we don’t want to check, even if it does come in a whole host of rainbow colors with all the dyes in our food nowadays. Keep your weird quirks to yourself.
Fecal Fetishes
Vultures have very acidic scat that helps to keep their feet and food clean of bacteria from hopping in and around dead things. Somehow, this doesn’t seem like a step up to us, but I guess if you’re a carrion crawler you take what you can get. At least you’d know where it’s been I suppose, and that’s more than you can say for some of your long dead food sources…
Rabbits must process their food twice in order to break down the grassy matter they digest (like cows chewing cud). And so they eat their own partially digested matter, the cecotropes they produce after the first digestion. This isn’t true poop per se, that fecal matter comes after second digestion, but it does work its way through the same way.
And that brings us to koalas. They are one of only a few mammals that can eat eucalyptus leaves (and are closely related to wombats, one of the other two). Koala offspring eat their mother’s pap, which is a specialized form of poop that allows the baby to transition from nursing milk to eating solid leaves. It is green, smeary, mushy, and can get everywhere. Just like you’d expect.
We aren’t exempt.
For all that we have learned to be poop averse, a lot of animals eat others’ scat and glean a lot of nutritional value from their detritus. It’s not just your dog raiding the cat litter box and then licking you in the face. And we humans have even fought wars over rights to seabird guano, which was used as a form of fertilizer in the late 1800s.
Anyway, that’s the scoop on poop for now. Maybe we’ll revisit this load later on, seeing as how there’s still plenty of content here.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
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.
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