Copulating as They Float | Caleb Bethea

There’s a tight-lipped man on the park bench, reading a horror novel. He’s been there since the 90s when he was a kid, doesn’t buy the twist at the end, so he’s flipping through the pages over and over until the great unmasking really makes him a believer. 

Neighbors of the park have spent hours online trying to find the book he’s reading. They could ask, but they’re afraid his jaw might drop to his waist. And who knows what darkness is dripping around at the back of his mouth? Probably worms too, bioluminscent little horror fucks, seducing neighbors into the big gape. 

And if they step into that darkness, what will they google next? What kind of pixelated tears will fall on their computer? What little half-lives will birth themselves out from the sobbingly damp keys? 

Surely, that would send them into the dark of their own hallways, with no answers–only near-solid shadows and the presence of little worms flickering purple light, twisting, copulating as they float across the house, illuminating small slices of the walls and ceilings with nauseous shades of night-gray and colors they can’t even name, into the bedroom past the mirror and onto a chaise lounge, untangling their wriggled weak bodies until they form a new shape, the shape of the answer the neighbors have been searching for. 

And they’re back at the computer again–eyeballs yellow and about to cry and bleed, becoming one piss with the screen, trying to disprove the plot twist as the keyboard plants wrap themselves around their necks, gently. 

Tears, three decades’ worth. The only plausible reaction to an unmasking like this, the shape of the glow worms, now dying after they’ve fucked to show you the terrible truth. You buy it, even if the man on the bench does not. But, you look out the window toward the park to see if his jaw dropped after all. 

It did. 

He’s fumbling to push it back up against the rest of his skull, but the ghosts of the glow worms keep writhing out of his mouth. 

Caleb Bethea is an MFA at UofSC, studying fiction by night. By day, he works as a copywriter in eCommerce. But, the best of his time is spent with his wife and two goblins by the ocean. You can read his work in HAD, Maudlin House, mutiny!, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, Autofocus, and elsewhere. He tweets at @caleb_bethea_