The Rabid Sac
Cosmic Horror?
Outside Brian Fugate’s bedroom window, lumpy little things grow and cling under the sheltering shade of the sill. He doesn’t disturb anything. He permits life to thrive and die and thrive and die according to its own cycles and rhythms. Reproduce-then-croak seemed to be the rule of natural law.
At the somniferous launch of autumn, fuzzy oval-shaped cocoons appear and sleeping larvae (wrapped in cozy, cottony wombs) rest through the winter in cold dormancy. Brian doesn’t wonder what’s sleeping inside. He wants to keep them unidentified and mysterious. He feels no need to research their unpronounceable scientific name or study their alien insect habits. Let them sleep. He’s just glad for the company, mute and torporous as it is.
Brittle, empty exoskeletal hulls line up like phantom soldiers guarding the glass. Temporary webs appear and disappear like the passing encampments of roaming nomads. Termites bore corridors into the house’s century-old timber. Black ants proliferate. Daddy longlegs and earwigs nap under the rotten-soft canopy during the humid summer months. Black mold grows between the buckling boards like a seeping Medieval plague.
Small birds land on the sill to drink from the tiny pools of water that collect in the furrows after a heavy rain. Brian is grateful for the thirsty birds. They take a few nervous sips and then jump fluttering away again, disappearing behind the dizzying and verdant wall of foliage behind the house.
The old windowsill supports a tiny thriving ecosystem and Brian monitors its existence and notes its slow growth with a quick, daily glance as he walks to his Honda in the morning. His classes at the university commence very early.
One morning, after a breakfast of Cream-of-Wheat and raspberries, Brian notices a small light-green pod of fluid growing under the windowsill like a strange mushroom or soft overripe fruit. He’s never seen its like before. It’s about the size of a lime and similar in color—a sort of weak green. It’s also soft as Silly Putty—just touching it leaves deep finger impressions in the…
What? Rind? Skin? Membrane?
After years of monitoring the habitat of the windowsill with modest curiosity, Brian finds himself strangely captivated by this new development.
He decides to break precedent and investigate further.
He plucks the pod from the sill and holds it up to the sun. Like a solar fluoroscope, the sunlight exposes a tiny curled lifeform inside. He can see its closed eyes—bulbous, linked to thin filaments. The light reveals an interior skeleton—bones as fine as fibers hidden within a translucent structure of head, thorax and abdomen. Brian doesn’t know much about biology but he’s pretty sure that insects have exoskeletons, not interior bones. Whatever this thing is, it resembles an egg more than a cocoon.
Puzzled, excited, Brian carries it gently inside.
He carefully places it on his desk and turns on the lamp. He sits down to stare at it and realizes it’s breathing and pulsing with the subtlest delicacy. The realization that plucking it from its stalk may have ended its incubation and doomed it to death suddenly occurs to him and he feels a flick of guilt. He hopes he hasn’t destroyed the life inside with his impulsive curiosity. He stares at it for a full five minutes, watching it throb and pulsate. Tiny droplets of condensation begin to appear like perspiration.
“What in the world is this thing?” Brian whispers.
And the breath from his words stirs the thing and it jitters and wobbles, as if straining against its viridescent confines.
A seam, previously invisible, appears and splits into a fissure, emitting a smell like decomposing apples.
It’s hatching. Whatever the thing is, it’s coming into the world.
The smell grows stronger. Apples. Rotten apples.
Clear viscous fluid spills from the seam, producing a lucent pool around the egg (and he regards it as an egg now—what else?).
A tiny face appears in the crack, its eyes slowly opening into slits as thin as papercuts. Pinched black nostrils flare and collapse, drawing in the first breaths of atmosphere and the new smells of its sudden home. Its mouth is puckered like the mouth of a goldfish and undulates with gasping respiration.
And then it cries—a high-pitched squeak—and a custard-like substance spills from its lips. Lungs (gills?) clearing of mucus. It cries again and finally slithers free of its soft shell, flopping into the tiny puddle it created. Its breathing grows labored. It gasps in air and then cries it out, its tiny, bony chest heaving with each struggling huff.
It’s dying, Brian thinks. And I killed it.
It cries and cries, obviously in pain.
He has to end its struggle, relieve the misery of its premature birth. He plucks several tissues from a Kleenex box and lifts up the struggling thing. It is nearly weightless.
He carries it into the bathroom.
He releases it into the toilet and flushes, averting his eyes. He is ashamed. When the tank falls silent he looks down.
It’s gone. Flushed away.
Brian moves to the sink and washes his hands as if he’s touched something radioactive.
That night, standing in an impossible orchard, Brian dreams of falling apples.
He awakes at dawn, as usual. Cold syrupy light leaches into the still-slumbering world. He feels a heaviness in his bowels and walks groggily to the bathroom, still half-asleep.
He yanks down his pajama bottoms and seats himself and his bowels let loose with a foul, sloppy rain of diarrhea. He exhales an acidic, early-morning breath.
And then he remembers the creature he’d flushed the day before and his sphincters reflexively tighten. What if it crawled back up the pipe? What if it had teeth now and bit him on the ass?
Oh come on. That thing is floating in the ocean or getting rendered in some sewage treatment plant (or whatever happens to the stuff that the plumbing drains away).
And then he feels a sharp pinch behind his scrotum.
“Shit,” he hisses, standing up and an even greater pain seizes him and he lurches forward, bent over, as new pain assails his groin with agony and fire. It’s like getting kicked in the balls after hernia surgery.
Brian collapses to the floor. His last thought before he falls into darkness is: “Little bastard crawled right into my scrotum!” and then his liquefied testicles dribble out of his anus.
The Ptoeth had a new home.
The Ptoeth stood Brian up. The Ptoeth made him look in the mirror. The Ptoeth stared at this alien face for a long time.
The Ptoeth made him pull up his pajamas.
The Ptoeth made him walk out of the bathroom.
The Ptoeth walked him into the kitchen where Brian’s mother was sitting at the table, drinking her first cup of coffee.
The Ptoeth worked Brian’s mouth and vocal cords and made him say, “Hello.”
“Good morning, honey.”
The Ptoeth made Brian’s head nod. The Ptoeth made him sit down at the table. “Goo-ood mor-ning,” the Ptoeth made him say.
“Coffee?”
The Ptoeth said, “Yes.”
The Ptoeth was present. The Ptoeth was there. The Ptoeth said, “Thank you.”
“You bet, sweetie.”