adrift and assailed

It's a hot day, the kind that makes an uncomfortable task out of laying about and in time produces a layer of sweat between your body and clothes like pus under a bulging scab. Remove your shoes, your socks, if you're wearing any, but for the sake of this experiment, it's preferable that you don't hinder the natural breath of things with any sanitary effects. Dig your sweaty toes into the tall fibers of a thick carpet and spread about the rank residue. The carpet's a soiled tan, the color of flesh about pits and apertures. It reveals dark grooves of inner fibres when you drag your scaly toes across it in certain directions. It is thoughtlessly that you sometimes stretch out, you scratch into the surface, and these gutters get plowed. Thus, we perform a service for our future tormentors and clear them easy pathways. We also provide the mutilated carrion that is thrown into these ditches and the scabrous dogs of the Gehenna are already begging for it on their bony haunches. Their mongrel eyes are yellow with bolts of red and their filthy matted hair sticks to their protruding ribs with oils of decay. Your feet are rank with a similar moisture, and the fumes of an intermittent slime weave their way through the labyrinth of parted carpet strands like a noxious gas through underground tunnels. The pungent clarion drains into the cracks and awakens a collective hunger, the attraction is instinctive and mechanical for those who cannot smell. It summons out the horde of true proprietors. Vile ravenous ants. Infinite black specs armed with irksome pincers. A trespass will come of a sudden. A scout darts across your toes and you feel a prick that is not quite a bite, but a taste, a crawling thorny bud from a long dismembered tongue. It dashes off quickly to make its report with fierce and nervous gestures. As a result, many more are dispatched for further probings. There are whispered rumours that your briny muck is delicious; they ache for it. Slobbering volunteers burst out of the den in a confusion of legs and antennae. In a wave of paranoia, you make believe that the slightest movement on your bare skin, an itch, a draft that whips the hairs on your arms, is in actuality the stealthiest of their agents. It isn't your average invasion. They aren't milling around an unfinished plate of food, a forsaken chicken bone behind the bed, a pizza box, discarded Popsicle stickiness, or any such regular beacon. You don't uncover a dark mass swirling around some monument to your carelessness. No. The house is pristine all around, every corner! so they're forced to become more and more indiscreet. Desperation and recklessness dominate their simple change of strategy. They realize that you alone purvey the waste and impurities they seek. Invisible millions in dark recesses rub their hairy mandibles, awaiting your grimiest secretions. Famine drives them to the most foul like humans to cannibalism. Mucus, saliva, semen, blood, juices diseased and menstrual, on tissues, cloths, forsaken by whom? Most toiletries don't inspire any second thoughts. There's a tampon in the trash that will launch a thousand ants. There's snot in a rag that bubbles with ejected nutrients. Uniform multitudes march towards a target they crave almost hypnotically. You stamp your foot with wild authority and they scatter in a way that makes them impossible to kill. Kaleidoscopic visions spin. The telepathic manifestation of their frenzy disperses a nauseating cloud. Drones are throttled to action by a demanding feminine brain. With a disturbing patience, they re-assemble a segmented line, with no semblance of fear. Like zombies, all who have ever lived will have risen, their numbers are vast and unceasing.