Gummy Bears

She was on the phone, on speaker, so he could listen in. He was so small, like a swollen thumb (He was in actuality a type of beetle, an invasive species, nonnative, alienus, in larval form.) with bristled, highly reactive hairs sprinkled over his milky translucent body. He smiled a lot. It split his face like a carved pumpkin, and then you could get a glimpse of his authentic self held deep, deep, within. He’d laugh and point at nothing with his diminutive thoracic legs, all six of them. She’d laugh too, but not right now. This was serious business; they were On The Phone.

“Hello,” she uttered barely above a whisper, and then she covered her mouth with her hand, afraid of other words disgorging.

“Ursa? Hello? Are you there?” The voice on the other end seemed so loud. The grub covered his hearing sensors with its forelegs.

“I thought you called me.” Ursa held the phone between two fingers like a hot pop tart and leaned in when she spoke.

“I did call you. Just now. What’s going on? Are you coming over for dinner? Where’s Griffin?”

(Unintelligible chattering)

“Hello? Ursa?”

“Yes, yes, yes. …We’re not coming, I’m so sorry. I think I have vertigo. Can you imagine? I vomited!”

“Where’s Griffin? Did he come into town or is he still in Indiana?”

“He’s right here. He’s taking care of me. (Unintelligible chattering) Oh no, wait, what? No, he’s not here. He is not here with me at all.”

“Are you ok? Should we come over? You sound so strange.”

“I’m so sorry, I’m just so sorry.” And Ursa severed the connection. Unsure of what to do with the phone, she placed it underneath a pillow, and then pushed the pillow down on it HARD. Griffin wanted her to flush it down the toilet, but that seemed like a lot of effort.

The blinds were drawn in the bedroom and the thermostat was cranked up. A humidifier pumped moisture into the room. It was oppressive. Depressive. Ursa went to switch on the lamp on the bedside table and Griffin chattered madly until she withdrew her hand. He squiggled up onto her shoulder and communicated at length into her ear, nipping at her earlobe and injecting her with a neurotoxin. She laid back on the bed, a woman in staged repose. He maneuvered down her torso. There was a sharp piercing sensation on her left breast that only hurt for an instant, and then she felt nothing, and then she experienced a very vivid waking dream.

Giant insects with iridescent wings glided effortlessly across the sky, challenging the atmospheric tension, creating visible ripples in their wake, and she came to realize that she was looking down at a pool of water and not up into the heavens. Some of the mirrored clouds weren’t clouds at all but fish moving below, white scaled bottom feeders whose mouths never ceased their reflexive sucking. She squatted down to get a better look at what was real and what was a reflection.

As if shoved by an elder sibling, Ursa tumbled head first into the pool and then somersaulted out onto a rug into a room with no windows. She stood up and looked around. There were frames on the walls, dozens and dozens of frames, of every size and shape, mounted from floor to ceiling. Some held landscapes, others families, one in particular caught Ursa’s eye and she went to inspect it. It was an action scene with a young girl on a swing, her dress flaring out, but modestly. The sepia print coupled with the girl’s garb appeared to be vintage, and Ursa wondered who she might be, and then she noticed some small print in the lower right hand corner: Realistic Life Styles Frames and Imaging, Seoul, Vilnius, Pittsburgh. So, this was the picture that came with the frame? Not a work of art, just a run off sheet of thin glossy paper with a random, probably AI generated, image? Ursa peered more closely at the girl and she had two right feet and seven fingers on her left hand. It wasn’t even a good human likeness, just lazy mass produced slop.

There was a doorway at the far end of the room and Ursa walked through it. She heard a loud clap and spun around to look behind her and the wall had closed over the opening. When she turned back around, a woman was standing there. A very tall woman, reed thin, elegant as an evening gown slipped over a hanger. She had a deeply creased face slathered with foundation that was filigreed with spidering and hair so jet black that it lagged when she moved her head.

“Where am I? What is this place?” Ursa was careful not to touch the woman. Something about her seemed to indicate that she was far too fragile to tolerate any sort of physical contact.

“This house is truly marvelous, don’t you think?” She swept her hand and the room expanded, fading into distant shadows beyond the pool of light where they stood.

“Honestly, I’m very disoriented. I’d probably vomit if I hadn’t already thrown up.” Ursa and the woman began walking slowly toward nothing.

“This house has the oldest room ever built and the newest one being built right this second, all within these living, breathing walls. Sewing rooms, sitting rooms, parlors, bedrooms, kitchens, pantries, bathrooms, dens, studies, libraries, nurseries, dining rooms, living rooms, family rooms, man caves, laundry rooms, game rooms, every kind of room conceivable, all connected like the segments of a millipede.” The woman stopped walking and pointed to a window that emerged from a knot in the paneling on the wall. Ursa went over to the window to see what was outside in this world. It was hard to tell, but it seemed like they were way up, like the ground was hundreds feet down.

“How do I get out?” Ursa asked, a hand on the window frame.

“Well, you know, no one forced you to come here. You came all on your own. You can leave the same way,” the woman said.

“But how? We’re too high up for me to go out the window.”

“A fellow that was here not too long ago flushed himself in pieces down the toilet and that’s how he escaped. Chopped himself up with a meat cleaver from one of the kitchens. He flushed his phone first, so it would be waiting for him. Do you have your phone with you?”

“Hold on, you want me to flush my phone down the toilet? That’s such an odd request.”

“It’s a common thing to do in most circumstances,” the woman insisted.

“No, no it isn’t. I’ve never heard of it before my boyfriend, who recently turned into a slug, suggested it when a friend expressed concern for me, and now you, a woman who looks like she was constructed as an afterthought from baked parchment and an anorexic dress dummy.”

“There’s no call to insult me; I’m just trying to assist you. Here, let me help you.”

The woman moved toward Ursa. Ursa opened the window and heaved herself up and over the sill.

She was higher than she realized. She was tumbling through the clouds, though not at the velocity she would have anticipated. The languid descent allowed her to observe the creatures of the sky. Birds of every feather swooped around her, until there was a thunderous snort and they scattered like helicopter seeds in a gale force wind. Bursting through the clouds was a colossal deer, its antlers sawn off, its eyes fathomless black pools. She and it were on a collision course that couldn’t be altered, so she braced herself, but instead of impact, she found herself subsumed by one of those infinite, inky eyes. She was experiencing the world as the deer experienced it, the exhilaration of bounding free over the land, the pain in its skull from having its glory stolen, the fear in its heart of being chased, hunted. Together they bolted over the whole of the earth, going from day to night to day again, until they came to the very edge of the world, where they overlooked a crater filled with carcasses that seethed from within, occupied by what would consume them.

Now was the point in the lucid dream that Ursa regained consciousness. She was strapped to a hospital bed, connected to a bunch of machines and IVs, a feeding tube at one and a catheter at the other, and everyone attending her in the pressure controlled isolation room was in a hazmat suit, either bright white or sky blue. A white suit approached her bedside. It pressed a button and began to speak.

“Hi, Ursa. I’m Dr. Lamb, the infectious disease specialist brought in to assess your case. I called in Dr. Johnson,” gesturing toward another suit, “who specializes in xeno parasitic entities, to consult. Can you understand what I am telling you?”

“I think so,” Ursa said, her voice thick from disuse. She cleared her throat. She blinked her eyes several times to try and focus her vision. Her left breast felt like it was literally on fire and she tried to lift her head to get a look at it. A suit rushed to still her.

“You really shouldn’t move. Remain as immobile as possible. Would you like to be placed into an induced coma until the gestation is complete?” Presumably it was Dr. Johnson who spoke, since it wasn’t Dr. Lamb.

“Gestation? Of what?” She was trying not to panic, but that was difficult given her circumstances.

“What can you tell us about your boyfriend, Griffin Owens?” Asked a different suit, a blue one emblazoned boldly with FBI, holding a clipboard with a pen at the ready.

“We met in college…,” mad scribbling with a thickly gloved hand…

“You needn’t go back that far,” Dr. Johnson interrupted. “Tell us what he was like when he arrived at your apartment most recently.”

“He arrived late, around dusk. He called from the road and asked that I have the lights dimmed or off because he was experiencing photosensitivity, which was something he never suffered from before. He also asked me if I’d taken a cannabis gummy that day, and I said that I had not, and he requested that I take one so that I wouldn’t be thrown for a loop by the news that he wanted to share. So I did as he asked.”

“Was it common for him to instruct you to consume a cannabis gummy, for any reason?” The clipboard suit asked.

“No, it was the first time he’d ever asked me to do such a thing.”

“And it didn’t strike you as out of the ordinary?”

“What’s ordinary? Why is my tit ON FIRE!” She struggled against the restraints and the burning in her breast worsened. It felt like a fireball trying to burn its way through from the inside out.

“Stop struggling or we’ll have to sedate you and it will set back the entire process. Please,” said the clipboard suit. Dr. Lamb took a syringe from a tray, just in case.

“Okay, okay, but after you’re done interrogating me, you have to tell me what’s going on.” Ursa relaxed back onto the bed as best she could, trying to ignore the piercing hot discomfort in her breast.

“Agreed,” clipboard suit said. “So, what was it like when Griffin Owens arrived?”

“Well, the gummy was just kicking in, and when I let him in, you know, he looked kind of pale, ashen. He asked if he could use the toilet, and I said sure, and then he was in there a really, really long time. We were supposed to go over to a friend’s house for supper. I was pretty hungry. Anyway, the door was just ajar a tiny bit and out comes this disgusting grub and I’m about to step on it because how the heck did that thing get into my home, and it starts chattering away at me. It’s talking to me, talking to me like it’s Griffin, not in his voice, but just that it’s him inside that hideous little creature. Grub Griffin told me to pick it up and hold it close to my face, so I did, and it sprayed something in my face that made me nauseous and I vomited, and then the phone rang. The grub wanted me to ignore it, but I answered the call, and it was Thea, my friend, God bless her. I think I blacked out not long after that.”

“That’s all that you remember?” clipboard suit asked.

“Yeah, if more comes to me I’ll let you know. Now please, what’s wrong with me? My chest feels like there’s a white hot coal in there trying to burn its way out. What the fuck is that?”

“Well, according to the imaging we conducted, it’s probably something very much like what you experienced with grub Griffin.” Dr. Johnson approached the bed and tapped out some commands on a medpad and showed Ursa what was causing her so much withering agony. She screamed and pushed the screen away. She began to weep silently, her whole body quivering, then quaking, until that escalated into a grand mal seizure.

Still heavily sedated, she came to two days later, her room kept darkened, in a state of perpetual twilight. A nurse in a hazmat suit sat beside her bed, checking vitals and reading an ebook. It was the third volume in a series of seven books (so far) set in medieval Scotland about a brilliant young woman forced to take the cloth, a werewolf with a heart of gold, and an evil earl named Leon Skum, among others. Parts of it were formulaic, but still others were wildly imaginative, and the story clipped right along. The first movie in the franchise was slated to be released next summer.

The nurse touched an intercom button. “The patient is awake,” was all she said and then left the room without another word or backward glance.

“Good day to you, Ursa; I’m just going to give you a little dose of sedative,” the suit pushed the contents of a syringe into the IV line. “Just enough to keep you from over reacting again to disturbing news. Now, the Office of Infectious Agents caught the grub version of your boyfriend Griffin, so you needn’t worry about that. It’s been in custody for weeks, since you were first brought in. Xeno entomologists have been studying it night and day. When discovered at your apartment, it tried to escape down the toilet, but the seat was down. It then tried the drain in the bathtub, but it got caught in the hair trap. So please, rest assured that it is out of the picture. I seriously doubt that it’s still alive, though any number of clone are probably serving nicely right now. Early reports are that it could possibly, once modified, of course, serve as an internal companion on deep space exploration voyages or as a companion for the elderly or shut-ins. As for human Griffin, sadly we discovered his expired body, also in your bathroom. The grub fed off of him, which triggered a cataclysmic autoimmune response and why you were sought out.”

Ursa tried to speak, the pain in her breast was searing.

“Easy, easy. The larva - there seems to be just three - in your breast are feeding on your mammary tissue, which is why it’s a little uncomfortable and wreaking havoc with your defense response. They are almost ready to chew their way out and look for hosts for their own larva. We have every hope that you will survive the process, though we’ve never witnessed it or attended to the afflicted, so this is a best practices sort of scenario. Should you survive, the larva are technically your property, so you will be compensated by whichever bio firm bids for their proprietary rights of use in perpetuity. Of course your hospital bills will have to be paid first, and any other debtors that you may have can petition for payment in full before you ever see a dime.”

Despite being sedated, Ursa’s body began to react on its own. Her back arched up off the bed, her body rigid, her mouth slack as an anguished guttural moan unleashed from the core of her being. The suits in the room gathered nearer, ready for whatever came next.

Six Months Later

Ursa retired way early from the resource center at the main library in Pittsburgh. She had plenty of funds to last the rest of her life. Once she healed from the trauma of gestating off-world grubs, she set about memorializing poor Griffin. To that end, she reached out to the team of researchers who’d treated her. According to the clipboard suit, Special Agent Dr. Maggie Day, who’d questioned her earlier, the working theory was that Griffin was in some manner exposed to a contaminated ancient ice core sample at the university where he was employed. It wasn’t his department, and certainly not his discipline, but according to his keycard, he’d been swiping into that lab every day for weeks. Initially they thought that maybe he was stealing data to sell to any number of foreign interests, but that didn’t seem to be the case either. According to his department head, Dr. Sheila Ward, he’d been tasked with coming up with a reduction plan for their department, a cost cutting measure implemented across the board at the university. When Ward would ask for a progress report, he’d say that he was working on it, but he never even produced a rough draft. Then he stopped answering emails, texts, phonecalls, and no one could find him in his office.

“Well, you know, he was confrontation adverse. The department head should have known better than to pick him to make any downsizing decisions,” Ursa said.

“Regardless of the man’s shortcomings…” Dr. Day was interrupted by Ursa.

“It wasn’t a shortcoming, it was just part of his personality. He did not like confrontation of any sort and avoided it at all costs,” Ursa insisted, defending his honor.

“I wasn’t going to mention anything, but since you’re keenly aware of his aversion to confrontation, he’d been planning on ending things with you for quite some time and couldn’t work up the nerve. He had a break-up text queued up in his drafts that he attempted to send on at least three different occasions but chickened out.”

“I don’t believe you!” Ursa countered, deeply wounded. Things weren’t perfect between them, that much was true, and he did drive six hours in the hopes of infecting her with a deadly parasite, so…

“Believe what you want. I’ll forward it to you. As it is, he’ll at least be remembered as the first known fatality of a xeno grub. There’s a huge argument raging as to whether this newly discovered creature should be named for him. I came down on the side of ‘No’.”

“I don’t know. It seems to me that the perfect way to honor Dr. Griffin Owens’ legacy, adjunct professor of digital advertising, is to name a parasitic extraterrestrial grub for him. I’m going to start an online petition and get the process rolling!” And that’s exactly what Ursa did.