Micro-fiction: I Could Just Gobble You Up

A delicious little horror in only 400 words!

Photo by Hanan Edwards on Unsplash

Hey all, thank you for joining me again! It’s your weekly mini bite of horror, freshly baked and ready to eat.

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With that said, let’s tuck in…

I Could Just Gobble You Up

I was born at 3a.m., my mother told me. When I slid screaming into the world, the doctor cradled my writhing, bloody body. She lifted me up to her facemask and inhaled so deep that her lungs wouldn’t hold a gasp more.

“Give him to me,” my mother said.

Shifting to hold my slippery body in one hand, the doctor pulled down her mask, opened her mouth wide, and clamped her teeth on my pudgy leg.

It took three nurses to pull her away from me.

I bled across the floor, wailing at the world of pain I’d unwillingly entered.

Then, the fighting subsided. The nurses turned, their eyes feral, the scent of my blood overcoming their horror, overcoming their interest in holding the doctor back. They came for me, drool speckling their paper masks, teeth gnashing, growling.

I’ll never understand how my mother saved me. Exhausted and loose limbed, newly the sole occupant of her body again, she swaddled me in towels, and fought them off, smashing their limbs and skulls to save me. Stumbling through the dim night corridors of the hospital, my juices, my blood, my tears, my sweat, my mucus, seeped through my swaddling. It summoned more. Hungry eyed receptionists chased us, geriatric men in wheelchairs forgot their nocturnal bathroom needs and rolled behind us. The orderlies, burly men and women all, lurched like zombies, snarling, calling, drawn by my scent.

She ran with me through the night. At each point of rest, new predators found us. A taxi driver crawled from his window, face slapping and scraping on the road as he fell out in his desperation to devour me. A pimply man on an electric scooter destroyed himself in a crash after the aroma of my fluids wafted across his path.

At home, my bleary-eyed father—a weak-willed man whose heart was his least developed muscle—came vividly awake in my presence. Confusion, lust, and fear fought in his expression for less than ten minutes before my mother knew I would never be safe around him.

We lived in the woodland together for eight years, until my mother could bear it no more. I saw the desire growing in her eyes each day, the love turning into greed. My growing body became a meal she could no longer resist. But she knew it would happen. She’d prepared me for the day I would have to escape even her.

I still hear her sometimes, howling in the distance when she picks up my scent. Eight years of resisting feeding made her my most tenacious hunter.

The prey creatures flock to me, deer and birds, fish in the streams. They recognise my curse. I was born delicious to humanity, and they teem across the Earth. I know I cannot hide forever.

The end

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I hope you enjoyed that!

I love writing these weird little micro-fictions. I’ve no idea where the ideas come from, but each week there’s something new and macabre popping into my head. Thank you, subconscious!

In different news, I’ve been working on a novel for a few months and this week I finished the first editing pass on it. I think it’s already in a pretty good state, so I’m going to give it one more edit and inflict it on some test readers. I’m really excited about this one—I think it’s got a ‘hell yeah’ one-liner pitch which gave me so much motivation while writing it and, I hope, will appeal just as much to literary agents. This might be the one that gets picked up!

(There’s also an earlier novel that I adore sitting on the drive of an agent I AM MASSIVELY EXCITED ABOUT. Oh my goodness, it would be so awesome to get that agent… Fingers crossed, but don’t hold your breath—this process all takes a long time.)

That’s it for this week. Thanks you for reading! As always, I implore you to keep hope alive in your heart for yourselves and the world around us.

Go be kind and spooky,

Mata

xxx