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3,500 words

My failures taste of screen and salt. It’s something relegated almost exclusively to words and two-dimensional representations, blatant artifice—pink-haired, heterochromed magic girls in way over their cutesy anime heads in insecto-flesh, stomachs deformed, fragile psyches breaking. There’s sparse—overwhelmingly lackluster—distributions online, buried deep deep in the hellish zoo boards. Scrolling and scrolling, my brain knots begin untwining themselves in a total lobal suicide sifting through the maniacal dregs of anonymous online puppy-fuckers. I wonder if the dog-love crowd hates me just as much as everyone else hates them? Maggoted honey, it’s coming into me—pixel mosaics of something I’ve seen before, more times than I can count. I low into my screen—no pleasure, only ritual. Living flesh reduced to host, parasite elevated to lover. A hissing cockroach flicks its antennae across a herped labia majora in 240p—a twelve-second clip of a Kyiv man’s genitals forcibly converted into a breeding ground for aedes albopictus, proboscises sinking into translucent foreskin as he strokes himself off with clinical dispassion at Kalashnikov gunpoint—a maternity forum for teen moms sabotaged by intentional botfly infestation hobbyists—centipedes taxidermied into increasingly lewd configurations of congress. I tug at my flaccidity, one pull every half-minute, matching baseline vascular function. Russian chitchat froths under white noise through the laptop speakers. What’s your plans after this, bro? Lunch? I finger-fuck myself to mushis for the thousandth time and cum across spit-slick white knuckles. There’s nothing in this immateria, just a schizophrenic A-B-C routine, sterile realms of fantasy, punching my softness and hoping something will spring out the hedonism ether to rapture me from this pathetic endoskeleton existence. Nothing. Digitized screams out into the zoo-void, howling and howling through an info apocalypse. My phoneutric erection speculations fall on deaf ears. Our small yet dedicated community has slowly exodused over the years—faded back into meatspace, entered algorithmic Promised Land—fellow entomophile voyagers passed by in this ethically derelict wasteland of kissless horse rapists and improvisational canine euthanasia artists. I see the bisected guts of a corgi once called Biscuit when all I want is a handsome cteniza sauvagesi building its trapdoor nest in the inverted cherry hollow of a decent-looking prolapse. I’ve conditioned myself to find contentment in ecstasy’s absence, trained my neural pathways to fire cold dope-hits at the promise of denied gratification, transcendence through negation. I steep into myself where there’s nothing, spanning maw empty and emptying. Like me, my carapaced fascinations writhe mindless through a sensory abyss—it’s all information, no feeling. Taking it all in and in, holding on thoughtlessly to feed the meat machine, self-perpetuating the conspiracy to my complete and perfect automation. I am made to sustain myself, so I do—I am made to fuck myself, so I do—I am made to hate myself, so I do. I’ve stopped contemplating the possibility of more, shrugging obsolesced. There’s nothing beyond those bleak horizons of prime directive, the compulsion squirmed into my developing gray matter before birth, Mystery Daddy’s cumshot sparking a new, inevitable self-negation into the universe. I amount to nothing—I am personified absence, transmaterializing outside intent, weeping ghast looping through memorious threshold—most pathetic specimen of our quasi-sentient species. My body disgusts me—the faulty, improbable soul worming inside my body disgusts me.

There’s no telling how long the package was sitting in my PO box, a week or more. No return address, layers upon layers of packing tape, cardboard edges softened with humidity. I originally got the PO box because Mom can hardly restrain herself from opening all my mail: smut, cock-shaped silicon, research chemicals, insufficient funds notices from the bank. I drag a scissors’ parted blade down the box’s center, along the divot where its flaps meet. Something brackish clings to my fingertips as I pull the tape apart. Cardboard unfolds to newspapers crumpled and damp, scrawls of illegible Spanish, from Mexico by the flag printed on one of the shredded leaves. Under a sección de política lies a black polypropylene container with holes crudely punched into its screw-on lid. Rotating the plastic container, it carries only a small, unmoving weight within, no markings—a faint, crystalline residue dusts unevenly along its sealed lip. The cap unscrews, and the stench of wet basement and enzyme decay wafts up. The thing that lays supine within sheens so minutely, contours sucking in what little light the black container can afford, camouflaging so well it manifests as nothing more than a silhouette cutaway from reality’s visual tapestry. I turn slick with immediate arachnoid recognition. The dark marks flowing up its body are hard to make out, hues of deep lavender blotting its supple curvatures in hypnotic patterns that seem to devour surrounding photons. Short, wiry hairs glint low orange, tiny eyes iridescent. It’s so still I’d think it’s dead if it weren’t softly moving, rising and shrinking in the umbra. A bolt of slow, heavy lightning traces down my spinal cord and settles at the deepest of my loins as it shifts to consider me in its octo-optical gaze. I’m warm between my thighs. Species unrecognizable, it doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen. Latrodectus by its body shape, but at least three times the size of even the largest Phinda widow, full body easily spanning the width and length of my hand—I don’t dare test to be certain. Female by its enlarged abdomen—perhaps male by its massive set of slender pedipalps that could be mistaken for an extra pair of legs curled together under its cephalothorax. An androgynous spider? Its epigynum rests away from where my eyes can see, hiding its sex. I screw the cap back on and empty the box it came in, searching for any clue as to who sent the spider, peeling through each shred of newspaper. No note, nothing. My 4:30 pm alarm sounds from under a pillow on my bed—another half-hour before I need to be at work. Tonight, I’ll get fucked on benzos and open the black container onto my naked stomach and flood my intestines with plastic, counting our breaths until dawn.

Evan, Arby’s petit commandant, calls me three minutes after my shift was supposed to start. Where the hell are you? I’m tired of you showing up late every goddamn day. Do it again and I’m dunking your hands into one of the fryers. You remember Tommy, you stupid cunt bitch? We all remember Tommy. Remember when Tommy’s skin literally peeled off the muscle and bone like a fleshy sock and he screamed and screamed? Remember that smell and how it wouldn’t go away for a month after that? Remember how he cried? That’s gonna be you. I could detect the stench of his untreated gingivitis through the phone. I had to stop by the pet store to get an enclosure big enough for the new mystery arachnid, but I doubt Evan would care about any of that. I make up some bullshit excuse about my car not starting—it hardly appeases him. Just get to fucking work on time. Grease impacts into my cuticles, oily crescents building fetid under my fingernails chewed raw. Eight hours of fryer baskets and oil-slicked roast beef lathered in plasticky cheese sauce, the foul clings to me. The place smells like failure. I down an aspirin and an Adderall with Red Bull on my smoke break, let the kiddie meth squirm around in my veins to take the edge off a bit. It doesn’t work, just makes me jittery the rest of the night with an acidy heartburn.

I almost get t-boned at an intersection on my way home. The blunt I smoke in my car in the driveway is probably 1/5 shitty ditch weed and 4/5 Backwoods. The house’s interior exhales the scent of nicotinic mildew lazily marinated in Pine-Sol and burnt incense discards as I open the door. Mom’s passed out in front of cable re-runs of NCIS, silvery Mark Harmon stoic and supremely fuckable, the only reason the show’s worth watching maybe once a year or so, when you’re bored and horny and have absolutely nothing better to do. She groans into a pillow and rolls over, averting her eyes from the foyer light as I come in. Honey? Muffled into the cushions. I’m not there. Quiet, I switch off the light and pass through the dark hallway towards my room. The doorknob turns with unnatural ease, no resistance from the typical mountain of piled hoodies and underwear cluttered on the other side. Folded sweatpants regimented in the dresser drawers, books shelved by Dewey Decimal rather than by frequency of use, 20-gauge hypodermics full of ketamine with their caps facing True North and ordered according to their placement on the light spectrum. I’ve never understood why she feels compelled to methodically organize my room anytime I’m out, yet she’s never attempted to clean the rest of the house—suspect it’s because she wants to snoop through my things: what I’m smoking, what porn gets me off, what things I can fit up my ass. I strip down to my bare skin, and it takes a few moments to find out where she’s moved all my shorts and t-shirts to—she never puts things in the same place twice in a row. As I press my hardened nipples in with my thumbs so that they don’t poke out through my shirt, I see, beneath the desk lamp’s jaundiced light, between a stack of h-manga and a fifth of a fifth of cheap vodka, the spider’s container, cap unscrewed and scooted halfway off its opening. It’s empty.

You went through my stuff, to the pile of sweat and blankets on the living room couch. Huh? Honey, I—I don’t feel good. She claps at the remote and shuts off the TV, some domestic terrorist’s monologue about how he’s actually the good guy and American imperialism is to blame for—cut short. You went through my shit. Again. She hovers her head over a trash bin and coughs out a stream of bile, thick and stringy with flecks of whatever she ate for dinner. Her skin has the texture of microwaved custard, yellowish and clammy. Snail trails of dehydrated spittle draw from the corners of her mouth. I think something’s really, really wrong with me. This isn’t normal. It isn’t normal for a mom to go through her adult kid’s stuff constantly. What happened to what was inside that black container on the desk? She balks and plucks at the floral muumuu sticking to her chest where sweat blooms through the synthetic fabric, making see-through Rorschachs that reveal the unflattering shapes of her breasts. Mom, cover up—Christ. You brought a fucking spider into this house, voice breaking, tiny teardrops starting to well in her eyes. A vein bulges down her forehead. What kind of goddamn spider was that? Did you kill it? What happened to it? She strains out another flow of vomit, dry-heaving for almost a full minute. I dunno—blech—it’s a spider, just scurried away. Probably hiding somewhere. She hiccups and farts. Jesus, I’m dying. You’re drunk, pulling an empty bottle of Prosecco off the carpet. It’s alcohol poisoning. This isn’t the first time, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Shut up. That bottle’s from two fucking days ago. I just woke up like this, like, an hour ago. I haven’t been able to drink anything because—blech—because I’m fucking sick here. I’m dying, I swear to God I’m dying right now. This isn’t normal. She whines and folds into herself, more puke pittering out her mouth. I press the trash can up to her face. Fuck, Mom, at least get it into the trash. I’m not fucking drunk. She slurs expletives and cries. I need to find that spider. It might be venomous. α-latrotoxin can— What the hell did you bring it inside for then? You want me to get bit and die? Again, this wouldn’t have happened if you’d stay the fuck out of my room. Someone sent it in the mail. Why? Who? I don’t know. I just need to find it. What if it bites me? Widows are mostly docile. It’s a black fucking widow? No, it’s not a black widow—something else—different kind of widow. Don’t worry, no one’s died from their venom since the 80s. Just make sure you check your shoes before you put them on. Widows like to rest with their bottom side in the— Goddammit, just go find the thing before it bites someone. Her crying curdles into sharp wheezes, then she doubles over. Something in her gut rumbles loudly, shifts from under her blouse. Fuck, I need to get to the bathroom. I think I’m gonna shit myself. Fuck, I’m definitely gonna shit myself if I don’t get to the bathroom. Her whole body trembles as I help her off the couch and get her to lean on my shoulder. Her skin is hot. Let’s get you into the bathroom, then I’ll get you some Tylenol or something. That’s not going to help. She strains, stepping forward uneasy. Her legs shake, and vomit falls down across the front of her chest. We make it halfway across the room before her knees buckle out from under her and she slides to the floor, sobbing and clutching her distending belly. No. No! Fuck. Piss trickles down her thighs, and a puddle spreads out dark underneath her, sour-smelling into the carpet. Her simultaneous shame and agony coagulate across her face, carotid artery throbbing visibly under skin and sweat and puke. Jesus Christ, Mom. This is so wrong. Should I call an ambulance? Her elbows bow out, then she spreads into the pool of urine, holding her gut as it bloats, expanding more and more with each second. What the fuck? What’s happening? I’m gonna die. I’m gonna fucking die here. I get her to stand back up, her bare feet slipping to gain traction in the puddle. Let’s just get you to the bathroom, then I’ll call 9-1-1. How long will it be till they get here? I don’t know—not long, probably. C’mon, just help me out here. She leaves a trail of urine across the floor as we stumble awkwardly through the bathroom door. Her stomach inflates, nightgown seams stretching over the bloat, belly button prolapsing. She’s bawling, incoherent now. I’m gonna die—fuck—oh, God, I’m dying. How did this happen to me? I sit her down on the toilet and position her to aim directly into the bowl, then her bladder immediately voids, splashing me. Her whimpering crescendos as she goes limp. I unpeel her from her piss-soaked gown and underwear. She farts as I slip the last of her clothes off her ankles, then reddish-brown liquid stool geysers into the water, filling the room with a coppery puce stench that makes my eyes and the inside of my nose sting. As her pupils lose focus and roll to the back of her skull, she slides forward off the porcelain like a dead fish. Her throat gurgles, foam gathering behind her lips. Glistening under the fluorescent lights above, blood flows out from her bottom half, mixing and displacing with the piss and shit. A rouge viscousness seeps from her swollen labia as its fleshy center begins to bloom wider than her anatomy should permit. What’s swelling from the inside of her gut moves down and down until the bulge settles just above her pelvis, her cervical boundaries audibly prying apart. More blood trickles out as a glossy, black talon parts her folds with obscene delicacy, splitting her slow with the ease and indifference of a glacier carving stone. Another emerges gingerly beside it, then another, tip-tapping at the linoleum tiles to find something with which they can pull themselves out. I feel nauseous as I backpedal towards the door, something hot and acidic coming up from the pit of my stomach, eyesight blurring and my face going suddenly cool. My fingers, slippery with Mom’s bodily discharge, struggle to grasp the doorknob. The thing inside her unfurls from her birth canal, segmented, iridescent, chittering mandibles clicking against the floor in increasingly rapid tempos. Then, with the wet suck of vacuum-sealed flesh reforming around its body as it aligns itself inside of her, the thing disappears again, back into the womb. My fingers catch the knob firmly, turning, then pull the door open with force. I slam it behind me and run.

My foot splashes through Mom’s puddle of piss as I streak through the dark on my way to the kitchen to call 9-1-1. Following the dull, green light of the landline’s digital clock, I pass around the dining room table and reach out. But something fibrous catches me by the waist before my hand can get to the phone, a spanning strand equally giving as it is unyielding, as delicately pliable as it is iron-strong—the impact comes as an unexpectedly gentle collision. Tumbling forward, the top of my body lands in a bed of soft. With the lights off, it’s too dark to see what I’ve fallen into. I get my feet to the floor, trying to struggle up and out, but I only manage to entangle myself even deeper into a precarious position, bent over with my ass in the air. In attempting to leverage myself, I trap my thighs at an awkward forty-five-degree angle, my knees unflexed. The membrane under me molds to my contours like memory foam. My forearms sink down with the slow hinge of my hips and the curving of my spine, directing with my torso’s weight behind them until my full body can rest comfortably in the matrix. A car passes by the window outside, its headlights glimmering in through a thin gap between the pulled curtains for three strobing heartbeats. With just enough light to finally see, the scene weaving all through the kitchen becomes apparent: an intricate web system from floor to ceiling. As the realization hits, I fight against the trap as hard as I can, muscles ineptly tensing against silken coils, joints bent firm in their soon-to-be death poses. My left arm, caught by its pit, is free enough to reach out towards the phone inches away on the kitchen counter. The kinetic strain follows from the tips of my toes to my middle finger, extending bone and muscle to their furthest lengths, but my fingertip can only just graze the plastic of its pound key. I lurch forward, springing by my knees a pathetic few centimeters. The phone chimes dull as I press the button, teeters a moment, then clatters backwards across the countertop away from me, completely out of reach now. In the emerald glow of the phone’s screen, I see a woman in a pantsuit with her arms crossed, too-white smile, fake tan, shoddily concealed muffin-top—The Purpose-Driven Life: Success Begins With You in paperback, a sticky note with my name scrawled in bouncy handwriting, an AA brochure underneath—then the screen shuts off to conserve its battery, steeping me back into the night. Time’s ebb obscures into abstraction within the near-perfect dark. I count seconds away in my head, far enough for a half-hour to have passed, but I give up when a migraine starts to gather under my eyes. I resign into the bio-architectural matrix, letting its gelatine comfort swallow me, its scents like burnt hair and clover honey.

I realize my eyes have been open when amber fluorescence casts from behind me and ends just below the Formica shelf, sliver growing with the keen of a door’s hinges griding. I crane my neck and align my head’s azimuth so that I can see where a misplaced shoe had kept the bathroom door from slamming shut when I fled earlier. From the gleaming threshold, a shadow detaches from the doorframe’s edge, scurries up the wall and into the dark, its silhouette stopping behind the couch. In the bathroom, I can only see one of Mom’s legs resting at the lip of the bathtub, a pool of her excrement oxidized and congealed under her. It’s almost too quiet to hear her moans, low and pathetic, like a wounded animal caught in a trap accepting its fate. A wet click vibrates as she twitches, a peristaltic malfunction that makes more liquid mess on the linoleum. Vibrations in the gossamer threads, directing from the kitchen’s shadow, subsonic frequencies resonating in my marrow. I whisper, whine. Mom. A wet gurgle answers back, what sounds like another discharge from her lower orifices, slopping into the offal pool. More vibrations to my left—careful, predatory movements from where I can’t see. Contact comes at the tender divot above my collarbone, spindly finger tapping in investigation. I play dead. Blacker than black, she twines down in front of me, her palps extended and tasting the air inches from my jugular. Her approach is distorted parallax in the dark, simultaneously distant and deadly close.

guyliner, 2025