They left me late in the day after what seemed like hours of feasting with lip-smacking glee on selected internal organs.  My internal organs.  They secreted an enzyme in their salvia that acted like an anesthetic, dulling but not deadening the pain, avoiding the onset of shock that might have killed the host.  Apparently they prefer the pulse of warm blood through their banquet instead of the cold, maggot-ridden dregs of cooling, lifeless flesh.

More than once, after seeing Jaws, I morbidly imagined the horror of being eaten alive by a carnivorous thing for whom I, for all my vaulting egoism, was to be nothing but food, my consciousness surviving long enough to realize that I was being eaten and would be digested and then shat out, my life amounting to nothing but nutrients for another.  But actually experiencing this firsthand instead of imagining it made my waking dreams a pale fairy tale by comparison.

I did not wonder who they were.  I knew.  After all, I had unwittingly invited them into the chamber of my body, opening myself to their hunger and their gnashing jaws. They entered through the ears. Continue reading »