tomatorade
The great speckled bird
A prompted short story I needed to write recently. Came out well, so I thought I'd share it. Keep in mind it had to be around 1000 words, so there's not much I'm going to expand on that front.
Cw for mild body horror.
Cw for mild body horror.
Animals
A man becomes friends with his alien parasite.
~(0)~
The creature squirms through the sand. It has the look of an oil victim, like in the old detergent ads, flailing and splattering thick black blood over the beach. Only, that isn’t blood. As it squirms through the sand those tendrils follow. He sort of sniffs at it. Crouches along the waterline alongside, water creeping at his ankles and splashing into his shoes.A man becomes friends with his alien parasite.
~(0)~
It comes to a stop some ways up the bank, heaving up and down. Injured. Of course, it’s man’s second instinct to touch it. The first, to recoil and pace circles around, no progress made. That does not last long. And a stick is good enough for him, yanked from a tangle of driftwood halfway down the dunes. Though by the time he huffs his way back, it stilled. An ink blot staining beige sand, smelling like salt and ash. The stick slides off its surface, catching faintly and pushing at glistening things like scales. It does not move anymore except to roll over in its little divot.
So he prods. It feels scaly, too. And soaked, from the sea or otherwise. The faint slime, cold and viscous, prickles his skin. Bubbles into a faint rash and his pained hiss. Thin spiderweb strings form as he spreads his fingers apart and drools through the webs between his fingers.
That’s enough. He creeps up to the waterline and washes his hand in the brine and dries them in the hot sand. He’s not too interested in a dead blob, besides.
He should have been more worried when the scales took his hand.
It started simply—a light dryness. A flakiness. He wakes up one morning and it’s black as night and far too late to go anywhere with it. He knows some men monitoring the satellites some miles east. They would kill him, now.
And nothing works on it. Not alcohol. Obviously—it’s embarrassing even to think about, but he goes through the entirety of his little red aid kit and his heart is beating out his chest. He leaves a scattered kitchen counter to watch it under lamplight, kitchen knife in hand.
Still, black as night up to the wrist, almost wet and glistening just on its own. It’s heavy on his workbench. His other hand trembles with the knife. But right as he tests, when blade meets scale, it reacts. Like an ocean polyp, an ancient worm, it unfurls—what were his fingers peel back and curl around the blade in protest, revealing suckers and spines budding through dozens of creases swelling and sinking like life. He holds, tongue caught between his teeth. And slides the knife out of the tangle with an irritating metallic screech. It only settles after.
But it doesn’t feel like anything. And cutting would be drastic. The tendrils curl back into the shape of fingers and he decides to leave it.
It has personality. It likes certain things. Dislikes a lot more. When he eats he tries to keep it out of sight, but he can’t help dropping crumbs eating with only one hand. And on the table, out of the corner of his eye, a thin black shape will unfurl and leave the table clean.
He decides to visit the original body. Nobody likes that. It’s sweltering; rotten seaweed piles up. He’s miserable. He hasn’t slept. The seagulls are miserable and screaming. The body is still there, in its little pool, untouched. He’d figure a scavenger would be all over it. The creature is miserable about that, too. He wants to inspect it, but a few steps too close and it unfurls in his pocket. A hiss echoes in his head—from every direction at once—and a pool of slime leaks into his coat and chills his side. It’s enough of a sign for him.
He knows what it wants.
He returns to man’s instinct number two. Circle. Wait for a belaboured hiss and watch a perfect circle form in the sand. With a dot as the pupil, they must seem like an eye from space. Watching. Or something.
It’s funny like that.
It’s a good thing nobody comes over. He has no real job but to watch for the men at the satellites. He’s failed at that, he supposes, because he keeps sending emails. All good here, all good here, nothing to report. Nowhere else to go either.
He starts savouring moments of movement. Radio static fills the beachouse and he relaxes in his armchair. With the creature out he can’t help poke at it. With a finger, a toothpick, anything new, cold or warm. He’s stopped trying to hurt it and waits instead for it to react. Wait for a stray tendril to peel back and shoo him off or a murmur to bubble in the back of his mind. It learns, too. After one too many prods it stops reacting and rumbles only to itself.
He gets to feeding it. Stepped up from crumbs to full meals: slices of meat or cheese off his plate, bread, tomato, some small, whole fish. It takes it all. A sitting glass of water is quickly wrapped and drained.
It's active now, but seems happy just to be there. It doesn’t do much for him but It doesn’t fuss. It gives him his hand back sometimes, to work, though he doesn’t often anymore. Watching the scaly thing skitter over his keyboard gets his adrenaline going again.
It lives, he figures. It eats and drinks like anything else. It begs his attention sometimes, shares his boredness.
They go to the beach when work is slow and nobody’s pinging his computer. He’ll be transferred eventually and nothing will go right then, but for now nothing has happened. Once, he manages to remember a shovel. The body is still there. Not moved, not touched. His passenger whispers something and digs its thorns into the handle of the shovel.
He can’t pretend to understand it. But it does let him bury the body.