Gagged on pop culture, polluted by
depression, comes Mantula!
A special fiction series!
I’ve woken up inside the body of something I cannot identify; only I know it isn’t what I fell asleep in. Falling asleep isn’t exactly accurate I suppose. I passed out. But I know I didn’t look like this, or feel like this. Everything is crazy and distorted, junked up with multiple facets – like looking through a kaleidoscope or something crazy like that.
I want to puke; only I can’t. My mouth isn’t what it used to be. It doesn’t seem to work the same way.
Whenever I try to move I see a flash of black furry sticks, but it’s all loopy. I’m looking at two of them, but on twenty different television sets. And I cannot close my eyes. I know I was human once. I was a guy in a bad way, like a lot of dudes I know. Life had me in a chokehold. And I wasn’t fighting back anymore.
Crown Royal made it all better. It really did. I stopped seeing my little boy with it. He’s there every other time though. Every single time I close my eyes he is there waving at me as the car drives off.
But now I can’t close my damn eyes, so I won’t see him again until all this is sorted out. I don’t even have a headache. But I can’t walk either. Every time I try to move I see those furry sticks. They feel light and powerful at the same time, like cords of aluminum, but they couldn’t belong to me, could they?
I have to focus; have to make a move here. It takes a few minutes, but I’m able to sort of shift all the televisions into a single concentrated image. I can see better like this, but I have to focus hard on it, more than I’ve concentrated in a long time.
I’m on a sidewalk somewhere, near a couple of warehouse-sized blue dumpsters, and it’s hot and humid as hell out. Luckily I’m in the shadow of the dumpsters and not baking out in the direct light. Trash is scattered all over the place. Up ahead I see a shattered rear-view mirror sitting on the asphalt next to the dumpster. I flop and scramble, flop and scramble, scramble and flop, then drag myself across the concrete. It’s not easy. The legs are everywhere and really hard to wrap a thought around. Not like my own legs, which I could operate without thinking, without caring. These things weren’t the same. As I squirmed closer, I realized how big that rear-view mirror looked.
Only it wasn’t any more gigantic than a regular mirror. It was me that had a problem. I was a hell of a lot smaller than I was the last time I looked.
These legs began to make sense.
Sure enough, once I got to the shattered glass and got a good look into a shard of it, I got my confirmation. I wasn’t the same man I used to be. Hell, I wasn’t a man at all. I’d become a tarantula, all furry and covered in nastiness, but still me on the inside. By the way my gross little body covered much of the rear-view mirror, I could tell I was a big one too. At least as big as a grown man’s hand.
The whole thing kind of pissed me off.
Doug will return in future installments.
Patrick Whitehurst 