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Last time on Feeding Frenzy

The motel room seemed decent enough.  It was clean, although the air had a dank, stale quality about it.  There were no lingering cigarette fumes, despite the fact that it had once been a smoking room.  The curtains were drawn and the early evening sunlight filtered in, reflecting off flecks of dust in the air to a hazy yellow fog.  Lucille plopped her weary self on the bed, clutching her purse, and gazed out the window.  The sun had just begun to set and a sinister shadow started to creep over the town.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, trying to calm her racing heart.  Trying not to think about the vacant eyed mechanic or the large, graying woman at the front desk.  “You’re just seeing things.  You need a bite to eat.”

The sun had begun to sink further behind the horizon when Lucille closed the curtains, flicked on the lamp, and left the motel room.  She locked it and briefly contemplated going into town for supper.  But it was still too creepy, especially with the first hint of night’s shadows lingering over the derelict town like dark, outstretched fingers.  And she didn’t recall passing anyplace that looked like it would have anything to eat.  She wasn’t sure she wanted to walk that far in the dark just to find out, and she certainly didn’t want to call for a ride.  She wandered around to the back of the office, to a small open room labeled VENDING between the office and Room 1.

The room was bathed in sickly green light as a fluorescent hummed above.  The vending machine sat with its back towards the curtainless window facing the decrepit town.  Lucille stared into the depths of the metal springs, contemplating whether to get a probably stale pack of five powdered donuts or a bag of Cheez-Ums.  A flash of movement caught her peripheral vision as she dug around in the depths of her handbag.  She glanced out the window.

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A number of ghostly looking figures passed in the dusk, all with the same dark, empty pools for eyes that seemed to absorb light and hope like black holes into some alien abyss.  She recognized two of them: Tom Jones, still wearing his oil-stained powder blue uniform, and the large heavily made-up desk clerk who had checked her in.  There was also a thick bearded man whose graying black beard seemed to both accentuate and hide his unusually thick and angled jawline, a taller older man whose easygoing agility surprised her due to his frail-looking countenance, and a balding diminutive hunchback.

The setting sun accentuated their disheveled facades as Lucille hid behind the snack machine, fixated on them.  The others were even more distant than Tom and the woman she had already encountered, their hollow stares focused dead ahead as they wove through one another in an odd dance, like they were swimming through the air.  Even though Lucille was certain that they hadn’t seen her, they passed the vending room slowly and rhythmically, as if cued in to her presence.  And then, all at once, they wandered away disinterested.  Lucille dashed to her room without anything to eat or drink and bolted the door from within.

Suddenly the most terrifying scream sounded from the outdoors.  Lucille slid to the window and peeked around the drab curtain to see the mob of ghostly figures had grown tighter and was thrashing and flailing about.  They were just at the periphery, at the edge of the parking area.  She hadn’t realized that they had come so close to her room after she had lost track of them.  There was something in their midst, brown and cumbersome.  The shape was hard to make out, maybe a deer, or a donkey, or a small horse or cow.  They circled it in unison, as if sizing it up and preparing their next move.

In a flash, the older man rushed forward, head butting the creature.  It struck back with a blow to his head, a jagged hoof springing out of nowhere.  Blood pooled all too briefly at the site where hoof had met flesh before fading and being reabsorbed into the man’s forehead.  His ashen flesh seemed to close over the spot, refocusing the blood to a throbbing, pulsing vein that protruded from its midst.  How was he not taken down?  A blow like that should have felled him, especially at his age…  Lucille fixated on him as he stood staring ahead, motionless, as if an hourglass spinning through its recalculating sequence begged for more time to process what had just happened.  All at once, his eyes grew wide and pooled black again as he lurched his head to the side.  He leapt in a coolly calculated strike and struck the creature again, this time in the ribs.  It fell to its side as he bowled it over.

Lucille watched in horror, mouth agape, as she saw Tom Jones’ black eyes grow wide and bright as he descended upon the fallen brown form amidst the mob.  His jaw seemed to unhinge itself as he leapt into the fray.  The others followed suit until soon there was a writhing mass of pallid grey flesh and tattered old clothes engulfing whatever was in their midst.  Lucille’s heart sank in her chest like a dead weight, filled with dread and racing with fear.  She watched Tom emerge from the writhing mass of bodies with what appeared to be blood dripping down his mouth and onto his shirt.  He pushed his hand to the back of his neck and cracked his jaw back into place before he looked up, his eyes returning to the hollow and distant black they had been when he first laid eyes on her.  She shrank back into the room as his gaze turned to meet hers before he brushed himself off and sauntered away.

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portrait of the artist and Great White Shark breaching a pool of blood
Portrait of myself with dark makeup and crow skull headdress, backlit by the sun.

And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.

Jennifer Weigel is a multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist residing in Kansas USA. Weigel utilizes a wide range of media to convey her ideas, including assemblage, drawing, fibers, installation, jewelry, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video and writing. You can find more of her work at: https://www.jenniferweigelart.com/ https://www.jenniferweigelprojects.com/ https://jenniferweigelwords.wordpress.com/

Original Series

Nightmarish Nature: Scads of Scat, Beyond Just Goose Poo

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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.

Poop Emoji

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.

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Corny Poop Emoji

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:

Vampires Among Us

Perilous Parenting

Freaky Fungus

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Worrisome Wasps

Cannibalism

Terrifying Tardigrades

Reindeer Give Pause

Komodo Dragons

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Zombie Snails

Horrifying Humans

Giants Among Spiders

Flesh in Flowers

Assassin Fashion

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Baby Bomb

Orca Antics

Creepy Spider Facts

Screwed Up Screwworms

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Original Series

Nightmarish Nature: Screwed Up Screwworms

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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.

Warm weather woes...  Screwworm fly sipping a boat drink out of a coconut with a text bubble "Take me to the tropics."
Warm weather woes…

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.

Too many maggots...  Showing one is maddening enough.  One screwfly larva with text bubble "I just keep on digging" and caption Multiply this by at least two orders of magnitude (regarding quantity not size).
Too many maggots… Showing one is maddening enough.

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:

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Vampires Among Us

Perilous Parenting

Freaky Fungus

Worrisome Wasps

Cannibalism

Advertisement

Terrifying Tardigrades

Reindeer Give Pause

Komodo Dragons

Zombie Snails

Horrifying Humans

Advertisement

Giants Among Spiders

Flesh in Flowers

Assassin Fashion

Baby Bomb

Orca Antics

Advertisement

Creepy Spider Facts

Continue Reading

Original Series

Finger Spiders Keep Trying!

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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:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

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finger spiders

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!

finger spiders

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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