Parasite

by Alisha C. R. Swartz - May 11, 2020

This is a short story I wrote as part of Savannah Brown's Escapril. The prompt was "parasitic" and my short story was partly inspired by the Doctor Who episode "Turn Left". I have not seen the movie "Parasite" yet so this story is in no way related to that. It was just a very fitting title.

The best word to describe the way this creature moved about is scattle. It made that noise when it moved, that awful rattling and hissing sound that could only be described as scattle. So, the black little thing with its hard shell and long, spiky tail scattled over the forest floor searching for its next meal. And it found me.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to the forest. I’m not much of an outdoorsy person and I cannot stand most animals that you usually encounter in a forest. Bugs, flies, wasps, snakes, mice, all the types of beasts I’d rather stay away from. But, it was John’s birthday and he loved to roam the wilderness. He once said that he felt most at home on a tree branch with beef jerky in one hand and hair that hasn’t been washed in a week. I heard that description and thought to have seen a little trailer of my own personal hell. I’m quite fond of running water, toilets and soap. So every Sunday he goes for a hike in his happy place and I go for brunch in my happy place: the cafe around the corner from our flat, where I meet with some friends or one friend and pass the time with good conversation and French toast until John returns from his self-finding trips. But as I said, that day, that one fatal afternoon, it was his birthday and it was his birthday wish to show me the beautiful outdoors and so I went with him and I hated every second of it. But I didn’t tell him of course. He had that childlike glee on his face when he told me about all the different birds‘ nesting techniques and when the sun shone through the tree branches to light up our faces he said: Not so bad after all, eh? And I smiled and nodded as if I hadn’t just seen a gigantic centipede crawl across my shoe and almost screamed in fear but just about managed to shake the centipede off and watch it crawl far enough away for me to relax a little and catch my breath before going back to pretending that I was enjoying myself.

We were two hours into our hike and about ready to get back home when the creature crossed our path and decided that I was, in fact, the perfect host. It scattled over the autumn leaves and I heard it before I saw it. In fact I only ever saw it once. I heard that awful noise and turned to John and asked him if that was a snake. But he hadn’t heard anything. Typical, he also never noticed when the laundry needed washing or the trash was flowing over. I cursed under my breath a little because this whole experience was so very out of my comfort zone and really testing the foundations of our relationship although John hadn’t noticed of course. I didn’t feel it when the creature crawled up on my leg. In fact, again, there’s no way to know that that’s what it did because no one bore witness. It might as well have jumped on my back. Either way I didn’t feel it at first. I did feel the tiniest sting when it latched onto my back with its sharp pointy teeth but I dismissed it immediately.

Three days had passed since our little outing when I noticed that something was wrong. Not in the way something’s wrong when you’re being followed by someone and receiving ominous letters with cut-out pieces of newspapers. But in the way something’s wrong when your AC makes a weird noise or your two clocks stop working at the same time. Just little things that you’d notice and go: That’s a bit odd. But wouldn’t really spend too much time worrying about. In my case it was neither the AC nor the clocks that were strange. It was the way other people acted when I was around. It started with Minnie, who I work with. We were talking in the kitchen waiting for the machine to pour us our coffees. Minnie kept looking around the kitchen. When I asked her if she was looking for something she said she thought she heard a noise. I hadn’t heard anything out of the ordinary so once again I dismissed it. The next day we had a handyman over to fix the bathroom sink. It had been leaking for weeks and I kept telling John to do something about it and he kept putting it off and so I finally caved and called a plumber. After he was done he told me in great detail what the problem had been. I didn’t really listen because I didn’t really care and was just happy that the leaking had stopped. But while he was telling me about rusty pipes he kept glancing behind him and behind me and at the window and I asked him if something was wrong and he said he thought he heard a noise. I thought he was talking about our ceiling fan which was crooked and therefore scratched the ceiling on each turn ever so slightly and so I told him all about our crooked fan and he nodded as if to say: That must have been it, but he did not seem entirely convinced.

In the four weeks that followed the same thing kept happening to me over and over again. People near me kept looking for something and claimed to have heard a noise. Once, after my neighbour said this when we were in the elevator together, I asked him what the noise sounded like. For the tiniest splinter of a moment his face went blank and he said: Awful. And then he went back to normal, smiled and suggested that the elevator might need oiling. This time, I was the one who wasn’t entirely convinced. Then began the forgetting. As it often does, it started out with little things. I forgot the name of my first grade teacher when I locked myself out of an old email account and tried to answer the security questions. Then I forgot the name of my elementary school altogether and that of my kindergarten too. So I called my mom to ask her about it but she coudln’t recall either. That’s what was really strange about the whole affair because my mother who hadn’t forgotten a single name of all of her classmates from first grade all the way through to college could not remember which elementary school I went to. And then came the incident of my birthday. Not a single family member or any of my friends reached out to me that day. But I wasn’t really mad because I too had completely forgotten about it. I only remembered the next day when I got into a traffic control and stated the wrong age. But, just as was the case with the way people kept hearing a noise around me, I got used to forgetting things and I got used to other people forgetting things about me, too. The thing that finally got me to do something about this whole situation was the back pain, funnily enough. I always had trouble with neck pains, especially after sitting at my desk in the office all day, so I ignored it at first. But the pain kept getting worse even on the weekends. So I went to the doctor. Like everyone else, she kept looking around the room as long as I was in there and not a single time during the entire appointment could she get my name right. Sometimes, when she let her gaze wander about the place again, she looked back at me and it was like she had forgotten that I was there. And when it was time to take a look at my back she almost seemed hesitant. Like she didn’t wanna touch my back or even look at it for too long. And she made that face like she heard someone scream in a very high pitched voice. When she finally got over herself and examined my back she stayed clear of the spot right between my shoulder blades which I thought odd, again, but didn’t say anything about it. She couldn’t figure out what was causing my pain but she did say that it seemed like I was carrying something very heavy, the way my shoulders slumped down and forward.

That night I stood in the bathroom, took my shirt off and tried to see my back in the mirror. Not an easy task but with a second, handheld mirror and some weird poses I finally managed it and for the tiniest splinter of a moment, again, I thought I saw something clinging to my back. Something small and black and terrifying. But as soon as I saw it, it was gone. I’m going insane, I said to myself and followed it up with a chuckle because I felt like I had to, to make it sound more like a joke and less like a matter of fact.

In the end, I was lying in a hospital bed. I couldn’t remember all the details of how I got there. I just remember that my back pain got so bad that I had to take some time off from work. But instead of getting better I got worse. Not just the back either, I got worse in general. Every time John came home from work he was surprised to find me laying in bed. Not because he expected me to be somewhere else but simply because he had completely forgotten about me. Then he stopped looking at me altogether. But he did look under every carpet and behind every piece of furniture for something. Anyways, one day I woke up in the hospital instead of our flat. The nurses don’t often come in my room and when they do they’re usually carrying fresh sheets and then they see me laying in bed and make a remark about how they thought this room was empty and then they left again. Sometimes they did stay and change the sheets anyways or clean one thing or another. But they always made an effort not to look at me.

Five months it took the creature to suck every last drop of life out of me. On my last day, there wasn’t really anything left of me. No one came to visit or called to see how I was doing because no one remembered me. I didn’t either. At that point, I was nothing more than matter being held together by sheer coincidence. I was aware that I was a person, that I was someone. But I didn’t know who. In my last moments I saw a black creature scattle across the hospital floor and I suddenly felt relieved. Like a weight was lifted off me. And then I heard the noise. The awful noise, as my neighbour had called it. And I realised what had been bugging me all those months. Because it wasn’t the glances around the room or the forgetting or even the pain. It was the noise, the noise that was in the background everywhere and that I didn’t even notice because I was hearing it all the time. I hadn’t realised that it wasn’t supposed to be there until it was gone. Finally, the noise scattled out of the room and all I heard was silence.