Tiny legs tickled the hair on Delphina’s wrist. Behind her elf mask, she grimaced. The customer, a tall woman with a deeply seamed face and hair that could have been blond or grey gathered into a sort of topknot, leaned down so her unsmiling eyes could meet Delphina’s gaze.
“I thought your store carried everything.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” The elf smile muffled Delphina’s words. “If it’s not on the shelf, we don’t have it.”
The customer’s frown deepened, mouth pinching into a bow, creases webbing her forehead. “Can’t you go to the back room and look?”
The awful pine scent the store used to cover the reek of cleaning chemicals made Delphina’s sinuses burn. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I am not allowed to leave this station.”
The scowl became a sneer. “Well, that’s stupid.” On that point at least, Delphina wholeheartedly agreed with her heckler, though she did not dare say so. The little button mic on her collar recorded every word and would flag any deviation from the syntax of acceptable responses.
An abrupt, intense itch stabbed into the back of Delphina’s neck, right under the collar of her costume. She flinched but could not reach back to scratch it, not with the customer watching, not with the cameras watching.
“What?” the customer demanded.
No specific script provided an answer to recite. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Delphina said.
“Sorry for existing?” The customer returned to towering over her. “People like you should be grateful that people like me support you. I spend my money at these stores. I even held my nose and voted for the Democrat.”
The customer stomped off before Delphina could respond, not that her employer would have permitted a retort. Now that nothing obstructed other customers’ views of her, she raised an arm as required, waved as required.
Raul’s voice growled in her earpiece. “You made that customer very upset.”
She fought not to shrug: that would be interpreted as insubordination. Instead she waved her hand slowly side to side, taking a second’s rebellious delight in her long, dark red nails, filed as close to points as the regulations would allow.
“I’m coming out to see what you’re doing wrong,” Raul said.
If she sighed in frustration the mic would pick it up.
Christmas hymns, played on some cheesy electronic instrument, plinked from the speakers above and beside her and echoed in the store behind her. She used to love Christmas music. She hated everything about this job. She had to have this job. The out of pocket from the shitty insurance wiped out her bank account every time she had to take David or Laquita to the pediatrician, but she couldn’t even afford the payments on the coverage the government offered, and out of seventy jobs she applied for this was the one that hired her.
Wearing the stupid smiling mask offered one perk — there was no risk of someone recognizing her inside this humiliating costume. She served in the role of an old-timey animatronic figure, except cheaper, more easily replaced. She was the living component in an otherwise static display of plastic candy cane towers, cardboard snowflakes, blinking lights, and empty boxes swathed in Christmas gift wrap. Her post in the outer vestibule, its design akin to an oversized aquarium, attracted eyes from all over the parking lot to the corner of the strip mall that the store occupied. She was a living algorithm, plugged into a role designed to comfort prospective customers without intimidating them or triggering their curiosity.
She had asked if she could at least have a mask that matched her deep brown skin tone. Raul had handed her the pasty, yellow-crowned elf face and informed her no one would care about the race of Santa’s helper and that if she didn’t want to wear the mask, he could call any one of fifty applicants that week alone and replace her within the hour.
She hated that she lacked the self-destructive impulse to tell him off, that she was at heart too nice to let loose. Her stomach churned and her mind broiled in anticipation of whatever abusive thing Raul was about to do next in demonstration of his grotesque power. A blot of blood flowed up the back of her waving hand, climbing toward her fingers.
Not blood, a beetle, some kind of beetle. She twitched her wrist but the bug stayed put. She sped up her wave, flicked her wrist again, cast the beetle off.
“What on Earth are you doing?” Raul stepped into the vestibule.
Raul’s shoulders and biceps bulged under his beige button-down, as if he hit the gym every morning in a vigorous, steroid-fueled quest to make up for his short stature with sheer muscle mass. For the first half of her first day of working, Delphina had admired how Raul looked from the rear, until his assholish nature spoiled all appreciation for his ass.
Raul’s most prominent attribute, though, was his monster of a mustache, somewhere between Einstein and Twain, with none of the nuances of soul that those gentlemen possessed in pictures. His own dark eyes had not blinked that first day, locked with Delphina’s as he explained the “bling” by his desk — a mannequin bust with its slender neck decorated by the lanyards and ID badges of all the employees he’d ever fired. Delphina had no opportunity to count but she guessed several dozen cards hung between the mannequin’s featureless breasts.
“I’m sorry, Raul,” she said. “There was a bug on my hand.”
“How did it get there?” he said. “Can’t keep up with the housework? Your home unsanitary?”
She hated to say “I don’t know” but it was the truth.
She didn’t realize she had faltered in her wave of greeting until Raul raised his own hand. “Did I say you were on break?”
“Sorry,” she said. Even as she resumed her robotic gesture, Raul, as often happened, refused to accept her surrender as the end of the matter, waving his own hand in time with hers.
“It’s a stupidly easy job and we pay you way too much for it, thank you Congress and General Assembly. Do you think you can at least try to do what we’re asking?”
If a virgin truly gave birth to the Son of God more than two thousand years ago, give or take a few weeks, months, and decades, then it also had to be at least possible that the Lord sometimes put worms inside deserving sinners with instructions to gnaw their way out. Delphina fervently wished it were true. Alas, the only things visibly worm-like about Raul were the lobes of his mustache.
“Yes, sir,” Delphina said, hoping bland obeisance would send him off to chew another bone. “Of course I can.”
“Of course you can. Of course you can.” He reflected her words with a mocking sneer, though she’d not spoken them that way. “Your attitude’s got too much negativity. You’re trying to tell yourself you’re smarter than I am, because I’m just a manager here and you’re whatever your imagination believes you are.”
“No, I’m—”
He stepped closer. “You’re not better than me. Just now, I did this—” He waved the elf wave— “Better than you ever could. Everything this company ever asked me to do, I did it at two hundred percent. And they could see it, and they let me be the one who watches out for the other ones who can give their best, and for the ones who aren’t worth the money we pay them. The ones who have kids to care for and still can’t get their act together.”
When he raised his arm to wave, she did too, her heart pounding, hoping he would see that she did care, that she did deserve to stay. Three more bugs blotched her upraised hand, while another tumbled down her forearm.
Raul got his last kick in before returning to the back room to monitor her. “If you move from this spot, you’re going to hang on my trophy stand. And I’ll thank Santa for the gift.”
Once upon a time, when companies didn’t keep their employees under constant surveillance, one of her co-workers might have walked up to her afterward, either out of compassion or a conniving urge to dig for more dirt, and proffered sympathies. But they all had posts they weren’t permitted to move from, so if they did anything at all, they either smirked or frowned her way and thanked Heaven above they weren’t the one about to stumble off the edge of employment.
Her hand sported even more crawling blood drops. She didn’t dare break routine, even to be rid of them. No worries, at least, about freaking out a customer; they never gave her any close inspection; they wouldn’t notice she had vermin crawling on her skin.
She focused as hard as she could on the inane wave the store required of her, and that allowed her to almost, not quite but almost, tune out the tickling of tiny legs, until the painful needle punctures clustered — on her ankles, her calves, her left side beneath the ribs, the underside of her right arm. More stabs up her back. She whimpered loud enough for the mic to pick up.
Raul growled in her ear, but she couldn’t pay attention. Where were the parasites coming from? Had the costume been full of them? That couldn’t be, could it, the store required her to wash the garments, she had brought them home last night and done just that.
If the camera sensors had flagged her as she twitched in pain, Raul had not noticed, or perhaps he had not said anything because he already knew exactly what was happening to her and was watching on his monitor. More bites burned her ankles and she couldn’t move her feet. She looked down at her shoes, guaranteeing Raul’s wrath.
The dull brown of the carpet made the red bugs hard to spot, but more had escaped the costume. Living blood drops, they circled her sneakers. One, two … five … ten … twenty … the more she looked, the more she saw. Smaller ones, pale grey, weaving and bouncing among the blood drops. Babies.
More and more of them. They weren’t scattering away from her, they were clustering toward her, emerging from the carpet to explore her heights like thrill-seekers ascending a mountain. Where were they hatching from? How long had this been going on before she noticed?
“Delphina, you’re not doing what I told you. You’re out of position.”
Despite her panic, she tried. She straightened her neck, moved her hand side to side. The bugs coated her arm, a seething layer made from scratching, scuttling legs.
“Stand there and wave, Delphina.”
She felt them everywhere. Under her mask, on her lips. She couldn’t lose this job. Without it her family would never make it to Christmas. If she screamed they’d crawl into her mouth. She blinked and blinked.
“Delphina!”
She pulled off her mask and shook her head like a soaked animal.
Someone else had joined her in the vestibule. Raul’s shouts weren’t coming from the earpiece anymore. “Get your mask back on!”
She couldn’t open her mouth. She couldn’t keep her eyes open, had to keep fluttering her eyelids. She gestured at her face with gloves made of teeming vermin.
Her manager mocked her gesture. “What is that? I don’t know what that means! Get your mask on and get back in your place!”
“Look at me! Can’t you see them on my face?” Her mouth closed on soft bodies and wiggling legs. She spat them out, in vain.
“I don’t ever want to see your face again.” Raul wasn’t shouting anymore. “Give me your badge.”
Delphina spread her arms. “Come take it.”
It was over. She was over. Her family was over. What happened next didn’t matter. When he stepped toward her, she embraced him. He recoiled but she hung on, pressing her cheek to his.
“I want to kiss you,” she said.
Too stunned or just too dumb to process what was happening, he stared, the insects marching along his shoulders and crisp collar. She reached up, her demeanor tender, deliberate. The soft red bugs completely covered her thumbs as she pressed them nail-first into his eyes.
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Mike Allen has written, edited, or co-edited thirty-nine books, among them his new horror collection, Slow Burn. His first two volumes of horror tales, Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident, were finalists for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Story Collection, and his dark fable “The Button Bin” was a nominee for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. As an editor and publisher, he has twice been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Ruadán Books intends to publish Mike’s sidearms, sorcery, and zombies sequence The Black Fire Concerto and The Ghoulmaker’s Aria in 2025 and 2026, respectively. With his wife, Anita, he runs Mythic Delirium Books, based in Roanoke, Virginia. Their cat Pandora assists. |