Alone; Together

aka Bug Mommy

Content notes: Horror, ~2k words. This story contains extensive, ongoing depictions of body horror, self-mutilation, and parasitic infestation. Proceed at your own discretion. Maybe don’t eat before reading this one.

This story was done as part of week three of Milk & Honey’s Augtober Writing challenge.

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Updated 20/11/2025 : Art provided by Hylia, Voiceover provided by Anthony Michael Malec

Digital Art drawn in Procreate by Hylia

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Scritch-scriiitch.

My nails drag along the inside of my thigh, scraping micro-layers of skin away from the small hardened lump that intrudes upon the otherwise soft flesh. The protrusion is pink and the surface looks taut and angry like an insect sting. In the center there’s a small, dark circle. I assume this is the stinger, and embark toward the bathroom in search of tweezers.

Bare feet meet the floor with soft, slow steps. Quietly pad pad pad across the vinyl flooring, each footfall sticks slightly as my clammy skin meets the cold surface.

I’m confused and still half-asleep still in this moment, unsure of when the injury occurred. I’d been hiking yesterday, but it seems odd that I wouldn’t have noticed this during the customary tick-check afterwards. Maybe I should have had a second pair of eyes to check, but I’d been just fine by myself before now.

The medicine cabinet opens with a cry from the hinges, a sharp whine that lifts at the end like a question mark. Creeeeak?

I find the tweezers next to my toothbrush, and as I close the cabinet I take in the sight of myself. I am pale despite my outdoor habits, a sickly cast over my complexion. I walk to the tub and seat myself on the edge, hoisting up the impacted leg to rest my foot atop the toilet seat with the clatter of plastic shifting against the porcelain.

The fluorescent light of the bathroom overhead hums and lights up the exposed skin of my inner thigh, revealing the angry red lump in startling clarity. It looks larger now, it’s swelling up rapidly. I pinch the tweezers around the millimeter of the thin dark stinger that protrudes from the center of the swollen mound, carefully pulling it upward and unsheathing it from its fleshy holster.

There’s a small pop as the firm sliver is freed. I feel a twinge of relief, a release of tension, before my stomach begins to twist. Attached to the stinger is a thread so translucent it is nearly invisible, and as I move the tweezers further I feel the pull. It feels like the string is twined through half of my nervous system, tied tight to my bones and threaded directly into the meat.

Each millimeter of release tugs directly at the muscle of my thigh, a dull dragging sensation of that is accompanied by a strange detached sense of wrongness. From there it rockets upward through my body and straight into my core; these are almost-pleasant vibrations, like drawing the bow across a cello in a deep, sensual thrum. Then it wraps around my stomach and throat; there it chokes me, a thousand strands of hair intertwined and stuffed inside my esophagus, woven into the membranes and noosed around my uvula.

Two inches of thread are visible when I lose control of my stomach, heaving aggressively at the tickle in my throat, the taut cord yanking at the space between my lungs. Once my stomach is emptied into the tub I take a moment to think, a moment to regret. I wish that I spent more time putting down roots than wandering the forest and tripping over them. I wish someone else was here to help deal with this.

I take a fresh look at the sting site; the thin string dangles from the wound, the flesh is angrier now, infection-red and pulsating rapidly. I press my fingers against it and feel a racing heartbeat, it’s hot to the touch.

I intended to search the bathroom for more medical supplies, maybe an antibiotic ointment, but my gaze is immediately drawn toward the top of the foot that still rests on the toilet. There’s another small pink lump there, another black speck poking out from the center.

Thinking that I might prevent the same issues as the first sting, I set to remove this stinger as quickly as possible. Perhaps a swift yank will remove the thread inside all in one motion or sever the string, and this one won’t swell up so badly.

The thread is stronger than expected, and wrenching it upward produces disaster. Instead of slowly unspooling from the wound, the thread pulls sideways and rips through the skin. I grit my teeth and let out a sharp whimper at the pain, I’ve created an inch-long tear in the top of my foot. The unbroken thread still gripped tightly in the tweezers. Further tugging only shreds the broken flesh further, sending lightning bolts of pain across every nerve from toe to hip, and I abandon the endeavor for later.

Perhaps instead I can find the source of the thread, remove it from there. Surely it’s in the first lump, somewhere in my thigh. I can dig it out, solve the problem all at once.

I take a deep breath of the stale bathroom air, it’s flavored with bleach, copper and a hint of stomach ejecta. I can hear the blood trickle from the jagged slit in my foot and patter softly against the tile floor as I angle the tweezers just so. When I press the sharp edge against my inner thigh there is little sensation, it’s a dull pressure against the distended mass. The bulging hump of meat throbs against the tool, as though begging to be pierced. I oblige.

There’s another release of pressure as I twist the tweezers into the center of the swelling, tearing through layers of epidermis and fat. I burrow toward what feels like a hard ball deep inside of my thigh, and each savage rotation of the sharp tool comes with only the mildest pressure, no pain. I must be on the right track, I tell myself as I turn my inner thigh into raw pulled-pork.

There’s a nearly quarter sized divot opened in my leg now, and inside the mess of shredded red and pink meat there is a distinct off-white mass wedged between pale lumps of subcutaneous fat. It’s too large to grasp with the tweezer, so I grab my razor from its nearby place on the edge of the tub. I can’t stop now.

I employ a trick I used in high school, back when dying seemed like an easier option than running away from home, and break apart the razor to remove the bare blades. The sound of the plastic casing cracking sends a rush through me, and I let the broken pieces clatter to the floor after retrieving the metal shards. I drag one across my finger, watching as the pale white line separates the ridges of my fingerprint before the blood wells up to fill the new cut. Perfectly sharp.

I drag the razor blade against the edges of the crater I’ve made, cutting lines through the outer edges in a pattern like a compass. Satisfied that I’d made the tissue more malleable to intrusion, I put aside the tools and wedged my fingers into the cavity, pushing the meat aside to reach toward the bloodied pearl encased within.

I feel that same twisting, tugging, yanking sensation as I free the foreign object from the juicy nest and hold it in my palm. It’s… beautiful. Pale and delicate, tainted pink from the gore that had housed it. I assume it is an egg-sac, and I have been made an involuntary incubator for whatever insect has left it behind.

This worries me, and I glance toward the second site on my foot. The mound is swelling around the shredded flesh, pulling it open and ripping the skin further. With every palpitation below the surface a new stream of blood seeps from the injury, but the pain is barely tangible.

I am in a sort of daze, a fervor. I must remove the threads. There must be another sac in my foot. Something itches on my stomach and I ignore it, I need to deal with things one at a time.

I cautiously tug at the string that sits atop the ragged skin of my foot, noting the lack of pain again. I yank at it, and it's like tightening a noose from the inside. Threads convulse in my throat, around my sternum, cutting off oxygen and sending an intense wave of nausea through me.

I had to be close. I must be. Four inches of thread come loose, pulling through the skin and tendon of my foot as it untwines. I choke with every tug, heave and heave and dry-heave eventually too. The room reeks of blood and vomit, and my bile-prominent sick sits in the bottom of the tub, unrinsed.

My search becomes desperate now, I rend my flesh apart haphazardly as the lack of meat in my foot makes it difficult to identify my target, everything within looks pale and blood-tinged; I cannot tell thread or foreign-body from tendon and bone. The skin stops tearing upward once the string has reached my ankle, the sac must be located here. But no amount of pulling on the thread releases it, and so I must dig again.

Something makes me pause my excavation though, a throbbing feeling in the side of my knee that seems to coincide with a tugging sensation behind my eye. Each time the side of my knee throbs it feels as though something has gripped my ocular nerve and is drawing my eyeball back into the socket. This requires immediate attention.

Inspecting the side of my knee reveals yet another stinger, this one sticking out of a particularly large bubble of infection. The taut yellow-ish cyst pulsates, threatening eruption. I follow through with my only instinct and pull the stinger from the site, and like a cork it releases a stream of pale green discharge. With the wound partly drained I assume it is safe to proceed with getting the sac out; the yanking of my eye has paused with the release of the thick pus from this site. A sweet relief.

I try to dig in with the tweezers again, but this time it hurts. Each pull against this thread vibrates inside my skull, pulls against my neurons and leaves my head pounding. Every part of me flinches at the act, my body realizing its own bounty ahead of me. Stop. STOP.

I shouldn’t be doing this. The thought feels natural, more right than the stomach churning tug of war with these internally twined threads. I pause my mutilation, coming to terms with my errors. I was doing everything wrong, I was tearing myself apart.

I drop the bloody instruments into the tub and turn on the shower, and watch for a moment as the pink-tinged bile flows into the drain. I wipe the gore from my body, and tuck the thread I’d pulled from my foot into the wound before wrapping it in bandages from toe to ankle. I wrap my knee in gauze to cover the drained pustule, and then address the crater in my thigh.

I reach for the tiny object on the counter, marveling at it for a moment. So small and delicate, a lovely thing. It came from me. I smile as I press the egg-sac deep into the exposed meat of my thigh, tucking my future child in tightly before wrapping the wound like the others. It feels right. It feels good. I feel whole.

My fingers slide over my body, searching, finding several other pulsating lumps just below my skin. I’ll need to take care of those, make sure we can all survive together.

Each time my hands graze a tender mound I can feel the threads inside of me vibrate along with it. They’re everywhere, creating an intricate web-like mesh of connections within me. A symphony of strings, bow drawn across each dendrite to create an intense, shiver-worthy melody that hums through my marrow. A part of me. Connected. Together.

When I smile at my sweaty, blood streaked face in the mirror I can feel the threads shift and vibrate against every nerve fiber; all of my children are smiling back at me.

I don’t know why I was ever worried about being alone.

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