The Stinging

by Byron Bailey

conclusion

The air sparkled and shimmered as a blob of pink enveloped me. “Yes, beautiful.” For a moment, I thought I was back in the incubator wrapped within its safe folds. Then I remembered that there were no safe folds, not after what Slippery Coil had done. Still, the colors bathed me. Amber became vermillion and vermillion became anger. I never knew anger was a color before, but it was, like green only sharper. Anger faded to bliss.

“Do you now understand why these vermin are so dangerous to us?” mother asked.

“Yes. If given a choice, I’m not sure I would ever do anything but get stung.”

“Yes. Now move closer and get some of the sticky stuff on your belly. I call it vermin balm. Be careful not to get any in your mouth, though. It tastes horrible.”

I eased into the shattered hive. Vermin balm oozed against my underbelly, the cool stickiness clinging against the itch. Fire versus ice, the continual struggle was enacted upon my flesh and the ice won. The itch was gone, thanks to my vermin friends.

Friends? The thought was a new one that I tried on like a fresh skin. I actually had friends, tiny ones who took the itch away and showed me beauty. Who would have ever thought it, especially after encountering the others, eerily like us yet frighteningly different? The others had scales, too, often painted colors bright enough to embarrass even the most perverted. Their limbless bodies, also, slithered deep into burrows. (The search for rodents was an adventure for us both)! Some even injected their victims with venom. There, the similarities ended, though.

None of the others produced more than one kind of venom and the venom that they did produce was always of the killing kind. No medical venom. No cement venom. No cleaning venom. Just kill kill kill venom and that’s all they knew. Kill.

Their tendency towards violence undoubtedly stemmed from their venom being situated in their heads where it leaked out and damaged the brain. If perchance, some remnant of rationality remained after the venom had done its damage, the jarring upon the brain caused by actually striking with the head, demolished what was left. Sadly, no matter how much cooing one did to express a desire to cuddle, the others never made good friends. My vermin friends, though, had stingers on the other end much like myself and were consequently conscientious.

“Nothing is as tragic as perversion,” mother said.

The venom haze dissipated like a fog mauled by the noonday sun, leaving me alone with the one truth that mattered: death flicking its tongue my way.

“And why is it tragic?” mother continued. “Because when one engages in perversion, recessive traits that have been haunting our species for eons invariably express themselves and the young are born with wings, hooves, legs and arms. Abomination heaped upon abomination! Sometimes there are even graspers. Graspers! Can you believe it?”

I could believe anything of perversion, even graspers. Maybe death wasn’t flicking out its tongue my way but rather clutching for me with its graspers. If anything had graspers, it had to be death. Ravenous, ruthless, capricious, always forcing itself upon those who wanted nothing to do with it, death certainly displayed all of the symptoms of graspers.

“You are now prepared for the truth.”

Slowly, the vermin venom reasserted itself and the world become once again beautiful. My friends had not abandoned me. We slithered into the night, skirting herds of grass eaters braying at their fate. (I would bray, too, if I had been consigned to eat grass to the end of my days. How their insides must itch)! Vermin buzzed for my blood, but they weren’t my friends. These vermin only wanted to take, never give. At last we climbed the hilltop.

If it had been an honest hilltop, it would have ended in a cliff for us to tumble from, dashing ourselves against jagged chunks of granite below. Or perhaps, lava would have spurted from the top and licked us with sizzling tongues until we were indistinguishable from pumice. Instead, the hilltop merely sloped back downwards until it joined with the plains in a union of grass peppered with clumps of bushes. No granite. No lava. Yet, there was fire. Writhing, cackling fire.

Bipeds gathered around the flames. At first, I thought that the vermin venom had turned bad, giving me a glimpse into the nightmare past of my species when we had legs and arms and entire worlds burned because of it. The scene did not waver, though.

Instead, the bipeds merely twisted and lurched into one unnatural position after another. Sitting, they contaminated the ground with haunches wrapped in the rotting hides of grass eaters. Occasionally, one would leave the rosy radius of the fire and squat, fouling the soil with their wastes -- watch where you slither! However, the worst was when they stood, their bodies aimed straight up at the sky as if to rend the heavens with the spears they carried in their graspers.

Yes, they had graspers, each spiked with five digits clenching and unclenching, unsure what next to mangle. A chill oozed into me as if to protect me from the flames that would inevitably come. The bipeds had intelligence. The spears and fire did not lie. And they had graspers that made using their intelligence far too easy, far too thoughtless.

“What do you see?” Mother asked.

“Perversion.”

“You have always been the precocious one, Sweet Venom. Now you know. There can be no future here. We cannot compete without graspers of our own and one mother can not produce enough venom to burrow to another planet even if all she ate was iridium until the day her scales drifted white like snowflakes from off her back.”

“Oh.” What else could I say? Doom had been stalking us since before we were born. By the venom of the ancient serpents, I hated bipeds. Hated them!

We traveled into the night, away from that all-consuming fire. The stars enveloped us in a chilly blanket but I felt no comfort from them. No amount of chill could stop the burning that had consumed my mind, the flames raging through my imagination. At last we stopped.

“This is as good a place as any,” mother said. “And better than most.”

A river snaked its way across the plains, its currents undulating in welcome. A good place to forever rest, wrapped within watery coils. Nerve venom began to sting my eyes. Why couldn’t mother control herself? Did she so look forward to killing me that she couldn’t stop the flow?

“This isn’t going to hurt,” mother said, her stinger angled over my head.

I closed my eyes, listened to the beating of my hearts. Would I hear them when they stopped beating or would I be too busy writhing? I flinched and then the pain came. Pain? So much for the wisdom of the ancient serpents! A nerve venom death hurt ferociously. I writhed, I thrashed, I ululated until my trachea grew hoarse. I even felt an outpouring that could only be my life draining away. Then I noticed that the pain came from my stinger, not the base of my skull. I opened my eyes.

With a twist, my stinger slid from mother’s flank, dark fluids dribbling out from its tip, fizzing against the splattered grass. Nerve venom. My nerve venom. It kept dribbling until I clenched my glands.

“Your venom is weak,” mother said, “but strong enough.”

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I had killed mother.

Mother shuddered, her eyes beginning to glaze over with an emerald film. I wondered if my eyes, too, would look like gemstones when I died. “I’m the one who should be sorry. Now there’s something you need to know.”

“What?” I couldn’t look at mother, at the purple foam washing down her side, at each spasm as she tried to breath and finally at the venom spurting uncontrolled from her stinger. That venom should be spurting into me.

“When I said that we can’t compete with the bipeds, I wasn’t speaking the truth. Perversion can compete with perversion; graspers can compete with graspers. It’s the only way.”

My stinger stabbed into mother again and again.

“You’re not so sorry now,” she said. “I can hardly blame you, though.”

When she finished twitching, I dragged her into the river, watched her float downstream. Graspers can compete with graspers. I wanted to slide into the river as well, to drown the abominations that were quickening within me but I knew that I was a good swimmer and would drown nothing. Instead, I slithered on into the day until I heard that cheerful buzz and knew that the comfort of my vermin friends was only moments away.

I threw myself upon the hive. Maybe if I were lucky, I might overdose.

Proceed to Challenge 236...