In Which It Took Years To Stop Missing Them

You can find our Saturday fiction series here from now until the sun dies.

Host

by ERICA CICCARONE

They start at my feet and have taken over my ankles, my shins, and two of them have grown in my right knee. We hope that there will be no new ones. We hope that they will fall off soon, or hatch.

They are blue-ish beneath the skin, some small as eraser buds and others the size of peanut M & Ms. Some are raised, like mushrooms growing on a rock. Others are partially exposed, like coral. There have not been any more since last week, so our hope is that the medicine is working and soon they will disintegrate. Hopefully, the medicine will also kill the creature that is living inside of me. What I want to know is, what will happen to it after it dies? Will it come out of me somehow? Will I spend the rest of my life harboring the corpse of an egg laying creature?

When we first noticed the eggs, we were in the car driving back home from a long weekend at the shore. I was wearing my rubber duckies and my feet started itching. Not wanting to take off the monsters, I stomped my feet on the floor of the car. I clicked my heels together, slapped my toes against the dashboard.

“What are you doing?” my mother asked.

“My feet itch!”

“Christ, it’s those ridiculous boots. It’s not even raining!”

The possibility that it could rain seemed reason enough to don the yellow galoshes.

The itching changed to burning, like the blood in my veins was actually on fire. I tore the laces out of the boots and pulled them off, threw them onto the backseat. Off came the aquamarine socks. You know when you’re dreaming and in the dream you sort of know that you’re dreaming? That was how I felt when I looked down at my feet. A cluster of six on the right foot and three dotted the left foot in the shape of a triangle. Eggs.

I am getting used to my eggs. I sit on the floor in the living room eating popcorn and watching the game shows. Mom doesn’t want me sitting on the couch. She’s afraid that the eggs might spread, that the creature will somehow move to a new host. Can I blame her? She didn’t want me to sleep in my bed, either, but Aunt Patty intervened and Mom agreed to let me sleep there if I put down a piece of plastic. Obviously, I am not going to school. Nor am I going to ballet class or horse back riding lessons, because we don’t want the creature burrowing into Ginger either.

Because Mom works and she decided I shouldn’t be left home to alone to develop a psychological neuroses about my eggs, Aunt Patty comes by a few times a day. She works from home doing something with computers so it’s not too big a deal for her to stop by. We play checkers or pinochle and she brings me a turkey sandwich with lots of mayo and tomato, the way I like it. We think that the creature entered me in the sea, and because they say that the human body is something like 75% water, it doesn’t surprise me that the creature has chosen me as its host. What does surprise me, of course, are the eggs. They are growing, very slightly but noticeably. I cannot see them growing, but I keep a chart of their progress, their growth in centimeters. Nor do I see a new one emerge. It is as if that part happens very quickly when I am not looking. One minute, I had nineteen of them and Bob Barker was hugging some chubby housewife, and the next minute there were twenty. That’s the count right now. Twenty. I am hoping that this nice, round number will signal a stop to their growth. Aunt Patty said, “Just four more and we can start selling them by the dozen.”

The infectious disease specialist is in New York City, 1300 miles from where we live in Metairie, Louisiana. Mom’s always talking about going to the Big Apple to see “a show.” She pronounces it “BROAD-way.” When we made the trip last week, scraping together the Christmas savings, I felt overwhelmed by the bigness of it, so many people, like my identity could shift out of me and jump into another body, and I would return home at night with the personality of a forty-year old accountant named Barry. There was now something so unique and exceptional about me that I felt full and original and great. I wanted to run down Fifth Avenue.

The doctor’s office was on the Upper East Side, right by Central Park. Before we went into the office, my mother said, “His name is Dr. Dudu. He is from Bangladesh and he is very brilliant. Please do not laugh at his name.” I could tell she was trying not laugh herself. I nodded solemnly, but I was very excited to show Dr. Dudu my eggs.

Dr. Dudu was very tall. He had a thick, black moustache and the complexion of a polished saddle. I was wearing some slip-on sneakers and thin socks, and when I took these off, his face screwed up—not in horror like Mom and Aunt Patty — but with an expression of fascination and rapture, like he had just seen the light of God.

After he interviewed me, examined me, and drew blood, he determined that I had been infected with a creature. You’d think he’d speak in fancy medical terms that I wouldn’t understand, but he didn’t. He actually said, “You have been infected with a creature.”

My mother, who had been standing, sunk her hips into the counter and her hand rose to her throat.

“What?” she said.

“It probably chose Julie as a host when she was in the ocean. You are a very unusual girl,” Dr. Dudu said to me. “This happens very rarely.”

This notion thrilled me!

“Eventually, with treatment, the eggs will disintegrate and the bumps will get smaller and smaller over the next three weeks, until they disappear. But you will have some scars.”

I considered this briefly and shrugged.

“Three weeks!” my mother said.

“Maybe two.”

“Can’t you cut them off?” my mother said.

The doctor cradled my foot in his hand and looked at my eggs. “I would not do that. The eggs are beneath the skin. It would be like cutting into the yolk of an egg — extremely painful for Julie. And the scarring would be much worse. And besides, they would still grow back. They must dissolve naturally.”

“What if they hatch?” I said.

“The medication will kill them. You are not a natural host, so the eggs most likely are under-developed anyway. I will give you an ointment for them, to help the itching. You must not itch them.” He shook his finger at me sternly. “Promise me you will not itch!”

“I promise,” I said. I liked him.

By the time I hopped off the examination table, I felt like I was taking the news very well. But that night in the hotel room, I felt differently. I couldn’t stop looking at my eggs. I began to imagine things. An alien race of creatures would be born from my feet, and they would kill me and my mother and leave the house to take over Metairie, New Orleans, and then the world. Or maybe they were actually bird eggs, or starfish eggs. I didn’t mind the idea of starfish being born from my feet, but wouldn’t it be painful? Where would the starfish go? I would probably have to collect them and take them back to the sea. And then what? Would the creature lay more eggs? According to Dr. Dudu, I would know that the creature was dying because I would experience symptoms of the flu. So now, we’re waiting.

Aunt Patty takes my temperature at lunch time.

“Ninety-eight-six,” she says every day, “and cool as a cucumber.”

I have been drawing pictures of the creature. I like to think that it has many eyes with very long eyelashes, and one of those flagellums. Basically, my ideas are a mix of cartoon monsters and microscopic photographs of amoeba in science text books. I am starting to miss school. When my friends call to find out where I am, I don’t mention the eggs. We decided on walking pneumonia: contagious and long-lasting, no one would try to visit me. “I’m feeling a little better today,” cough cough, “Just weak and,” cough, “tired. I’m so tired, I’m falling asleep on the phone.” I keep up with my homework and have discovered that I can easily get through life and school without teachers. Except that I need Aunt Patty to help me figure out a geometry problem from time to time. Sometimes I take the needle of the compass and press it against an egg, almost to the point of breaking the skin. I wonder what would leak out of it. Like the yoke of an egg. It is sometimes lonely here with my eggs. At least I have the dog. Yesterday, I woke up and the dog was licking my eggs. I haven’t told Mom and I hope the dog doesn’t die.

Three months later the eggs have spread up my legs. We have been to New York twice, mortgaged the slanted house, consulted more doctors and they have all said the same thing: wait. I wait, and I feel like a mother, waiting for a baby to complete the gestation cycle and be born into the world. School is over. My friends have stopped calling. I caught Reggie Boudreaux looking through the window at me as I sat on a towel in the living room, practicing yoga. I went to a specialist in New Age medicine who suggested it. I meditate, cross legged, breathing in and out, sending thoughts away as quickly as they appear. The eggs are large and bulbous now, and there are dozens. I cradle my feet in my hands when I am in full lotus and smooth my hands over my eggs.

My mother has ceased communicating with me. Aunt Patty comes less and less. Even the dog has lost interest in me.

One night years later, my boyfriend Michael consults my feet, which are pockmarked as a prehistoric egg. I have never told anyone the story. I keep my feet as a secret all to myself, something sacred, a thing of something like shame and homage together. But I like Michael. He has scars and burn marks from when he was younger and damaged. But he is better now. We are in our thirties, and it has been many years since the eggs started to fall off. But still, I wonder if the creature is still living inside of me.

“These scars, Jules,” he says. “Where did they come from?”

I try to tell him the story. With tenderness, I describe the day at Pensacola, removing my galoshes and tiptoeing into the water. I tell him that I stood there, fifteen years old, in a blue bikini, my mother sunning behind me. I tell him how calm I felt as I stood and waded up to my thighs, as I dipped my head into the water and held my breath and my hair spooled all around me like a mermaid. I tell him I wish mermaids were real. How I imagine they’d have problems like this all the time, how it would be no big deal.

“But what is it?” he says.

I tell him that at some point, as I bathed in the gulf, a creature entered my body. I tell him about my eggs, about the hard, certain texture of them. I tell him about the nine months I sat on the living room floor with them. I tell him how I grieved when they started to fall off, one at a time, into tiny carcasses, deflated and hopeless. It took years, I tell him, for me to stop missing my eggs. It was like a part of me was amputated.

“I felt that way when my mother died,” he said.

“I felt nothing when my mother died,” I said honestly.

And here we are, alone, essentially, on this earth, in each other's arms, and I have told him about my eggs, and we lie there, eyes locked, and I feel his foot graze my foot, his toes run up and down it, something starts to happen to me and I moan. I keep moaning as he strokes my feet. I see the surf of Pensacola and hear the waves; I feel the scruff of the bath towel under my butt and I breathe in, breathe out, sending all thoughts away, until I’m underwater again, my legs turned to a slick scaly tail, my hair floating around me, my neck slit with gills. I am part of the ocean, I am part mother and part ocean. I moan and he strokes my feet.

Erica Ciccarone is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find her website here.

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The new album from Filastine, LOOT, was released on April 3rd.

In Which We Remain A Vagabond At Heart

You can read all the stories from our Saturday fiction series here.

Diegesis

by JOSHUA D. FRANK

A month out from their arrival on Tonga the three of them spied a small settlement in the distance. They'd been on foot through this deserted part of the island the entire time, and with one member of their party sick (or dying, depending on your point of view) it was a welcome sight. To think of food in such a place was a near impossibility, but every tiny outpost, even an abandoned one, was likely to have a source of fresh water.

They had been forced to let one of their cameras go when they last saw signs of human habitation, trading it for five gallons of water and a bag of highly caloric nuts which tasted something like burnt popcorn. Once you grew accustomed to it, the nuts weren't half bad, but the flavor stayed in Derwin's mouth for hours afterwards, turning sour and making him gag.

He left Tellman and Karen with the sidearm while he investigated the settlement alone. They had argued for a time about who should keep it, but he had won, although as he double-timed it unarmed in the direction of the largest structure, it did not feel like a victory. He did not particularly like the idea of leaving them. Tellman's attitude had gone from a sort of vague optimism to a spiritless drone rather quickly and he worried it might be contagious.

Along the way he saw several peka, the creepy Tongan fruit bats, circling overhead. Strange to see them out in the day. That they could not possibly want to consume human flesh was no comfort when he saw their weirdly coyote-like visages. Everything has a face, he thought. After forty-five minutes he stopped to slake his thirst, and the jungle had diminished enough to where he could see the structure more clearly. He had twisted his ankle on their first day on the island, and it ached now, but he pressed on.

From afar the structure resembled a simple hut, but the closer he ventured to it, the larger it became. At a distance of a hundred meters it loomed large overhead, almost blacking out the heat of the afternoon sun. From the overlaid carvings on the exterior it appeared quite old, but certainly not ancient. After approaching more closely, he decided it was a temple of some kind. Tellman would be unhappy he was not present for the discovery, but considering Karen's condition there had been no choice but that the man with some modicum of medical skill should care for her.

He tried the door, and it quickly gave way to his pull. He entered the temple only after finding twelve to fifteen huts of the kind he had imagined on the horizon surrounding the place. To his disappointment, but not to his surprise, they were all empty, and from the looks of it had been so for a long time. With the possibility of thieves and the occasional film crew accidentally stumbling on the settlement, anything of value was likely underground, and he could see no other viable access point.

As he entered the temple, he felt a cloud of dust enter his lungs and eyes, and some of it made its way into his mouth. He moved more cautiously into the anteroom after that, even as he grew more hopeful. If there were booby traps or deadfalls in this empty place, it only implied that there were items of value to protect.

The inside of the main chamber was filled with more carvings along the lines of what he had seen in the anteroom. All were done in a dark wood he could not identify: perhaps it was not even from the island. At the rear of the room was a rostrum, and behind it one large tableau to which all others seemed to direct and refer. The scene depicted an old and emaciated woman either leaning against a staff taller than herself as support or, as he decided was possible, commanding it. Behind her loomed what Derwin at first identified as a sun, but upon closer examination, the globe seemed to radiate no heat or energy, and he could see a landmass, faint but discernible, on its surface. Earth.

Next to the image of the old woman (he had to remind himself it was only a representation) was a small rodent or possum, most likely the woman's familiar. His eyes lingered on the old woman's face. There lurked both a quiet assurance and a subtle hint of fear. He did not know how long exactly he viewed the elaborate carving, but it was long enough to know he was not entirely well. When he tried to stand, propping himself on two legs felt fine for a moment, but then the light headaches would come in again.

When he woke there was no longer light coming in through the parapets. The woman was gone, and he was lying on his back in a different place. He smelled the dank aroma of popcorn with which he had become so familiar. He heard the sound of footsteps nearby, and tried to raise his head, but found he could not without furthering a dull, then searing pain in the back of his skull. Given a moment to his collect his wits, Derwin was sure he was experiencing the most savage hangover of his life. The only solution he knew of for a hangover was more alcohol, but when he reached into his pocket for the flask, he found it had vanished along with his only knife.

When a large figure entered the room, he immediately hid behind a wooden door. The slow moving shape entered, and seeing him no longer resting on the hard slate, let out an anguished cry. He pinned what he was now sure was a young man's hand behind his back and twisted. He would have threatened the boy quietly but his Tongan was rudimentary at best and pain would carry the message more quickly. What unnerved him was that the boy did not utter a sound after the first scream.

He noticed hanging from the boy's belt of rope, his only remaining knife. He had traded the other two he had brought with him in Vava'u for the seervices of a guide who had disappeared into the jungle as they marched west from the tourist-y part of the island. He pocketed the knife and slammed the boy's head as hard as he could against the door. Staring at the unconscious native, he knew that leaving him alive to follow was not a viable option. Leaning down, he plunged the knife into the boy's heart and felt a shudder: his own.

It did not take long at all to realize he was underground. By following a long pathway, lit by a torch every five meters, he worked his way back into the anteroom. There was the old woman again, in the thrall of the planet, and he realized that he had missed her. He wanted nothing more than to sleep on a pew, to rest the aching head that weighed heavier on his shoulders with every step, but he could not. The one saving grace was that his ankle felt fine, better than fine. His strength grew as he walked and then ran away from the village, and even the pain in his head began to abate.

Tellman and Karen were not where he had left them. The majority of their supplies and the remaining camera were hidden in a nearby bush. He hoped this meant they would not be gone long, but leaving such things unprotected and nearly in the open mystified him. At the bottom of the pack he found the satellite cell phone he could not imagine them leaving behind, no matter how long the trip. He tried to puzzle it out: they thought they would be back quickly and were attacked; something had happened to Tellman and neither of his colleagues could carry the pack. No explanation seemed to take all of the aspects into account, and then he noticed the date and time on the satellite phone.

If the clock was correct, he had been gone over thirty-five hours, which must have raised an alarm. But for them to move, with the condition Karen was in... Crossing a fragile rope-bridge the previous day, she had cut herself on the twisting boards as they splintered. Infection was the biggest fear, but she had also lost a lot of blood in the accident. Her legs might have carried her as far as the temple, but he could not see Tellman risking it if he was with her. He would have left her here to wait if he had done anything at all. Would he have taken the sidearm with him? Derwin could not answer that, but it also seemed probable.

He thought to himself, Tellman leaves to go find me. Karen can't carry the gear and must leave it behind if she wishes to follow. She hides it and comes after him. Within the realm of possibility, but again something was not right. As night began to fall more of the peka circled, chirping at him when he stood up to shoo them off.

After making another meal of the foul popcorn, he hid the majority of the gear in a more concealed spot, strapped the pack to his back, and resigned himself to heading back towards the temple. There was no place else they might have gone. Halfway out, the Tongan rain began, a drenching, unrelenting stream that at first cooled him off, and then began to chill him.

On the steps of the temple he found the boy. Feeling quite silly, he checked for a pulse. Still dead. He viewed the wound and found another incision on the left side of the torso. As he closed the corpse's eyes, a burst of sudden recognition arrived. Add a beard and perhaps one or two kilos around the midsection, and he was certain the young man had been their derelict guide, who had vanished with a camera and a pack after promising to scout the the way ahead more than a week ago. They had hired the boy to help them look for a grave, the final resting of place of a legendary aviator. Tellman had been so sure, that the woman's body had been traded for gold, interred and dug up, passed around so many times, he actually found himself believing it might be found here. It hardly mattered now.

He put an arm through the temple doors, and then extended his right hand, clad in a latex glove, to examine the substance he had ingested on his first go round. The color was a sickly green, probably a native poison of some kind. Incapacitated so, it was no wonder he was unable to recognize the guide as his victim. The influence of the substance may have also been what allowed him to take a life in such a cavalier fashion. He still did not feel entirely like himself.

He found a second entrance to the tunnel system quite by accident, hidden below the rostrum. He fought the urge to stay above ground, not to descend below. There was nowhere else to go, so he followed, dropping seed behind him as he went so he would not find himself moving in circles. Soon the sound of voices grew louder, and this time he did not try to return to the surface, following the dank path until it opened into a larger cavern. He hid near the entrance, and in a moment he saw a glimpse of Karen, seated on a makeshift chair. He thought to try to signal quietly. Before he chanced it, his eye was drawn immediately to her injured arm. She no longer wore a sling, and moved the limb without effort.

He simply watched then. After ten minutes, Tellman made his first appearance, and they both worked in front of laptops. He decided that what unnerved him most was that they did not speak to each other at all. Occasionally Karen would turn to the spectacled Tellman and look as if she might either say something or cry, but after a moment, she returned to eyeing her terminal.

When his eyes had fully adjusted to the lack of light in the room, two things jumped out. The first was that the room was completely flooded with the fruit bats. The peka inhabited the cavern like ants on a hill, and they barely moved except to clean themselves. They second was that his sidearm lay well within reach, if he could move without being seen or heard. His two travelling companions were so involved in what they were doing he doubted he would arouse their attention, but what if the bats took notice?

Instead he stood and calmly walked across the cavern. He made no move towards the gun. He simply went over and stood before them. "What's going on here?" he demanded.

Tellman held up a solitary finger. In a moment, the cavern began to shake, subtly at first, but quickly the vibrations grew stronger. He heard Tellman say, "The boy was strong, and you must have been in the first stages of the virus. I'm surprised you were able to overpower him." Derwin thought to explain that it had been self-defense, but realized the very idea of defending his actions was absurd. 

"She's well," Derwin said.

"She's an automaton," Tellman said. "It's necessary to have one on board."

"You tried to kill me," Derwin managed.

"I'm sorry for that," Tellman said. "I truly am. We needed organs in case ours fail during the trip. You and that autochthon have the same blood type. I'm not being deceitful when I say I hoped you would win, and I left the gear for you to prove it."

"How have you..." he began. "Why the bats?"

"They're quite nutritious and tasty," Tellman said. "We'll need lots of food. Get comfortable. It's a long ride."

Joshua D. Frank is a writer living in Portland.

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In Which We Learn The Meaning Of Platonic

You can view our Saturday fiction archive here from now until the sun dies.

Covert

by JOHANNA DEL RAY

No one but myself knows what I have suffered, nor what I have gained, by your unsleeping watchfulness and admirable pertinacity.

- Black Arrow

"The better way," Miss Hamm said with a glib smile, "is to pat it down with your hands."

"Someone taught you that?" Lira asked.

She shook her head. "I read it in a book." Lira had to learn from Miss Hamm's lips, as there were only five books in the manse. Two chronicles by Robert Louis Stevenson, and the rest may as well have not existed. They were in French. Lira spent the afternoon dusting the two attic rooms, preparing them for what her employer called "new arrivals." They had not been in use for some time, since long before the last war.

It was her task to sort the produce, celery from lettuce, avocado from cucumber. For each patient she cut up some in a little cup. The gals were evidently thankful by the way they nodded to Lira. The ward was all women except for a few token males: Miss Hamm's young son Daniel was the gardener, there was a border collie who had impregnated a stray somewhere on the property, Alex Pearl and his brother Ben were the only male employees, and Miss Hamm had a friend named Veld. It was how Lira learned the true meaning of the word platonic.

Veld took her aside suddenly as she was packing up the little crates for the food service. She could not imagine what he was going to say, but after a foreboding prelude, he asked her help in picking out a gift for Miss Hamm. She was both a little disappointed and relieved. Then she felt panicky, for in truth she could not know what someone with fine tastes would even want.

Brushing his long hair from his brow, Veld asked her to not tell Miss Hamm, but she went to do so anyway, at the first opportunity. Her supervisor was sewing the pocket of a long trench coat.

"Lira," Miss Hamm said after hearing the story, bouncing a thimble on her bottom lip, "you must like someone." With the excretion of a border collie no doubt somewhere in her hair, it did not seem like a moment to admit to anything, even if the confession was a lie. She told her mistress what Veld had said earlier.

Miss Hamm stopped sewing and began writing something. "What did you tell him?" she asked. Lira found herself saying, "I couldn't have answered him if I wanted to, and I found that I did not want to anyway."

Later that week a new patient arrived, a young woman by their standards, younger than Miss Hamm, named Miss Darlington. Miss Darlington was a lovely blonde shaped something like a crane. She and Miss Hamm had known each other in some previous life and acted like old friends. In the mornings Lira got in the habit of serving the two women and Veld tea in a leisurely fashion. They would ask her to sit with them if she did not have some other work, which was rare. She found that Veld paid roughly the same amount of attention to his two friends. He spoke to her infrequently, only to ask a question or to suggest he would fetch the next cup himself.

At the onset of spring, Miss Darlington did the opposite, catching a virus that weakened the feeling in her legs. The bug was not contagious. Veld did not mind sitting in the attic; it was not Lira's favorite, but Miss Hamm begged off due to her claustrophobia. Without her boss around, she found Miss Darlington altogether different from Miss Hamm in a way she had never seemed during their placid tea-times.

In the evening when everyone was sleep she sat on her bed and read one of the Robert Louis Stevenson novels. She heard him say, that others may display more constancy is still my hope, and felt the urge to obey.

By the following Friday, Miss Darlington seemed to have recovered, a refreshingly full cast came over her cheeks. She took Lira into town of Tunstall on a wandering pursuit of a new collar for the border collie; she had named the dog Leslie. After ten or so minutes of small talk, Miss Darlington said, "She's quite unused to this, you know. She's doing her best."

Lira knew to tread carefully. "Yes, ma'am."

"When I knew her," she said, "she would read our palms and tell us our fortune. Give me yours. If there's a war, your friend Veld will be called off. Does that bother you?"

Lira thought for a moment. "No."

"It should, Lira, it should. Suppose you were called off. Don't you think he'd be sad?" She look Lira to a fashionable store, one she would have never dared enter on her own. Miss Darlington tried on a few jumpers, nothing particularly seemed to suit her. When they were alone in the dressing room she opened a large black purse and showed her a small silver box.

"What's in there?" Lira found herself asking.

Miss Darlington said, "A gift from Mr. Veld. I'm returning it." Inside was a necklace that glowed with anticipation.

"You don't like him," Lira said.

"No, I don't," Miss Darlington said. "Does that surprise you? Well perhaps it does, you're not used to condescension. It's when someone is saying something they half mean."

"Doesn't that make everything condescending?" Lira said.

"Nearly so," Miss Darlington said.

In the bathroom of a diner, Lira made what small changes she could in her appearance.

Johanna Del Ray is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Atlanta.

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