The Electric Slug

[Studio8]

It’s up in the corner, where the metal and wood meet and create a tiny patch of space that will always remain, no matter how hard the crew she hired tries to rework the deck. High utility bills this month means she didn’t hire the best guys, and now she has this, a small box in the corner, out of her reach, unless she grabs the old red-handled broom.
She’s always been like this, always felt that she didn’t want to touch certain things like worms, snakes, dead puppies, vomit, and still didn’t want to touch them while holding something else in her hand. She knows that the slime resting on the snakes back won’t shoot up the broom handle to her skin, but she can’t help but imagine that it might. And that is enough for her to completely avoid situations like this.
When she wrote me the letter and put it in my mailbox and asked me to go to the backyard and call her when I have a minute, I did. We share a duplex, so we share a backyard, so we share some of the same problems.
“Here, get at this angle,” she whispered. “Now stop. Look up there, how did you never notice this before, how do you not know this?”
“Where is it?”
“It’s up there, look. It’s looking at us right now.”
She’s pointing at the corner.
She tells me that she’s not sure what it is, but that it is there every day and it always watches her. She admits that she watches it back, but assures me that she does it carefully.
I’m at the right angle now, only this means that my knees are a little bent and the skin on the back of my neck is starting to pinch itself. It’s late enough to make me worry about whether I’ll get enough sleep tonight. I’m in my pajamas and she has a face full of makeup.
“Wait,” she says and grabs a little piece of my shirt. “Did you see it?”
I didn’t see anything and that’s exactly what I told her.
I went to bed and she didn’t, then I stopped thinking about this while she didn’t.

[kellychaos]

Slug 2: Electric Boogaloo