Feeding Frenzy: Summer Series by Jennifer Weigel, Chapter 6
Last time on Feeding Frenzy…
The whole of the flea market was coated in a thick layer of fine soot. Nothing looked as if it had been shifted or moved within it for years. There was a wall of farm implements, a few buckets of nails and screws and random bits and pieces of things that were unidentifiable under the dirt, and several tables of maybe housewares and maybe toys. Lucille studied the wall, taking inventory of a decent sized sickle and a small hand axe. A sign next to one of the buckets proclaimed “NAILS $1 PER POUND”.
A low raspy cough sounded from behind a small crevice near the door in which an old desk and even older cash register sat. Smoke billowed from behind the register in wispy trails, pregnant with the strong scent of cloves. A hoarse voice breathed hushed words into the stale air, “Can I help ya?”
A short older, lean hunchbacked balding man peered out from behind the ancient register with his small glasses pushed as far up towards his eyes as his nose would allow. His flesh was arsenic white and his diminutive hand was stained yellow from years of smoking and nicotine abuse. Unsurprisingly, he held aloft a smoldering clove cigarette. His cubby was piled high with ashtrays full of old stale cigarette butts smoked down to the thick and snuffed out into small scrunched sculptures that resembled their creator.
Lucille recognized him as the last of the shadowy figures and hoped that she had now encountered all of the town’s remaining inhabitants. She suspected that this Nightshade couldn’t sustain any more lifeless listlessness than the five inhabitants she had witnessed in the motel parking lot and had now met the last of.
“Can I help ya?” the man echoed, pushing his glasses again up his long nose as his nostrils flared and his beady black eyes fixated upon her.
“I collect farm tools,” Lucille lied through her teeth. “How much are these?” she inquired as she lifted the sickle and the axe from their hooks on the wall, hefting them slightly as she did so in order to feel their weight and solidity in her hand before setting them down on the counter.
“Aww, y’all can have ‘em for $5 total,” he stammered as his eyes bore into her further as if to discern her true intent.
Abruptly, Lucille reached into her purse and removed a rumpled $5 bill from her billfold. Best not to push it, she thought as she considered purchasing a pound of nails for $1, fretting over whether he could see through her ruse or not. She wasn’t sure what she’d do with the nails anyway.
“I gots more farm ‘quipment fer sale,” the balding man exclaimed, gesturing to two more walls of larger implements, plows, scythes, horse harnesses and such.
“Thank you, but I need things I can fit in my luggage,” Lucille spat out, “I have to get them on a plane once I get to Portland.” Why can’t I ever think up better excuses on the fly? she thought.
“Um ‘kay,” he rasped and took a hit off of his cigarette.
Lucille decided to change the subject. She formed her words carefully, “Interesting place you’ve got here, this Nightshade. Tom says no one comes by much nowadays. He says maybe because of the casino, that you used to be a tavern town.”
“Tavern burnt down,” the little man drawled, glancing out the window across the street. “Been almost decade ‘go now. Town’s dried up since…”
Something about the way he spoke was distinctly unnerving. There was definitely more to this history than Lucille cared to know, and she felt uneasy, like she had asked too much already. “That’s too bad,” she backpeddled before quickly changing the subject again to leave. “Thank you so much. I won’t take any more of your time.”
The little man folded the sickle and axe into a moldy brown-black paper sack and slid it over the counter towards Lucille. She took the bag hesitantly in the manner of someone who has been handed something that one doesn’t want to touch for fear it might be contagious. The bag crumpled to dust at the edges but remained remarkably intact, concealing its contents perfectly.
Lucille exited the building and started towards the gas station, well aware of the black beady eyes boring holes in her from behind, peering out from beyond the register in the creviced nook in the wall and through the nicotine stained door of the more-flea-than-market.
The street seemed quiet enough, too quiet really. A wispy breeze drifted by lazily but otherwise there were no signs of life except for the scraggly grasses and scrubby plants that had overgrown much of the derelict ruins and the empty lot that stood between her and the gas station, and even those weeds didn’t seem so much living as simply waiting to die.
Tom was sitting in a sunken rust stained chair behind the desk watching a rerun of some unfamiliar 1950s era sitcom glowing forth from on a small television set in the corner of the room. He turned towards the front as Lucille entered, the bell attached to the door awakening the room to her presence.
“I’d like to go back to the motel,” Lucille quipped. “I think I’d like to sort through my luggage before dinner, since I’m not going to make it to the wedding now.”
“Mmm’kay, jus lemme get my keys,” Tom replied as he stretched, leaned forward, and rolled his neck back and forth to pop his jaw a couple of times. He pressed a button on the cash register and the drawer tongued open. Tom groped about within it to extract a Ford pickup key, and slammed it shut with a quick clang. He rounded the counter to head towards the front door.
“D’ya find somethin’ at da flea markt?” Tom asked as he nodded towards the bag Lucille clutched in her arms.
“Yeah, I collect farm tools,” Lucille said matter-of-factly in a voice that suggested not to ask any more questions because the answers didn’t matter and weren’t that interesting anyway.
“Good-deal. Dat’s def’nately da place fer dat,” Tom smiled. “Told ya ts worth da trip…” He held the door and gestured for Lucille to exit, not in a gentlemanly manner but with the air of someone who needed to clear the room before he locked up afterwards. As Lucille snuck past him in the tight quarters she was acutely aware of how he deeply inhaled the air that she passed through right beneath his nose and how his eyes brightened a bit when he did so. She hurriedly headed to the passenger side of the truck, noting that he left the building unlocked despite acting as if he was going to secure it.
Tom climbed into the driver’s side and opened the passenger door from within, beckoning her to join him. She carefully slid onto the seat and they started down the road back to the motel. Neither said a word; the trek back seemed to take twice as long as coming.
The white Cadillac still sat motionless and untouched by the front office.
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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