Slug: A Short Story
So here it is. The first short story I ever wrote. It's dark, punchy, and gets to the heart of what I believe a good story is: sticky.
(Pardon the pun.)
🤘
Slug: A Short Story
Copyright © 2024 Russell Deklynn
All Rights Reserved.
Mara’s thong sandals were worn almost all the way through, which afforded her the feeling of being nearly barefoot. Coupled with her bare midriff, thin leggings, and the warm night air, she felt a little better—but not much. The slight slopes in the lawn that spanned for a half acre behind the house were as quiet as they had always been. Quiet, that is, as long as you don’t count the nocturnal song of crickets and amphibians as noise. Mara hadn’t turned on the porch light. This stroll, a requiem for her dignity, was lit by twilight, which also made her feel a little better.
This wasn’t the first time she had walked the perimeter of the yard, gliding her left hand over the chain-link fence’s crossbars. It was happening more often as of late. Riley had refused to continue taking his pills. “They make me feel like a fucking zombie,” he had offered as justification. She walked slowly and gently, trying with little success to force the events of the day—and their implications for her future—from her mind. She stopped about halfway along the farthest section of the fence, grabbed the crossbar with both hands, closed her eyes, and leaned back, holding herself up. She could not will away the throbbing in her cheekbone and knew that the bruise was only going to grow larger and darker. Visions of Riley invaded her mind—visions of a palm twice the size of her own closing in on her face, the maniacal hate in his eyes, the sour smell of whiskey and unbrushed teeth. She silently began to weep.
Mara allowed herself to cry. When she finished, she opened her eyes and stared out into the sky. The moon and stars were bright that night and illuminated the stretch of marshy woods beyond the fence. She gazed at nothing in particular for a few moments. Without bothering to wipe her tears away—she knew there would probably be more soon anyway—she began to walk again, left hand gliding along the crossbar.
What caught her glance then was a slick, shining mass protruding from the muck about ten feet marsh-ward from the fence. It was about the size and shape of a rugby ball. She stopped and squinted to get a better look. It was entrancing, the way the thing moved: a slow, rhythmic wobbling forward and backward, side to side. A pair of radial eyes disjointedly poked out of the darkness. It was a slug. A big one.
She was so taken by the strangeness of what she was seeing, she had all but forgotten about Riley until she heard him on the
porch.
“I’m sorry, Mara,” he called out into the darkness toward her.
Mara’s head jerked back toward the porch. She saw Riley descending the porch’s small stairs toward her. Every hair on her body stood on end. She was terrified—terrified of this drunken, violent, mentally ill asshole she called a husband walking toward her in the dark.
She turned toward him, quivering.
Then, as if somebody had shot it out of a cannon, the slug launched toward her like a projectile and latched onto the small of her back. Mara was thrown forward by the impact and landed on all
fours.
“What the fuck did you do to my fence?” Riley snapped at her. He rushed past her. There was a rugby-ball-sized hole ripped through the chain-link.
“There’s something stuck to my back!” Mara shrieked.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Riley replied, not taking his eyes off the hole in the fence.
Her voice quivered. “Something came through the fence. It’s stuck to my back,” she said as calmly as she could. She knew from years of experience that Riley didn’t handle being scared very well. He responded to fear with meanness, which meant a scared Riley was a dangerous Riley. “Bad to worse,” she thought to herself. “Can you get it off of me?” she asked, trying to understand the weird, painful pulsation she felt along her backside.
It was then that Riley laid eyes on the slug. He was afraid.
“I’m not touching that fucking thing, Mar!” he snapped, backing away. “It’s fucking disgusting! What is it?” he asked, his face contorting.
“I don’t know. It was out behind the fence,” she said, hoping that Riley’s temper stayed even. “Can you please just do it? I can’t reach it myself.”
Riley thought for a second, said a quiet, “Fuck,” under his breath, tightened his lips, stepped toward her, ordered, “Lie on your stomach,” and grabbed the slimy thing. Once he got a hold of it, he pulled hard and Mara’s torso (roughly half the size of his own) rose from the ground. He shook the thing and Mara shook along with it. He dropped them both. The impact forced the air out of Mara’s lungs.
Without a word, he stepped on her buttocks, pressed all his weight down, and tried again.
“Ahh!” Mara cried out. His foot bearing down hurt worse than the pull of the slug. The slug didn’t budge. Riley let go and stepped away.
“Get up,” he commanded, wiping his slimy hands across his pant legs.
Seeing that he was not only frightened of the slug itself but disgruntled by his inability to remove it, she got to her hands and knees.
“I don’t know what that thing is, but it isn’t normal,” he said in a disquietingly hushed tone.
Mara struggled to her feet. Riley grabbed her by the arm and pulled her toward the porch.
“Let’s call animal control,” she said, struggling against his grasp.
The struggling made no difference whatsoever. He walked her up the porch steps, into the house, and toward the staircase that led upstairs.
“Animal control can’t do shit about this demon,” he said matter-of-factly. “I have to contain it until I can figure out
what to do.”
Mara’s body surged with electric fear.
‘He thinks it’s a demon,’ she thought. ‘He’s having another episode. He’s hammered. He’s scared. He hasn’t taken his pills in weeks.’
She struggled furiously, but his grip would not relent.
Up the stairs they went. The weight of the slug pulled her backward as they ascended the steps, but the strength of Riley’s grip propelled her forward and upward. They reached the top step, and Riley pulled her across the hallway and threw her into the second bedroom. Mara knew something bad was going to happen, but Riley was so unpredictable without his medication, she couldn’t even begin to imagine what it might be. He walked into the bedroom behind her and picked her up one-handed by the hair. She screamed and was interrupted by Riley’s fist striking her mouth. Pain, blood, and then dark; he had knocked her unconscious.
Mara awoke to darkness. She was in the bedroom’s closet. Riley had somehow sealed the door shut. She tasted blood. Her entire face pulsated with pain. She lay there coming to, strewn against the wall and floor with this massive slug relentlessly, but painlessly, affixed to the small of her back. She could hear Riley talking in the bedroom, and for her sanity’s sake she tried to tell herself he was on the phone.
“This is the right thing to do, right?” she
heard Riley say. Then she heard a shotgun barrel being snapped closed. “God knows what that spawn of Satan has done to her insides. She’s no good anymore. She’s probably one of them now. I’m doing her a favor, really. Yes. I’m doing her a favor.”
There in the darkness, one thought reverberated clearly through her mind: “This is it. I’m fucked. He’s going to kill me.”
Maybe it was the dark. Maybe it was the firm but painless pulsation between her and the slug. Maybe she had no other choice. Whatever the reason for it, the fear left her. It had been a long time since
she felt—not fearlessness, but peace. The fear was gone so completely that she smiled a grateful smile to herself there in the dark. She didn’t want to die afraid, and she wouldn’t have to.
Her breathing slowed. Just then, the suction on her back gave a little, and then let go entirely. The slug had released itself from her skin and plopped down on the floor beside her. She picked it up and, with that intuition unique to humans of the feminine persuasion, she understood what had happened. Fear locked the slug to its host. Later, she would ask herself whether it was telepathic or in tune with mammalian pheromones.
Those weren’t thoughts for right then, though, for without warning, the door flew open. There stood Riley, pupils dilated, looking disheveled, and pointing a shotgun at her head.
“I’m doing the Lord’s work right now, Mar. You’re welcome. I forgive you,” he said to his wife.
Riley looked to the floor beside Mara and saw the slug unfixed from his wife. His eyes opened wide. He aimed the gun toward it. Then, without warning, the slug, seemingly propelled by some unseen
projectile force, flew out of the closet and latched onto his face.
Mara did not move from where she sat, nor did peace leave her. She watched, detached, as a terrified Riley dropped his gun and tried to pry the slug from his face. He couldn’t do it.
“Riley, let me help you,” she said, getting up off the floor and walking toward him.
He stepped back from her and continued to struggle.
“You just need to take your pills, Sweetheart. It isn’t a demon and neither am I,” she added.
He struggled even more furiously, both against the slug and away from Mara’s voice. His muffled screams were audible under the preternatural grip of this creature. She couldn’t have stopped what happened next if she wanted to.
He flailed backward through the bedroom doorway into the hallway, and then he tumbled down the stairs. The fall lasted about seven seconds. She walked to the top of the stairs and saw right away that his head was at an unnatural angle. Refusing to relinquish her newfound serenity, she descended the stairs toward him. She crouched down, pressed her left index and middle fingers against his neck, and checked for a pulse. There was none.
She breathed in deeply, let the breath out, and plucked the slug from Riley’s corpse (a dead body can’t pump out fear, you understand); the creature did not resist at all. Mara found the sliminess endearing. She walked slowly through the back door, across the porch, and across the yard to the place she had first spied her bug-eyed savior. She then had the thought as to how the slug perceived what it had, and where its strange power had come from. Mara lifted it over the fence, bent down as far as her petite frame would allow, and let it go into the wet, swampy vegetation.
“Thank you,” she said.
She went back into the house and wiped the slime from Riley’s face, sure that the reality of what had just happened would hit her soon. She knew the peace wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. There was a dead man in her living room, and she wasn’t about to run from what had happened. That she would feel fear again at some point was a given. Now, at least, she had a reference point. She knew what peace felt like and could strive for it as a standard.
She called the police. They came.
“Looks like you’ve had a hell of a night, Ma’am,” the officer said to Mara. “What happened?”
“He had a psychotic episode,” she replied. She pointed to the bottle of Remeron on the coffee table. “He was very drunk and he hasn’t taken his pills in weeks. He tried to kill me, so I slugged him and he fell down the stairs.”
“By the look of you, I’d say he may have had it coming. Did he do this to you?” the officer asked, gesturing toward her face.
Mara nodded a confirmation.
“Must have been one hell of a slug,” he said.
“Officer, you have no idea,” she replied.
The end.
🤘
If you're into Slug, check out my longer works, Charnel Tea: A Most Distasteful Scenario and A Cranial Conspiracy, on Amazon. eBook, K+ (or whatever it is now), paperback and hardcover. Here's the link to my author's page:
Peace and love.
Russell Deklynn
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