Vestiges ➀

Content Warning: This story includes extreme themes and intense imagery that may be disturbing to some readers. It explores unsettling dark and graphic content involving physical and emotional distress, as well as challenging and provocative scenarios. Reader discretion is advised.

Topographical Leakage ▼

excrescence

is the word for what i am now.

excrescence

is the word for my sorry life, ballooning slow like a tumour out of the sidewalk's ooze and burgeoning unchecked from the slime of the buildings in their sweat.

excrescence

is my world. all our world, truth be told. rusty canker and gelatinous boil both. slug siblings and gravy-grease splotches of matter floating. the world of the chattel drudge and unseeable enslaver. 

one morning –

Submission Juice ▼

one morning I woke up. like all the others, yes, day after day. thinking for one split second that it might be better. but it never is.

slug still driven into the veins of my neck like always. call it a slug but it's really more like a leech, but though it draws blood like a good leech should, it also adds a certain something. a soupçon – a slug of control hormone from the Master. 

hence slug. not just what it is, also what it pushes into your blood, your brain. your slug of submission juice.

time to wake up, slurp down the nutrient broth from the trough, then go to my meeting with my supervisor and find out if i still had a job, or whether i would be dissolved into the grey dark cold juice that i was breakfasting on right now.

this is life if you are an excrescence living in a city that's an excrescence, on a planet that has become a gray-green pustulent daughter of a lush green before. day by day we have what the Masters leave us. it's enough to get by.

Tubules ▲

After breakfast, that first whiff of molten rubber drifting down the foothills from the city always gives me mouth clumps. Alkali smarting reflux? Sure, but I appreciate the output. A blessed second helping - a meal so nice you taste it twice. That's what they say down at the slurry farm. 

Considering my roach bag is empty save a few leg bits, I'm savouring the caustic bitter aftertaste, swirling it in sour saliva and coating my bucca mucosa - a salve for my hunger.

What's really making me crazy is a wholly different kind of hunger. A pang, though satisfied with as much frequency as this forlorn brushscape will allow, still puffs my epididymis and throbs under my crotch gauntlet. I don't let it get me down though. Au contraire, I'm up most of the time. There's always someone or something to play get what ya give. You just have to keep an open mind. 

I say crazy, but preoccupied is probably a better designation, for I am quite sane. Though prone to a manic affect, my thoughts are free, but organized. You have to keep your wits about you out here. It's bug food all the way down. I am but a size medium in the grand scheme of things. 

Today, I'll get up a little closer to the dismal downtown, and poke around in some of the more unscavenged, eremetic waste dunes. Who knows, maybe I'll find a friend. A friend or a meal.  A giant myriapod would do. It's my go to fantasy. The best of both worlds really. I daren't close my eyes, but for a moment, I do. Open and receptive to the bountiful universe, I am lost in brief reverie. 

Beautiful creature, I release your head, careful not to disturb the subesophageal ganglionic structures, I slurp the fat from your tubules and empty your mid and hindgut with reverence but also enthusiasm. 

You undulate with residual neural activity in my hands, oruga brother. I am honoured, your last writhing, given to me. Inside you, we are coupled in rapturous delight and become one. It’s a mystic union of protein and desire. 

Holding the moment, I let my eyes open slowly, degaussing the wilderness to reveal the promise of a new day.

Side-Eye ▼

the thing i call supervisor is actually an overseer or better said owner. it possesses me. yes like that too sometimes, but i'm not sure it takes any pleasure from it or that it's just a way to check if i'm still viable as breeder.

it pushes in polyps or whatever and it shakes them around. various places. jellisome jigging. i look away. i try not to feel anything except the minimal physical discomfort that the slug on my neckvein and the polyps on these places are working on me.

the Master forces its nonthoughts into me then. the stink becomes intense, soursmell and wax drips, rotmold and giblets. there's a sudden shudder and then there's always something to wipe off as it runs down my leg afterwards.  

that was not what was happening today though. today is performance review. that's what i call it. there are no human words for what is actually happening here. 

it sends me images culled from scraps of our entertainments from the time before they came and possessed us. images of tests and ordeals - thumbs screwed in clamps, runners on treadmills, papers on desks in large hallways - all mixed up. 

it's up to me to figure out what the Master means to convey to me from these strangled images. this is the only way they can communicate with us. the things we humans used to do, now used as small tokens of what they command.

it's an art in itself, for us conditioned ones, working out the message from these images they push into our minds, with the razorfuzz filter of their own consciousness intervening. 

their nonthought, it squishes and tars the images, makes them glutinous and jiggly in the mind’s eye. all through this conversation, i must keep my eyes averted from my Master, the thing that possesses me. it's owned me and my labor and my output for many many years now, but i've never seen it head-on. 

that is both a taboo - for their protocol, conveyed to us by the most striking of mental transmissions - and is also something that will destroy our minds in seconds. i've seen it happen to others. then dissolution into the cold gravy.

so the performance review as i see it in my brain is an image of a runner running on a treadmill, a doctor connected by wires reading numbers from a screen. 

but the runner has three legs and clammy mauve skin and the doctor's stethoscope is a caterpillar drilling into his skull. this means that my work tasks are being monitored.

the thumb screw, thumbnail bursting custard yellow threaded with crimson strands. this is an unsatisfactory performance. displeased vibrations sound in my head like angerbuzz. 

now my own head is placed in a clamp, a large vise, and crushed, splurging aubergine and taupe all around. significance: a reprimand may be expected soon.

other images follow in quick succession - fungus growing in the bowels of a horse, the lopped-off stems of hydrangeas -  give me to understand that i must score a success for my possessor without delay, or my employment for its needs will be terminated.

while this is going on there is a small pseudopod from the Master invading my ratskin breeches and fumbling with my loins. but it doesn't go farther than that today.

and then i am dismissed.

Embouchure ▲

Had to take cover inside a barbed succulent when I saw a gang of deserters scramble over the moat mound that surrounds the gooey spires and high-rise tombs of the city. It wouldn't be long before some swooping netherwraith caught up with the escapees. And as much as I'd like to help a fellow band of fugitives, I couldn't risk getting caught, quite possibly with my pants down - so to speak.

You have to be fast and clever if you want to outrun or outmaneuver those ghostly flying-monkey-police and it didn't look like this bunch had any semblance of a plan at all. 

They were just shrieking down the hill, fast stepping wildly, occasionally tumbling into the sand where they were easily picked off. I kept my distance and laid low, peering through a couple of eyeholes I fashioned into the cacti with my handy ravioli punch, an artifact bestowed upon me by my mentor and trainer, Signor Valenti.

As luck would have it, the security team dispatched with the runaways in quick order, and I didn't have to wait long until they had finished collecting the slave scraps for recycling purposes. Waste not, want not.

Though it was a long way off, I was optimistic, thinking they might have missed something and left me a little snack. I emerged from the hiding place and under my shawl of camouflage, hopscotched my way watchful to the kill site.

After some careful excavation, I did manage to discover a scalp slice and a few teeth, sadly nothing very edible. But you know, you'll find nothing in a hundred percent of the holes you don't dig right? So I was about to head back to safer ground, when I heard a slippy whistle sound, like someone imitating a baritone gila with a damaged embouchure.

"Who's there?" I say, swivelling my head, triangulating the surprise emittance.

The sad trumpet continues but the signal is getting weaker. It's coming from someplace downslope. I descend in an arc toward the source, each footstep a deliberate and measured movement in case this is some kind of trap. Camo net deployed, eyes flicky, ears tick-tick-ticking for snaps and snips. 

Crouching and scanning along the granular surface, I notice a reed vibrating. From the tip, there's a barely audible fizz degrading in shortening bursts, like a dying breath. After a while, it stops and my instincts tell me it's safe to unearth the anomalous thing.

Prospects are dim here. He wouldn't make it very far without legs anyway. Must have hand-scooped a shallow hidey-hole when his bottom third got swiped off. The breathing tube was a stroke of genius—very impressed with the ingenuity and quick thinking. Probably woulda made a good companion for a while. 

Hey, maybe still could.  So I fashion a sled from some driftwire and my burlap veil and haul my new buddy back to the lair.

Part 2