Trigger Warning: Insects, body horror, psychological horror.

I feel it coming on for days beforehand, waking in the sluggish rot. Sap-suckled and reeling with inevitability, I moan and roll forth from my apathetic decade. In the darkness, I grow restless. Some encoded want, the same font of which bestowed me with this dreamless sleep, demands I wreck what little life I’ve known, and urges me to scrape, scrape, scrape.

A bedevilled nymphette, my senses bid me writhe. Gorging dirt, I tunnel upwards. Sleep is evil now and though my eyes burn, I rake the ceiling with serrated nails until I see the sky. It is the need that draws me up, the need and the inner splitting.

I am so full up with myself, smothered in my own form. The borders of my being ache against its own rigidity. We’re all in here, every one of us, superimposed. Reflections upon reflections, every cellulose thorax. Breaking ground, my confines tighten, and I am goaded on in community by the friction of the ceaseless ringing, a thickness of chirrups.

The surface brings no release; the damp soil, no succor. There is only further up, and I must crawl, following the ones that came innumerably before me. This height is new to me, but the fear is no match for my terrific wonder. I am chasing a whispered promise, an enticing recklessness in service of rebirth.

My compound eyes catch russet husks scattered en route to wherever it is I am going, latched to the cutaneous surface of our Mother Wood. A much more cogent agitation reaches me as I recognize that these are my brethren, burst and emptied of themselves. I realize my fate; the inner shattering is imminent.

The roar of wings calls to me, each glittering, gauzy aileron, whipping me into a holy mania. The final bracing of my insides begin to crack open my carapace. There is no terror at the tipping point, only the prescience of sublime release.

The sudden paroxysm calls forth my higher form.

In shell-rending ecstasy and with orgiastic intentions, a soft, cream body ruptures from my casings, red eyes rolling in the moonlight. My screams swirl among the profusion of my co-conspirators, with fecundity enough to feed a forest. We rhapsodize the world for the fullness of each moment, and the sacrosanctity of our eternal present, our beatific figures.

Someone will sweep up the pieces, the hallowed leavings, after the summer has ended.

About the author

Lily Lalios is a writer based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. They’ve been published in publications from VA Press and Grim & Gilded, as well as self-publishing Agapimeni Literary Magazine, a zine about the queer Greek-American experience.

Photo by Jody Confer on Unsplash.