You weren’t looking where you were going. You had your nose pressed into a new, engrossing app on your phone, like a child at a Macy’s Christmas display window. Scrolling, tapping, swiping, following the instructions being whispered into your Bluetooth ear-buds.
When you step off into the woods, the darkness doesn’t register, nor the silence.
The images on the screen come faster, tints of gory crimson, royal blue and black, always black. Your finger flicks in a blur. The voice begins to screech. The ground turns to gravel, then leaves, dry like the crepe-paper skin of an old woman. Then soft loam cushions your footfalls. Vines trail across your shoulders, uncurling tendrils reach for your ears and lips. Still you wander, enraptured. Until…
You’re physically halted. You push forward, the voice compels you to struggle on, its piercing commands, so loud that they burst your eardrums. Trickles of blood loosen the buds’ grip and they fall to the dirt and are swallowed by squirming larvae seething at your feet.
You look up and find you’ve stumbled into the web of some vast malignant weaver. Cloying silk binds your eyes open, your mouth open, your hands, still gripping your phone, try to clutch at your face to tear away the threads. Your arms reach only half way, they too are bound and are now being draw to your sides. Your cherry red phone falls face up to the earth and pulsates there, whether from loved ones trying to reach you, or from fetid creatures tasting the plastic case, you no longer care.
For the children of the monster that has encased you in her undying tomb, her woven cocoon of preservation, now dangle by the millions. They dance at the end of invisible threads, all anxious to encrypt your juice-filled corpulence so that they might dine for days, years.
Round and round they spin, entwining your once rosy glow now faded to an ashen hue. You watch their tiny black bodies scuttle across your vision, never patching your sight. They leave two slits to serve as witness. For what, you wonder?
For her, you realize.
She descends with a jerking motion within your mummified view. She’s covered by bristles that glimmer as if vinyl. Through your silken mask you smell her, corpse flower nectar. She twirls at the end of her own sticky rope until her black dead eyes, arranged like fist-sized marbles, come to regard you, her host.
You fear the fangs that she clacks together, hard as ivory, but she rotates further and from the end of her bulbous abdomen you see her ovipositor, a syringe the size of a dagger, lift and strike toward your belly. The pain explodes in your chest and spreads, napalm oozing through your veins… Which subsides until you sense a new motion within your gut. You feel your self being pumped full. Full of eggs.
As your consciousness pinches to a distant shrinking point of light you hear your phone ring, and ring, and ring.
Anonymole - apocryphal agitators 
Number 28 Dry like the crepe-paper skin of an old woman
You perfectly describe a place I never want to walk through. Why just the other day I nearly walked into what to me was a giant spider and huge web. The same damn spider and web at the same exact location that I had walked into twice before in the last couple of days. My youngest son grab me by the should pulling me backward while he yelled look out just in time.
I really have no good excuse for such unconscious meandering as I was not even looking down at some cell phone displaying some fantastically compelling images. No, I was just walking unseeing with my mind in a fussy cloud which for me is now a daily experience. Like your unfortunate character, I am on my way to the crepe paper skin condition of an old person myself. What is one to do? – Cry, laugh, or thank the universe for letting me live this long. I guess I’ll just say Thanks.
Your writing is always great, even when I sometimes shiver at a scene. I mean that is the point in narrative work is it not – to impact the reader in some emotional way. Good, Bad and what does it all Mean. Questions to ask oneself.
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Thanks for reading, Mike. Trying to create compelling scenes, it’s a tough task.
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I thoroughly enjoyed this piece. I liked the premise, I liked the pacing, I like the descriptions. I liked it all. A perfect story for Halloween.
So were you successful in writing a scene EVERY day of the month?
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Indeed I was.
I tried to write a few days in advance so that I didn’t have to worry about falling behind. But, mission accomplished.
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Sneaky! But, well done!
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Yuck I actually felt queasy at the end 🤢 Good job
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Hi A. Mole,
One question: is the exterminator calling? Nice post. Duke
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Didn’t we discuss em/en dashes? What was it BIll Engvall said (–) here’s your sign?
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You had your nose pressed into a new, engrossing app on your phone, like a child at a Macy’s Christmas display window. One complete thought, modifier. Carry on.
Years ago I won a sound design ADDY for a commercial about that very thing. “Christmas in a child’s eye.” Always a great Norman Rockwell visual for a starting point to creep away from.
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You’re right, too close the window. Fixed.
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Invasion of the spider eggs? Macabre ala Lovecraft. Who is on the phone?
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I was carried along and hated every step knowing I wouldn’t like the end. Just joking. You scared me but I love your writing. 🧡🧡💛💚💙
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…I hate spiders by the way…this is visceral…
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Holy Stephen King type of creepy. This was great…and what a fate…pay attention to your environment! LOL!
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