Yara-Ma-Yha-Who (Part 4 of 4)

The calls of the bush brought her awake, the screaming insects piecing her ears, and again her body was layered in a film of repulsive muck, thicker now. The pain in her joints hit her next, everything swollen, her fingers puffed out like sausages. The pain in her neck and jaw prompted her to explore, to gently touch her neck; it was numb, but it had swollen to double its size. The continued from her fat neck up to cover her face, mouth Novocain numb. Her lips protruded into her limited vision.

The depression in which she lay was mud now, with that same vomit like smell, she had been sleeping in it all night. She had been brought back here while she slept. Some Thing had done this to her.

She struggled to get out of the hollow, out of the muck. Cicada bodies crunched beneath her palms, they were everywhere, disguised by the mud; they were tangled in her hair. She took her rest on the higher bank of the hollow. Her hair lacquered to her scalp and body, she picked the insects and sticks out. Then she lay watching the sun float across the sky, feeling too heavy to move, and too confused to care.

When some strength had returned she made her way to the stream, she crawled into the water, hugged her knees, and hung her head. Her flesh looked like raw chicken skin, as if she could dig her nails in and scrap lumps of it back. There was no fear, just cold curiosity. Was this how giving up felt?

When she started to shiver and the effort of shivering became too painful, she worked her way out of the stream, unable to stop her flesh scraping on the sharp rocks. She collapsed, wedged between two mossy stones and shivered there, too weak to move, to think.

She slept.

Back in the hollow, her engorged face just above the surface of the disgusting fluid, now pooled deep; the remains of cicadas and their severed wings and legs floated on the surface like a thick insect soup. Levi came violently awake and choked, her upper body erupting out of the soup and up onto the bank. She coughed to bring up a darker batch of the fluid. Exhausted, her head fell into the dirt next to her expulsion. She watched it be absorbed by the dark soil, leaving the solid elements behind, leaving two of her teeth. She was beyond caring. She just breathed, in and out, each breath burbling in her chest, and vibrating strings of slime the strung about her lips and nostrils.

The stars traveled in a slow arch across the broad sky, replaced by the burning sun.

He watched her from high in the tree, an old squiggly bark gum. He was barely visible, certainly unable to be seen by someone who didn’t know he was there. The shape of a small man, he had thin arms, with fingers that wriggled like worms, or leeches. Crouched there with his pot belly, blending into the bark, he could be a knot in the wood. Though the shape of a man, his features were swollen and bulbous. His wrists and feat bloated as if injured or infected, and the terrain of his bald scalp mountainous with growths and tumorous mounds.

He protected her. He spoke to her.

“Yarra mah wa wa who,” the deep vibration of its voice calmed her.

With the sun high in the sky, Levi sat up in the dark pool. She picked a cicada from the surface, the string of slime breaking as she drew it up and placed it in her mouth. She noticed she had no remaining teeth. Her jaw clicked in and out of its joints as she tried to chew, at first only managing to break its crisp wings and legs. Then the abdomen of the incest burst under the pressure of her gums. It tasted like buttermilk and almonds.

She would be totally unrecognizable as Levi even to her closest friends and family. She resembled a bloated corpse pulled from a river. A monster.
Each night the Demon descended the tree to inspect her, eye to eye. Black beady eyes. His skin imitated the red and brown summer leaves, complete with spreading capillaries and veins. Thorny growths like broken twigs.

He took her feet into his wide mouth and very slowly, with determined little movements, he devoured her entirely. Soft bones flexed and popped as her bloated body ballooned out his throat, and then his chest and abdomen. Once fully inside him she was expelled in rush of fluid, back into the pool created for her.

Each morning Levi woke and ate the insects from the surface. Her mind was so clouded, in the back of her mind she knew something was terribly wrong, but insects soothed her, and when she had eaten enough of them, she would slip peacefully into sleep. She dreamed of high places and vast distances. She explored cool caverns and bathed in crystal waters, so deep and black they could have been bottomless.

One morning when Levi woke the pool had begun to dry out, and a thick crust had developed. Levi listened to the sounds of the bush, the sweet song the cicadas and the happy birds flittering about feeding upon them. The warmth of the sun had dried the skin of her face. When she opened her mouth the skin split and flaked into thick sections.

Curious, she pulled her upper body out the hollow, breaking the surface crust of the pool. The weight of the thick mud sucked at her. Her bloated bulk moved by inches as she heaved and clawed the ground. She moved more like a grub than the person, and on the bank she stayed until the heat of the sun dried her out, forming a cocoon.

Just like the cicadas, she shed her nymph skin to emerge anew, leaving the empty shell of her former self cracked like an egg upon the ground.

Fresh and clean pink skin, that would toughen in the elements and resemble the leaves and bark.

Fingers that wriggled like worms.

“Yarra mah wha who”