The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Those Social Worms Will Eat You Alive
by Melissa R. Mendelson 

The worm eater did not look old, but her skin sagged, pale.  Maybe, it was because she did not surface to get any sun.  If she surfaced and was discovered, they would kill her, and they killed most of them, believing that people like her should not exist.  They would never accept otherwise.

The price was steep.  Five hundred, and I barely had that.  It was so hard to survive in the world today, but I needed to see her.  It took a few months, and it took even longer to track down one of her contacts.  But I found them, and her contact led me to an underground haven, where we had to crawl down until I felt claustrophobic.  I was surprised that her room was so spacious, lit by several candles, and she sat against the wall, her skin glowing against the flames.

She never said a word but gestured to a golden red pillow on the ground opposite her.  Her hand remained stretched out.  I thought for a moment of shaking it like you used to in the old days, but then I realized that she was waiting for the cash.  And it was strange placing all that green in her paled hand.  I never had that much cash on me especially when everyone used plastic, and our usage was tracked to see what we were buying.  And I had to be careful when withdrawing the money.  They were watching that too.

I didn’t realize that she was holding a lit candle.  She moved the flame toward me, and I flinched.  She lit the candle near my knee, and I thought that she would move the candle away.  But she held it over the other candle until the flames merged, and something like a teardrop formed.

Suddenly, I doubled over.  My head smashed against waves of voices, voices telling me what to do and not to do.  Voices screaming to stay and be heard.  Voices I even dreamt of, and this was why I was here because they would never leave me alone.  They were everywhere.

Tears stung my eyes, but I couldn’t move my hands.  My body was frozen in place.  Even my mouth would not open, and all my eyes held were the flames especially the one by my knee.  Finally, I was able to look down, see my bare arms, and shadows formed into what reminded me of plastic army men that my brother used to have.  I missed him and haven’t thought of him in years until now.  Their hold was breaking on me.

The figures pulled at my skin, tearing and clawing, drawing droplets of blood.  Their empty eyes glared at me.  “How dare I remove them,” they screamed in my head, a scream that cut down my back, into my sides, and I would have fallen to my knees, if I wasn’t already sitting.

The teardrop fell from the candle.  The figures dropped with it.  The ground beneath me looked like a burial of ants, and the worm eater swept them all up into her hand, placing them into her mouth.  She smiled at me as she swallowed them down.

I was able to move again, but I didn’t.  I felt…. Empty.  I wasn’t me, but I haven’t been me in a very long time.  But I wasn’t them.

“What was with the teardrop?”  I asked.

“That was you.”  Her lips barely parted, her voice slipping between them.

“Me?”  I asked.  “What is left of me?

“Nothing.”  Her smile snapped shut.  “But, maybe, one day, something.”  She shook her head, but I couldn’t tell if she was sad.  Then, she looked at me, her eyes glowing with several flames.  “Those social worms will eat you alive.”

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Fiction © Copyright Melissa R. Mendelson
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

About Author Melissa R. Mendelson:

Melissa R. Mendelson is the author of the Sci-Fi Novella, Waken.  She also has a prose poetry collection called, This Will Remain With Us published by Wild Ink Publishing.  Her short story collections, Better Off Here and Name’s Keeper can be found on Amazon/Amazon Kindle.

If you’d like to learn more about Melissa, you can visit her accounts here: www.MelissaMendelson.com