Mosquito
a short story about beastly tendencies
Amongst the swarm of his friends that ran amok like mosquitoes buzzing through the deep blue shadows of that sticky summer night, she stood stagnant with her head turned towards the woods in the distance. Gone were the heads and shouts of his friends that staggered across the grass in their drunken states, her figure the only clear sight in his eyes as he watched her from the chain-linked fence lining the roadside. Hair cut short around her throat, each strand framed the triangular shape of her small face like fingers cupped under her chin, holding the white glow of the moon reflecting upon her face. The rest of her figure was covered by a long-sleeved shirt and pants, which made him wonder if her bare skin was suffocating and sweating underneath those layers from the humidity that persisted in clinging to the air even through the nighttime.
From the woods, she turned her head, her round eyes landing upon his face. Despite the neutrality of her expression in the stableness of her brows and eyes, the sharp corners of her thin lips teased at a smile.
Even as she turned her head away and started walking deeper into the distance at the sight of him, he unhooked his fingers from the chain link fence and began walking after her. Furling and unfurling his fingers at his sides, his fingertips grazed against his cargo shorts, fingernails scraping at his legs underneath the fabric as he continued following her down the flat expanse of grass. Brittle from the summer heat, the grass bent underneath his shoes, the thuds of his feet hard against the compact, dried-up dirt yet not jarring his body in the slightest. Even his friends that zipped past him and bumped him with their flailing arms did not falter his straight path in pursuit towards her.
And even as she glanced over her shoulder at him through the strands of her hair angled across her forehead and quickened her pace further down the slope, he kept on following her, quickening his own pace to get to her.
About an arm’s length from the invisible boundary between the open grass and the closed trees, she halted. He halted behind her and stared at her as she turned around to face him. From the pocket of her baggy pants, she held up a sleek-skinned hand and pointed into the depths of the woods. His eyes trailed the direction of her fingers towards a reddish hue radiating in soft pulsations equivalent to a steady heartbeat through the treetops.
Yet his eyes strayed back to her as she said in a clear voice with that slight smile on her face, “I’m going to take you there.”
Tiny were her black pupils and whites of her eyes that caught the faint red light as she turned her head towards the depths of the woods. Stagnant, she stood with her finger remaining in mid-air pointing towards the heart of that light, unshifting as if she was waiting for him.
He came up beside her and angled his neck to get a better look at her. Spotting that same, subtle tease of a smile on her lips as her eyes rolled over to look at him, his lips parted and slurred out a single word, “What?”
Yet not one muscle in her face twitched, and that tease of a smile remained on her unmoving lips as she crossed over that boundary and headed into the woods.
And he followed her, stepping along the linear indentations of her tennis shoes as he ducked under the stooping branches of the trees and slunk through the deepening shadows of the woods. The shrill shouts of his friends cutting out in the distance, only a droning buzz hummed through his ears. Not even their footsteps procured a sound against the hard dirt, as if the woods were swallowing down all of the noise the deeper that they went in them.
The further he walked, the less progress he perceived to be making, all of the trees appearing the same with their leaf-dense branches and linear trunks. Only the shadows appeared different, deepening in their darkness and creeping closer to the silhouette of his figure against the dirt.
Yet onwards, she kept on walking with her head facing straight ahead, not once swaying or stopping in her path even as he asked her, “Where are we going?”
Despite her silence, he kept following her, even as that unknown red light that he had seen at the tops of the trees began to appear in front of him. Like a mosquito drawn to the heat radiating off the human body, he found himself drawn to her, drawn to follow her wherever she led him. Under the red light that pulsated upon her body, she appeared surreal, more surreal than he had ever perceived her. That red light upon the little skin that peeked out from her clothes – the arches of her ears, the smooth back of her neck, and the thin shapes of her fingers – made her blood appear as if it was outside of her body, as if he reached out his hand to touch her skin, he’d be inside of her.
In the bright heart of that red light, she stopped walking, turning in a tight semi-circle upon the dirt and facing him. Bathed in the red light, only the pupils in her eyes stood out upon her body, two miniscule dots of deep red piercing through the pores of his skin and pinning his body upon the dirt.
Not once did those pupils leave his face nor disappear with a blink of her eyes as her fingers crawled along her body and undid her clothes from her limbs. Like the shedding scraps of an insect’s exoskeleton, each piece of her clothing fell to the dirt with a hollow thud until she stood bare naked before him. Under the red light, her body appeared inverted, as if the raw flesh underneath her skin was on the outside of her body. Bare of any hair and reflecting the red light, her skin appeared glossy, almost unnatural, almost inhuman.
Yet under his clothes, his body thrummed with fresh hot blood in his flesh at her approach, thrumming even underneath the coldness of her fingers that crawled along his throat as she hissed through her teeth a sharp breath into the core of his ear, “You want this, don’t you?”
He could not respond, for she pushed her lips up against his mouth, pushed her lips so hard that they rubbed against his teeth as she moved them about. Under the pressure of her lips, his mouth opened in simple reciprocation, receiving her like it was a natural reflex.
Until a sharp sensation of needle-like blades punctured through the flesh of his mouth.
Ripping his mouth away from her face, his eyes widened at the sight of six slim blades of flesh protruding out of her mouth, stringy drippings of his flesh and blood dangling from the twitching tips. Hands flying up to his mouth, he tried to shout through strips of blood-ridden flesh in his mouth. But only a low gurgling noise came out of his throat.
The blade-shaped ligaments quivered within the circle of her lips as she hissed through them at him, “Isn’t that the same question you asked me?” Backwards, he stepped away from her, his steps unsteady with the shaking of his body. But she took another step forward towards him. “And did you wait for an answer?”
Harder his body shook under her stare of not just two but three, four, five, and more eyes, her pupils splitting apart like the mitosis of cells into a multitude of eyes that roved over every pore that oozed sweat out of his body. Not just sweat but piss, leaking out of him and trickling down his legs to the dirt as she delved her fingers into the center of her stomach and ripped her flesh in half, revealing two more limbs that wriggled and jutted out of her fleshy insides.
Tongue flailing about his torn-up mouth, he tried to scream for help, tried to scream for someone to save him. But he couldn’t scream.
And even if he could scream, no one would hear him, no one would come save him. The only eyes on him were the red eyes of those monsters like her in the surrounding trees, their eyes pulsating with slow blinks as they watched him bleed and sweat and pee and squirm underneath his clothes at her encroaching approach.
He even tried to hold out his hands, waving them in front of him to stop her advance. But she kept heading towards him, six limbs twitching about her body on the precipice of pouncing upon him.
And with the backs of his ankles bumping against the protruding root of a tree, he fell over, his body spreading open in surrender to her as she leapt and landed on top of him.
Piece by piece, she ripped his clothes off his body until he was bare naked squirming in his sweat and piss. Yet the excrements from his quavering body did not stop her, did not stop her limbs from puncturing into his flesh, did not stop her from engorging upon his blood. Rather, her slow biting into his flesh and sucking of his blood made it appear as if she savored the thrashing of his limbs and the silent screaming of his mouth even more, as if she was engorging on him with the slowness of knowing that no one would come to save him.
~the end~
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