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this whole thread is really sweet :*). i'm working on lots of stuff, many things i would love to share with people, but here is an e-mail from 2008 (i think, maybe 09) that i sent on a whim.
it's not very funny if you don't know the backstory. in a few of my highschool classes was a girl named chandler. she was this extremely bookish freshman, very shy, glasses, blond, dorky, awkward, scrunched up scared posture all the time. rarely raised her hand, spoke to the class like she was in a lion's den. she was just cuter than a dick, but she never left her shell for anything, ever. i went to great lengths to get her to talk, especially after being warned against it - being told that it was a 'lost cause.' that was sophomore year, 7 years ago. eventually, we would become friends, first by proxy then directly, but the thrill of the hunt was just too much.
several years have passed, and my methods were becoming more aggressive.
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oh hello little one. Take a deep breath before you proceed, you're gonna need it. I know all about you now, Chandler. I mean, don't be alarmed or anything, but don't attempt to conceal anything from me either; let's not insult my intelligence here. I've found you out. Rather, I found you out a long time ago and I just tucked that knowledge away for a rainy day. Now, I'm afraid I need you.
Some time ago I made a misstep with a woman calling herself "Millie." A stupid name, I admit, but what she would have you know is that it's short for millipede. I'd be lying if I said a quality about that childish "millipede" struck my fancy. There was something about being in the same room as her... egh, it's difficult to put it into words. I'll try and de-moron myself for a bit here; I know your time is valuable, and my need for you is quite dire.
Let's see, about her: great hands (let's not be immature here, she only has two), pretty eyes in a mixed hue you don't often see, fantastic frame in that germanic tall/long/slender fashion that I do so approve of. We could be bored together for hours. She could find a way to make a rocking chair duel feel competitive, but that's not the thing that kept me. What kept me was that strange 'feeling' she exuded that always made me shield my elbows, close my armpits, and especially guard my wrists, literally; I quite rightly shielded all the major arteries whenever I was in her company. Every warning alarm in me constantly ordered me to never give the girl an opening, and who am I to argue with my own defense software. She just had some intangible factor that I had never encountered before in a person, maybe it was a smell in the air that we humany man-peoples can't quite sniff out anymore, hell, I don't know -- I mean the olfactory sense has been getting slowly evolved out over the past couple thousand years anyway like wisdom teeth, but even as a waning sense it still offers more to our brains than we're aware of.
So what do we know for sure about Millie? An absolutely palatable sense of imminent exsanguination, if ever there was one, and I loved her for that. There is no mutual relationship quite like one funded by fear. Millie was awesome for that, and really brought out the good man in me, the devoted one, faithful and true, and all it took was a slight fear of dying. Her apartment was a place I loved to visit, but also, and yeah I know this is gonna sound gay, it had the hardest front door to open. I always hesitated, every single time. What if I did something stupid while I was in there? What if I forgot one of those pointless dates or times that women never fail to remember? I mean well, Chandler, I really mean well, but I need to mean well enough to not get killed, and this girl was always a shattered teacup away from leaping across the room and disemboweling anyone that offended her with a boxcutter only one click open.
So do I go in, or do I flee? After a teency bit of civil war, I always ended up choosing to steel myself and head on inside... and what greeted me? A dark-haired, cheerful murderess who only I could make smile. That was enough for me, and fear had always kept me from straying from her. That's good enough, right? Though now, I feel even without the ominous sensation that I was about to be slashed open and killed, I still genuinely adored her. We're all born with a constant heartbeat that only ever stops once. Being in the presence of someone who wasn't afraid to shut down a heart or two gave a flavor to the air. I'm sure it was similar to what higher knights felt in the presence of vicious nobility. Brave men, always hungry for the approving nod of the warrior king walking past in full plate, yeah, I can definitely see the appeal; everyone wants to play for the winning team. I've always been attracted to strength, and what is more powerful than the ability to quiet one's conscience and terminate life, especially while maintaining their sanity?
Make no mistake, I am good at heart, and could never do harm to another without worthy provocation, but perhaps therein lies the attraction? Of being Millie's counterbalance. Where she is black, cruel, and a tyrannical cunt, I am good, happy and comforting. Our common ground was always humor, you know. Where our views differed on so many things, it always came together in comedy, and making each other laugh, I think, was our favorite thing to do.
Ohhh hell. That apartment of hers never got any easier to visit, my dear Chandler. Never got easier, not a once. The longest I stayed at the door was at least two minutes, and on a damned cold evening, too. Millie got some kind of cough aids and had been feeling like crap all week, so I was naturally very cautious lest she vent her congested, coughy rage on my supple body. Standing around outside like a dope holding movie rentals and a pair of lunchables or something cute and retarded, not moving or anything, I had to have looked so stupid just staring at the apartment room numbers on her door. Why am I always so freaked out by her? On the evening of the longest doorwait, when I finally worked up the minerals to enter, I found something I had never seen before.
Nothing. For the first time in a fucking coon's age, she wasn't home. I mean, she wasn't a crazy shut-in that thirsted for social interaction from every mailman to come by, no, she had a life, and we ran on a decent schedule (hence me bringing my awesome party supplies), but she was nowhere to be found.
Stay with me, Chandler, please. Millie's apartment was about as abnormal as its tenant. It piped some electricity... so a couple appliances did work, but the place had a bad string of luck when it came to lightbulbs. Something about an abnormal voltage, or heat, or moisture, or god knows what else made it so she burned through lightbulbs at an unfair rate. She told me when she first moved in, she went through a full pack of four in a single night. A bit unaffordable, right? Exactly why she decided not to even bother anymore. I went and bought her some energy saving halogen-y lights, the stupid looking ones that look like corded up dog penises twisting everywhere, yeah, well the only ones that worked for longer than a few hours were bright and ugly as hell. That disgustingly bright light that can take a 15 year old girl and make her look like a 38 year old smoker. Fuck that noise. We both agreed it was just a lost cause, and so she resorted to candles. How cute is that, we're living in the age of flying cars and pill-form meals and Millie is buying candlesticks at wal-mart or she can't see when she showers.
Funny how the toaster, fridge and TV don't seem to give a crap about the wiring problem. I'd have made a joke about just getting a bunch of cheap TVs and lighting her apartment that way, but remember, Millie is but an errant pubic hair away from carving a trench down my chest and arms while chewing my throat out. See... even something about that sentence was arousing. Oh, Chandler, what's wrong with me.
Millie's unlit den and that annoying burnt wood smell, oh lord it was freaky. I've played enough video games to know that if I'm not carrying a pipe, a knife, a radio and a goddamn energy drink, I'm gonna get killed by something in there. Stereotypical creeky floors, a wood stove in the corner that hadn't been used that day, of course I'm calling out for Millie but getting nothing but the twangy echo of a very small two room apartment. She's just gone.
Did she suffer a stroke while taking a shit? Pass out on sleeping pills the night before? Those aren't always the things I automatically think of when something goes wrong, but I started to legitimately worry for her. Had she been more sick than she let on? I mean she only had minor cold symptoms, nothing beyond the span of soup. I cared about her, and me creeping around her screwy wooden studio in the dark just seemed wrong.
Her brother had made her a "candlestick rack" in shop class, and that thing was mounted on the wall, but honestly it was one of those shop class things that you could call anything. "Spice rack," "movie rack," "wall-mounted shampoo storage armoire," -- it was a piece of shit made of spare wood, nails, and had a seattle seahawks sticker on it. But god help me if it didn't hold her goddamn army of candles.
Grabbed one, went to her teency kitchen and turned on the stove until the coil got red, lit the wick and investigated the place. Candlelight immediately cast shadows on tons of her things strewn about the floor. Place was trashed, Chandler, and I was terrified that she had gotten robbed. My heart is beating like crazy at this point because now I know something isn't right. It's weird... as a guy you automatically get pissed at a time like this. Even though she's the only girl I've ever known who could hold her own in a fight and mangle people twice her size, I still start to get pissed that some stupidass methhead would break into her place and steal her shit, hurt, rape, or heaven forbid, kill her. The plus side to searching a two room apartment is I only had one more room to go.
Now that I had been in her place for a while, my vision had adjusted to the dark and the candle gave me all the light I needed. Better yet, my hearing was worlds different. Where outside the apartment my ears were pink and frozen and filled with the noise of traffic and wind, in here I could only hear two things: the boots of yours truly creaking against her stupidass creepy floor planks, and the rhythmic tapping of fingers on the floor. Oho...? Ever been bored, tapping fingernails on your desk? Course you have, you're a vaguely smart girl, and smart people are bored easily, especially until they get out of high school. That tapping was the only noise I could make out. Maybe she was in her room just waiting for me to come in, and was tapping because she was bored as tits with how stupid and slow I was? Here I was so worried, but really she was just playing a game with me? I prayed to god that was it and nothing more.
Fucking christ, the second I opened her room door, the tapping noise stopped. A jet of cold and the shift in air pressure snuffed the candle, and I had already turned the stove off, too. Boo. Though before the light died, I did catch a glimpse of what was going on in there, and it wasn't all that bad. Millie was there on her bed, beneath a pile of laundry or something. Also in the laundry pile, I saw... I don't know, wires, unfurled metal coathangers? No clue. Almost like pieces to a disassembled tent, but that didn't make sense, at least I knew she was here, was breathing, and everything was alright, and that she possibly bought a heap of clothes and salvaged us some metal dillyboppers to build indecent christmas displays with.
My nightvision was still pretty sparkly and full of that black snow junk, but her bedroom was the one room in the flat to have a window. So, instead of black, the room was just the deepest blue you can go. Oh Russel Crowe, you're so merciful. In total quiet after the tapping ceased, I called out to her, and, uh, the instant I said her name, the laundry on the bed began to move, quick. Tapping came from all throughout the bedroom's wooden floor, not her fingers. I again asked of god to not have let Millie been eaten by rats. I thought it was just my eyes screwing with me or that she had shifted her legs beneath a pile of blankets, but no, the pile kept moving like a mound of black socks, each with a cat's tail in them, animating them, curling, slipping over each other, crawling down the mattress. On her bed, she was indeed there, breathing heavily and stripped naked except for a t-shirt, though you wouldn't notice it with all the obscuring motion along her legs and on her stomach. Rhythmic tapping stopped when they crawled atop her bed and body, but resumed when traffic flowed onto the floorboards.
I really wasn't very alarmed when I realized what was skittering all about her, as sick as that sounds. That's about as far as open-mindedness can go, right? Only when one of the fuckers crawled up my pant leg did I show any sign of alarm, and that's when she felt compelled to speak. So what was this going to be? Have I been dating some sick fuck who masturbates with hundreds of millipedes? Oh, if only. Actually, that would be kind of interesting, I suppose. She explained what she was, and what she had always been, and that she had been in few relationships regardless of her deficient people skills, but, that of all of them, the only one of note had been ours, and that she truly valued what we had. Also, that she desperately did not want it to end, even with this most recent weirdness.
I've seen some weird shit before, Chandler, but, wow, I almost have no words. I stepped back for some air and to relight another candle or two and bring some light into the room, and there before me was my beautiful little murderess, legs spread as if she'd been in stirrups all afternoon, just covered in bugs, each with more legs than I have eyelashes. There's something endlessly hypnotizing about such a combination of beautiful and horrible. Someone who held my affection and my fear, mixed beauty and revulsion, covering her body in such things, and like an imbecile, all I could do was stare and watch the writhing. She never told me she had been with child all this time, though child singular doesn't seem to apply at this point. Her brood had only hatched within the past few hours. Each skittering member still had a soft, colorless carapace, drenched and wet, very unnerving and tickling when they crawled upon your skin.
At her behest, I looked underneath the bed, finding thousands of eggshells belonging to her clutch, though they didn't quite look of the birdegg variety, no. Some of the new arrivals had remained underneath the bed with mandibles chewing on their own eggs, antennae flickering about, giving me the equivalent of hand signals that said "hello sir! what's the score?" I joke, sure, but I did feel a connection to them then. They were as much mine as they were hers, and not once did I ever feel compelled to bring harm to a single one, even before I knew the story and one of the jagoffs was adventuring up my pants, I never thought to remove it or injure it.
But chandler, a problem had arisen. Millie had never bred before, so a lot of it was as new to her as it was to me, but the clear and present danger, and the reason she had been bedridden for the past few days, was that she needed to eat, and the two lunchables I had brought were insufficient. Part of the reason why many relationships end terribly throughout the animal kingdom isn't that it's an easy snack, a sporadic betrayal, or the mere price one pays for sex, no, it's for the enrichment of the brood and the strength of the mother. You'll recall that horrible feeling I had felt, of me always about to die? In truth, I was being eaten, if only by her eyes, but because of her adoration, she had refrained from slaying me to slake the brood.
And though the brood had not suffered for it, she had. The birthing had all but ruined her chances of running in any decathalon in the near future, and the amount of nourishment it would take to replenish her was quite great at this point, well beyond a grocery run. The thought to offer myself was not far from my mind. I don't know if it was her doing, or if I was feeling exceptionally charitable, but seeing her in pain, covered in our young, even someone as blind as I was able to read what to do. I knew this day would come, sure, might as well get it over with on my own terms. Sure it was a vicious sadness for the both of us, and there was a lot of brainstorming in trying to cook up alternatives, but nothing reasonable, and nothing that fit the timeframe. She was dying, and I didn't want that to happen. I offered myself freely, and Millie accepted. I was bitten on the jawline very deeply, just near a corner of the chin, popping a sizable vein and doling out a heavy amount of hurt as my blood poured free in synch with my accelerated heart. When I think back on words to describe what I felt next, the only word that comes to mind is green. How queer, is that? I stand by it, though; I felt green.
Stemming from the chin, running along the jaw and down the neck, was this "green" sensation. In short order, my hearing stopped working, and though I tried to lipread the last few things she had said to me, my eyes became harder to keep open before my lids froze up. They never did quite close all the way, though, so I did get a lovely view beyond little slits of my beloved murderess eating pieces of me, pulling colorful parts out of me, chewing them until they popped. Seeing my blood coat her hands felt... well, indescribable. A mix of several feelings, good and bad, excited and sad. As a bit of comedy, the only portion of me she removed and did not consume was my stomach; women, right? My heartbeat ran too slow to service the body, and my brain began to die. Faculties started to shut off one at a time, vision being the first to follow hearing, with my sense of touch growing increasingly numb as the feast dragged on. It's strange... even without touch, hearing or sight, I was still consciously aware of my pieces as they were bitten, removed, and ingested, as if some trickle of my nervous system had yet existed and was functioning. A part of me took pleasure in knowing that I was going to end up inside her forever, servicing her metabolism, nourishing her, becoming a part of her while giving a suitable mother to the brood I had fathered. I should have been pissed that we didn't get to make fun of Timecop and eat our lunchables. Instead, I was happy to die in service of my dark-haired, cheerful murderess, and my curious little offspring quietly nibbled the pieces of my body Millie had discarded.
Which brings us to where we are now, Chandler. I am slain, but not. We are all born with original sin, we all commit transgressions that only grow more numerous the longer we live, many of which are hellworthy trespasses. I am as guilty of failings and sins as is any other man to have lived, however, a selfless act such as self-sacrifice is widely known to be cause for entry into the celestial heaven. Unfortunately for me, it is debatable whether courting and impregnating an adventurous uniramia masquereding as a human female -- and subsequently volunteering to be it's birthmeal -- is considered a valliant "self-sacrifice." What they had settled on was a cleaning of my spiritual slate, logging the sacrifice as a noble deed and stacking it against my transgressions. Long story short, I found myself in a room with, well, effectively nothing. Full of those fucking bright coiled dog penis lights that make our skin look so grodulated and terrible. The room does have internet though, I'll give it that, though I do have to manually suck it out of a cable. Each letter in this e-mail was the result of thinking extremely hard of the letter I wanted, focusing on the letter being in my mouth, spitting into a transdimensional envelope and mailing the envelope across the space/time continuum, suffering several hangups in regards to incorrect postage, hence my delay in sending this correspondence.
No more, Chandler. I want out, and you're just the person to do it. Admittedly, I laughed when I first heard that you were a shrine maiden. I thought 'a shrine maiden? she doesn't have a frigging shrine, she doesn't even have a god to service; all the good ones are taken.' Well, I was wrong, and I'm sorry. I need you now more than ever before. I need a shrine maiden to get me out of purgatory before I lose my mind. I've also been thinking about the pros and cons of fucking millipedes, and if that line were to be taken out of context, I'd look quite the fool. You must save me. As a shrine maiden, you have the power to rectify this and pull me back through to the living world where I can have a fresh start. Please, I do promise a hefty compensation, but be expedient. Something about sucking internet from a transdimensional cable has me in a dreadful fear of developing testicular cancer, not that I seek to exceed a thousand offspring. Even spiders are nary as whorish.
With a brave heart and a high stake in the chandler faith
I do so await my liberation.
-X
Fast as easy, young child able do.
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