When I first saw the old woman, I thought it was a Halloween costume. It was only the 30th and we were in a grocery store parking lot, but I had already started seeing people dressed up for parties, festivals, and just because. And she looked so odd.
Her feet and legs were what I noticed first, of course. Barefoot and spindle-legged, she was wrapped from sole to upper shin in what I assumed was thick medical gauze. It was as though she had started wrapping herself to look like a mummy and then either ran out of material or energy.
But then I saw how she was bent over, her thin grey eyebrows furrowed and a crooked cigarette dangling from her lips as she studied the ground around the back of her car. She wasn’t playing dress up, and clearly she was looking for something, whether real or imagined. I hated the thought—it was judgmental. Just because she looked to be in her eighties, it didn’t mean she was senile. Maybe she had dropped her keys or her phone. Feeling a pang of guilt, I changed route from heading into the store, and approached her with a smiling wave.
“Can I help you, ma'am? Did you lose something?”
The woman looked up and I froze in my tracks. Seeing her up close, she still looked old, but everything was off somehow. She moved quicker than I would have thought possible given her appearance, and while her face was very wrinkled, the creases and lines almost looked more like a short lifetime of hard use than someone who had simply gotten old.
But it was her eyes, bright and sharp and strangely familiar, that had slowed me to a stop. She just stared at me for a moment before letting out a coarse bark of a laugh and scratching at the bandage on her left shin. Shaking her head slightly, she muttered to herself as she ignored my question and went back to looking.
I almost left it at that, but something about this woman made me uncomfortable. Unsettled. And I felt a compulsion to get some kind of normal interaction out of her before I left her alone.
“Are you sure? I don’t mind helping you look.”
The woman glanced back up, and this time, her expression was free of any bitter humor. Instead, she looked unfathomably sad. After staring at me for a moment, she nodded.
“I appreciate it. But I don’t think there’s any point.” She pointed to a nearby bench on the side of the store. “But if you’re cool with it, I wouldn’t mind company while I rest a minute.”
I felt a stab of regret for asking again. I was on my lunch break and had just planned on running in the store for a minute. But I had stuck my nose in, and I didn’t want to be rude. The woman had already started shuffling off toward the old wooden bench, and reluctantly, I followed.
We sat down and I was about to make an attempt at awkward chit chat when the woman began speaking again, her voice softer than before.
“You’re wondering about the bandages, aren’t you?”
I felt my face begin to burn as I shook my head. “Um, no…I mean…”
Another short laugh. “Don’t lie. It’s what I’d be wondering, so it stands to reason. And they are odd enough, I know, but it’s the only thing that seems to help when they’re gone. It hurts and itches regardless, but I can’t stand pants or shoes when it’s like this.”
I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t want to pry, but she seemed to want to talk about her strange condition. Taking a breath and knowing I might just be prolonging my lateness returning to work, I asked the question.
“So…what happened to you? Um, if you don’t mind me asking.”
The woman caught my eyes again, and again I had that disorienting sensation of familiarity—that I knew her from somewhere. She held my gaze for several seconds before nodding slightly and turning to stare off into our corner of the parking lot. And then she began to tell me.
One day I was out hiking south of town. I know what you’re thinking, but I was much more able-bodied then, I assure you. I’d been in the woods most of the morning, and at some point I got off course. I wasn’t lost, not exactly, but when I came out of the trees, I was in a field I didn’t recognize. But I had a good sense that I needed to head north and that north was across the field, so that’s the way I headed.
It was a large plot of overgrown, hilly farmland, and while I could see fence in the distance, there was little other sign that anyone had been tending to the area for some time. I walked for several minutes before cresting a hill and stopping as I saw what lay in the bowl-shaped depression ahead.
It was basically a large mud pit, the lush, tall grass that covered the rest of the field first turned yellow and stunted before becoming the brown-black sludge that filled the bottom. That was slightly odd in its own right, but it was what lay in that muck that caught my eye.
There were five balls. Well, I call them balls, but they were more some kind of sphere I guess. They ranged from the size of a kickball to one probably taller than us, and they were all different colors, from a bright speckled green at the smallest to the dark red one—the biggest—in the middle of the rest. I couldn’t say for sure what any of them were actually made of...I could see shapes underneath their smooth, cloudy surfaces, but I had no intention of getting a closer look.
Then I noticed that the small green one was starting to move.
For a second I thought it was my imagination, but as I watched, the top of the ball flexed up and down once, twice, and then began to split open. I didn’t see any more because I turned and ran. I didn’t care where I was going any more, just that it was away from whatever those things were. It was then that I heard the sound, a pulsing high-low-high noise coming up behind me fast. I had time to think of crickets and discard the thought before I felt the first of them landing on my legs and starting to bite.
My fear started turning into a blind panic, and I don’t remember much after that. I know I tried to keep running and then I fell down. They had all caught up to me by then, covering my legs and working their way down into my shoes. Not just biting, but clawing their way inside my skin as they went.
I finally made it back to town and went to the hospital. Said I’d been attacked by some kind of burrowing insect and they needed to help me. My skin had gone back to normal, but…well, I could still feel them in there, you see. Shifting and clawing beneath the surface of my meat. And I had to get them out.
But the doctors saw nothing. X-rays, MRIs, as I insisted on more and more tests, they started turning their questions toward things like did I have a drug problem or a family history of mental illness. After a week of being poked and prodded, I gave up. The itching had stopped, and I was starting to agree with them that the only thing wrong was in my head.
It was two weeks later when they came crawling out of my legs and feet again. I’ve figured out over time that you can’t predict them exactly, but usually every two or three months they need to come out to feed. I think they must be feeding on me at least a little the rest of the time because within an hour or two of them hatching from my skin and flying off, I look like this.
I know I look ancient, but I’m not. I’m only twenty-nine years old. Most of the time I look it, even if my looks aren’t quite what they once were, but when they leave for a time? I dry up. Get weak and old looking. I never die…they don’t ever let me die even if…well, I can’t die, I’ll say that much. But it’s like I’m just a dried up husk until they return all full and satisfied. They burrow back in, and within minutes I feel strong again. Young. And there’s no sign of them having ever been there at all.
Of course, I’m the only one that can see them anyway. Them or the wounds they cause when they come and go. I think that’s part of how they’re so effective. They fly off and…well, I think they hurt people somehow. I think that’s what feeds them, though I’ve never seen it myself. They take their meals away from me, whatever they are.
You would think that after all this time I’d be more used to it, even as horrible as it is. People can get used to just about anything, right? But I think part of that is because people can change. You adapt to the bad shit that comes and try to make things better in the future.
And for me…I can’t do that. Not really. Because every so often when they come back, it’s not just me that changes. It’s everything.
Something that they’ve done to me…I’m unseated, you understand? No, I can see you don’t. It’s like…like one time I had a pair of jeans with rhinestones on the back pocket. And one day in the washing machine, the rhinestones started coming out. They were tumbling around lose in all that water and agitation. That’s how I am. I’m not in my normal place in time any more. I move along for awhile, and then one time, seemingly at random, their return moves me some place else. Some other time. Forward, backward, it doesn’t matter. It’s always just a few years and it never lasts. I don’t know…I know this sounds crazy, and it is. But it’s also the truth.
I don’t know if they do it intentionally or if it’s just a side effect. And I’ve tried changing the past before, and something always stops it from sticking. That why, even as I tell you all this, I don’t think it will make any…
She broke off as a thrum began to fill the air. Small specks, a miniature swarm of tightly clustered creatures that looked like mosquitos from a distance but more like winged ants the closer they got, were fast approaching us. I saw the cloud pass several people in the parking lot, and not one of them glanced its way or seemed to hear the creatures’ droning as they flew by. I looked over to the woman, desperate for some kind of help in my confusion and fear, but she was already busy unwrapping her legs and feet. Preparing them for the swarm’s arrival.
Her newly exposed skin was riddled with deep holes—they weren’t bleeding or scabbed at all, and around the edge of each hole the skin was so black it almost looked burned. I wanted to run, to offer to help her, to tell her that this couldn’t be happening, but then they were there, flying all around us briefly before diving onto her skin, crawling into their holes. Within moments the holes began to close, and as I watched, her skin appeared to become whole. More than that…it became smooth and tight as her legs seemed to swell with new muscle and vitality. That’s when I looked up at her face.
And saw myself looking back.
“What year is it? What’s the date?”
I could barely breathe, much less talk. My head was swimming. I must be dreaming or sick. There’s no way that any…
“Tell me, hurry! I feel it coming on me now.”
I wanted to look away, to deny everything, but her eyes, my eyes pinned me in place even as her desperate, pleading tone pulled a few words from my throat.
“It’s…um, October 30th. 2017. October 30th.”
The other woman nodded, and giving me a sympathetic look, she reached out and gripped my arm. “This doesn’t happen for over two years. I don’t know that you can avoid it, even if you try. But please do try. Run away. Move to another continent. Do something, anything, to avoid what I’ve…what we’ve become. And rem…”
And just like that, she was gone. I actually looked around, thinking I must have blacked out momentarily or something else that would explain her sudden disappearance, but there was no sign that had happened. I saw the same old man putting away his shopping cart who had been loading his groceries as the swarm had passed invisibly by.
When I stood up, I was shaking so badly I could barely walk. I went home instead of going back to work, and I spent the next two days going over what I’d seen and been told by this impossible other version of myself. And then I started packing.
That was two years ago, and I’ve spent most of the time since working at a pub on the coast of Wales. My life has been good overall—I have friends and a dog and most days I manage to have at least a few hours where I don’t think about that conversation on the bench. That’s improved even more recently.
Because I’m starting to forget.
It’s happening quickly. Over the last few weeks I’ve started having periods where I can’t remember the details of what happened that day in the parking lot. Times when I wonder why I’m still here instead of going back to my hometown of Empire.
When it comes back to me, when I remember what I’m starting to forget, it terrifies me. I try to hold on to it, but I can feel it slipping away. I’m writing this as a record and a reminder, but how long before I forget it too? How long before the terrible thing that is waiting calls me home?
I was doing laundry as I wrote this. And this pair of jeans I bought last weekend in Cardiff are already starting to show wear. They had this little rhinestone pattern on the back pocket that I thought was cute, but some of the stones are missing now. Lost in the washer somewhere, I guess. For some reason, that makes me sadder than I think it should. I’m wondering if it has to do with what I wrote above, and I’ve tried to check, but…I can’t remember what I read of it as soon as I’m done. I know that’s strange and I don’t understand it. Even word to word now, I feel like I’m writing some kind of stream of consciousness thing like we had to do in college. I don’t remember what the point of all this was now, and I don’t like thinking about that, because it scares me.
Either way, I need to stop here. This little journal or whatever it is will just have to wait. I have a million things to do and…
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