The Twelve Nightmares of Christmas Holidays: Insatiable by Jennifer Weigel
In 2020, Haunted MTL brought you the 13 Days of Krampus. Now we offer another exclusive series of holiday horror stories: The Twelve Nightmares of the Holidays. Here’s our very own Jennifer Weigel kicking it off with Insatiable.
He was a jolly old soul with an all-consuming appetite for winter festivities and seasonal accoutrements. Well, at least those focused on one particular holiday at any rate. The other celebrations of the season sort of shrank into baffled silence in the background, whispering murmured concerns amongst one another while shaking their heads. Trying not to draw attention over the spectacle and to hush… Hush…. HUSH!
Every year, the festivities grew. It was innocuous at first. The celebration just crept into the previous occasions, edging its way over a month ahead into traditions under the premise of spreading more joy while the family was together. Everyone seemed so grateful to gather but really needed more to do, so why not start decking the halls and go shopping? It seemed like a good enough bonding activity, and all of the sales and consumerism were supposed to keep the economy going stronger and bigger, so best go ahead and buy… Buy… BUY!
But as time passed, even that just wasn’t enough. There were simply too few fruitcakes and carolers and peppermint scented candles, too little mulled apple cider and eggnog and evergreen flourishes… There was just not enough time to watch all the movies and hear all the music and taste ALL the cookies… The white powder shimmer snow needed to glisten for longer in all of its faux finery, like magic dust to call forth the beauty and majesty of the coming season, yet to be unleashed upon the eagerly anticipatory crowds. The houses needed to be brighter; their blinking lights signaling to all that they were a part of the larger outpouring of joy… Joy… JOY!
But there was still so much room for growth; there just had to be more. So as his appetite grew larger, the jolly old soul loosened his belt buckle another notch and began to eye the next holiday over yet again, although that occasion was all about spookiness and the unexpected, considering death and decay and dread. But surely there was plenty of space for more baubles and bling and yard ornamentation… Oh sure, everything started out a little spookier, but then the overlap began to really take hold and slowly the change began. Stores morphed the two occasions together into all sorts of shopping opportunities and pumpkin spice became king. Even the eerie began to consider the solace and beauty of the coming winter season, the calm and solitude it brings. Because we all know that skeletons need peace… Peace… PEACE!
Yet, even that was not enough, and the jolly old soul began to edge his way earlier and earlier into the year. July seemed like a reachable goal, for we all know that those who like to craft things need an early enough start to get all their projects in order. Especially if they are making gifts for their parents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces and cousins and second cousins and friends and coworkers and mailmen and garbage collectors and kids teachers and bank tellers and acquaintances and so on… And for those who don’t make things, shopping was becoming an even larger and more pressing need, starting earlier and earlier to be sure that all could disperse as many presents of trinkets or baked goods or money as possible, to shower upon all of those aforementioned, in order to show their goodwill… Goodwill… GOODWILL!
And now the jolly old soul’s minions are everywhere, making sure that everything is running smoothly. Keeping watch over all, whether they are being particularly nice or naughty at any given time, whether they remember to leave out extra milk and cookies, to deck the halls, to trim the trees… Earlier and earlier they come, bells jingling, reindeer hooves click-clacking over the rooftops… With rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes, smiling wider and wider… Bearing mistletoe and poinsettias and gingerbread houses and cinnamon spiced nuts and visions of sugarplums and hot cocoa with marshmallows and Charles Dickens and chestnuts roasting over open fires and brightly colored ribbon tied up in bows and paper-wrapped packages and huge feasts with all the trimmings and music and blinking lights and shiny round baubles and plastic icicles and glitter and sparkle and merriment and more… More… MORE!
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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