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.
Sometimes it pays not to be seen, especially if there are things that want to eat you or if you have to sneak up on things to eat them. So this time on Nightmarish Nature we’re going to look at some of the creatures known for being invisibles among us. Some of these critters engage in mimicry, intentionally looking like other specific things, but a lot of them engage in camouflage, just wanting to blend in. In this segment we’ll consider both but focus more on the latter.
Buggin’ Ya
Some of the most notable invisibles are masters of camouflage in the insect world… Moths and beetles that look like bark or dead leaves. Mantids and other insects that look like leaves or flowers. Those stick bugs and walking sticks that I’m not sure how to classify (are they some kind of weird relations to assassin bugs or their own thing?). And my personal favorite, Umbonia Crassicornis, a type of tree hopper better known as the thorn bug. And don’t even get me started on spiders and scorpions… You could come face to face with pretty much any of these critters while mucking around in your garden and be none the wiser for it unless their movement betrays their location or you happen to scan the area with a blacklight before you dig in. It’s jump scare central, for sure!
Leapin’ Lizards
Lizards and amphibians are also masters of disguise, often resembling their surroundings much like the insect world does. Chameleons are celebrated because of their ability to change color to match their surroundings, but there are several lizards that do this, just not to that extreme. Like anoles. Take a trip to Florida and you’ll soon find that you’re being stared at by a lizard you didn’t even know was there, seeing as how anoles are everywhere and get into everything (one recently startled my mother after making its home in a hallway decoration). You don’t even have to go to Florida, they range anywhere from Texas to North Carolina, and there are other lizards that range further north that do this as well.
Cunning Cats
All those coat patterns you see on cats and other ambush hunters aren’t just for show – the spots and stripes allow our feline friends to blend into their surroundings while on the prowl. Sneaky sneaky. This helps them to be the amazing hunting machines that they are. Assuming they don’t raise the bird alarm and draw attention to their whereabouts. Because birds do love to raise a stink when there’s a feline predator about, and we can’t say we blame them.
Aquatics
Then when you go underwater, you take it next level. Camouflage is taken up a notch with seahorses, nudibranchs, and more that look exactly like random flotsam. Some critters, such as Majoidea crabs, even decorate themselves with ocean debris to blend in. And octopuses are like underwater chameleons on steroids that also utilize their surroundings to create a sort of protective armor that blends in, like when they carry anything they can grab to protect their squishy selves when sharks are about. There are even true invisibles like shrimp, fish, and jellyfish that are actually clear except for their internal organs that don’t necessarily register with everything floating about underwater. Even whales can appear to come out of nowhere depending on your angle to them to start with!
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
So, now that it’s getting cold, here on Nightmarish Nature we’re going to talk about a different kind of terror – the starvation diet. It’s winter, and food is becoming ever scarcer, so many creatures will slow down to conserve energy. Let’s take this a step further to the sleep of the damned… But I’m not talking hibernation, or settling in for a sort of long winter nap version of seasonal affective disorder on steroids. No, I’m talking hummingbirds.
Sugar Rush
Hummingbirds are about the polar opposite of what you’d think of when you talk about inactivity. They’re more the picture-perfect speed demons. And yet, due to their crazy high metabolisms and constant need to refuel by consuming all the nectar and insects they can get their little beaks in or on, they have near death experiences on a regular basis. Even during the summer at night whenever the temperature falls too low. It’s like all their systems have to go offline for a bit just so they can survive.
Energy Suck
Essentially a hummingbird burns so much energy that he can die in less than eight hours of not eating. The little sugar daddy needs another fix just to keep going. This lifestyle is a far cry from the Energizer bunny. Essentially he has to enter a torpor state in sleep so he doesn’t succumb to his own starvation diet. Not every time, but when the temperature drops or food is scarce.
A hummingbird in torpor may, by all accounts, appear dead. He can be frozen in place, his tiny feet clasped rigidly around a branch as if rigor mortis has sunk in. He can be cold to the touch and unresponsive. He can face upwards, unmoving, breathing and heart rate slowed to near indiscernibility. He can even be hanging upside down, oblivious to the world. In fact, the hummer’s heart rate can reduce to almost one tenth of his waking state, and his temperature can drop by ~5o degrees Fahrenheit (~ 30 degrees Celsius).
Miracle Mavericks
Honestly, as shown in this article on Journey North, this ability to exercise such fine control over metabolic rate on a nightly cycle makes the hummingbirds more marvelous than terrifying, switching between cold- and warm-blooded. And they are very well-adapted to their eating regimens, especially given their diminutive size. But such is the cost of burning so much energy to keep going without much room to store fuel. Like I said, a strict starvation diet.
If you’ve enjoyed this segment of Nightmarish Nature, feel free to check out some previous here:
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:
