Roger Bundridge is currently a senior at the University of Iowa obtaining his Bachelor's degree in English & Creative Writing. You can find him writing, or reading or watching, transgressive queer body horror anytime of the day. He lives with his partner and his Pitbull, Harley, who supplies soft snores while he writes.
A TALE THE LENGTH OF A SPIDER’S LEG
by
Roger Bundridge
I close my eyes and press the bong to my lips. I never believed myself to be one who reminisced on their past, but I do that now, as the smoke fills my lungs and I proceed to bring in more. I ponder the man’s reactions to the silk he felt leaking from his nose to the feel of needle-like legs pressing around beneath his skin; moreover, I hear his scream on my exhale.
I had left my apartment late, around midnight, which I never do. I’m a bit of a homebody; however, there was something about this man’s messaging: he was provocative, talking about me bending him over in his apartment’s hallway, him sucking me off in the stairwell. Hell, he even offered to give me a handie in my car right there at the stoplight outside of his place. All I would have to do is stop long enough for him to get in. Did he want to see satisfaction upon my face that badly?
He should’ve asked anybody else. I may not leave my home after dark too often, but when the opportunity presents itself, I too, have a hard time saying no.
When I arrived at the address he sent me, however, he did not step out into the freshly rained on city and get into my car, no. He stepped out–his crop top and shorts not leaving anything to the imagination–and he tilted his head to the left, toward the alley. His features matched the pictures: tall, thin, pale, long and curly black hair that was done up in a bun with strong eyes that were almost black in his current silhouette position to the apartment’s lights. The closer he got to the alley–a black void–the more he seemed like unblended white paint against a dark canvas.
I questioned the whole way over there why I was going, and I question it again with another lungful of smoke, but I never came up with an answer. I’ve never bothered to wonder what I am; besides maybe a monster. I’ve never done the research or asked my family if they experienced anything odd in their lifetimes that ended with corpses haunting their dreams. I’ve come to the conclusion that I just am. “Just am” may include cursed, gifted in some fucked, ancient definition of the word, haunted, genetically modified, it didn’t matter at the end of the night, because it felt ethereal. Maybe I’m a god.
I parked my car across the street in a parking lot that said “BANK EMPLOYEES ONLY”, but it was dark–who did they expect to be able to see in the dark–and made my way over, pulling my coat tighter around my limbs. My groin twitched in knowing.
I found him against the wall, shorts down just beneath the curvature of his well taken care of ass. I put a cheek in both hands and got to my knees, not wasting a second. He moaned into the brick.
It wasn’t long before I was pumping inside of him and the screaming began. I realized at that moment, after years of committing the act, that I’ll never know what they look like when they come out of me: are the eggs mid-hatch? Do they slither out and extend their legs immediately, crawling inside of whoever I am in and ripping them up from that very first second; of course I have tried on my own, my hand or a toy doing the job, but my semen is just that when it arcs through the air and onto my chest. I will, however, always be a witness to the aftermath.
I was sitting across the alley, my back against the brick, my pants down around my ankles, and the man bore victim to my voyeurism. He scratched at his belly button first, picking at his innie like a scab until it became an outie, an outie, an extended outie with a sharp bending needle poking and tearing from it.
After finding out the hard way they will try to kill me if I leave too early, watching got easier.
The sharp needle split into two tinier ones that peeled apart the stranger’s belly button like a woman in labor. Thin streams of blood ran down the stranger’s lips while he looked at me. I was unable to look away, and I didn’t.
If he knew what they would do to me, he wouldn’t look away either. He would sit there and watch as tinier legs filed out of the steadily increasing hole; perhaps he would pull his eyes wider so as to never look away from the organs that spilled onto the concrete in a wet, red smack. The little eyes attached to the legs that blinked under the sky like forgotten stars, he would watch every second, even if he didn’t want to witness the shredding of his body into clean halves and suction that came with the babies’ feasting on every bit of flesh they could get their fangs on.
I had a morbid fascination when it came to them absorbing the eyes. No matter the location, no matter the host, they would always take the eyes the same way: a scuttling of legs, an almost caress against the iris, and a pluck of said scuttling legs, a pull, and a slurp. This set of eyes were blue.
Once finished, it is as if a rain I cannot feel washes them away. They blink out like a broken light. Until the next fix.
I take another hit from my bong. I don’t know who will be next. They’re never picky. Maybe I’ll let it be me. Could it be me? What if I ignore them? After eating their way through my testicles, will they disappear? The world better fucking hope so.