The Tick People, page 4
He didn’t know where she lived since the gypsy-like parasites didn’t have addresses, but he knew where the largest population of Ectoparasites lived. There was a place known as The Cluster high on Old Gloomy’s neck where a densely populated community of tick people could be found. Some tick people lived there for generations, eating and breeding beneath Gloomy’s patches of hair, only departing from the area once in their lifetime to be tested in the Ectoparasite branch of the Matchmaking Bureau.
When Fernando left his home, he found himself shaking. He was nervous, but he wasn’t sure exactly why. It could have been due to the fact that he had to go to a side of town that most humans avoided. The Cluster was considered the worst slum of Fluffville and one of the most dangerous areas in town. Ectoparasites were known to attack humans that entered their territory, especially when in close vicinity to one of their nests. They also hassled humans for money and on some occasions mugged them for their belongings.
But that wasn’t Fernando’s biggest fear. He was also nervous about meeting his matchmate. There was a strange anticipation that was making him sick to his stomach, the kind of anticipation that everyone felt when they were about to meet their matchmates. He was nervous about what he would say to the tick woman if he actually spoke to her. He had to come up with a good reason why he didn’t want to be with her. He didn’t want to feel like a jerk and tell her that she was too ugly and disgusting to be with.
He was also afraid of what would happen if he actually was attracted to her in some strange way. They had human faces so it was possible that she was pretty.
He really hoped she wasn’t pretty.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE CLUSTER
“I’m looking for this woman,” Fernando said to the first tick man he came across as he entered The Cluster, holding up a picture of his matchmate.
The old insect looked at Fernando, then at the picture. Then he spewed a gray fluid down his wiry black beard. The tick man didn’t speak English. Not many ticks spoke English, especially those that lived in The Cluster.
“Have you seen her?” Fernando asked.
The old tick man spewed more fluid, spraying a metallic odor into Fernando’s face. It was so pungent he had to back away. Ectoparasites had their own strange language that they spoke. It was not comprised of words, it was a language of smells. They communicated by spraying fluids from glands growing on various parts of their bodies, each smell communicating a different expression. The stronger the smell, the louder they spoke.
Fernando had no idea what the old tick man was saying, but because the words were so odorous he could tell that he was practically yelling at him. When Fernando stepped away from the cranky insect, the creature turned and scuttled away like a crab.
“I’m sorry…” Fernando said, but he had no idea what he was apologizing for.
As he walked through The Cluster, it was like he was in another world. Gloomy’s hair grew tall on this side of town, like he was walking through a brown forest. There were no streets or sidewalks, just soft fleshy ground dotted by hundreds of boulder-sized scabs. Everywhere Fernando looked, there were small huts made of fur. And the population was dense. Thousands of tick people surrounded him. Many were upside-down with their heads buried into the dogflesh, their butts sticking straight into the air. Others were up in the hair-trees, clutching onto them like lice, as if trying to get away from the overpopulated neighborhood below.
Everywhere he went, Fernando was attacked by clouds of aromatic speech. He couldn’t tell if the tick people were trying to speak to him or if they were having conversations with each other. His skin crawled whenever he touched them, their thick beetle-like shells rubbing a greasy stink into his clothes, their spiky insect limbs cutting scratches into his soft human flesh.
They spewed harsh smell-words at him whenever he asked them about his matchmate. After an hour of this, his clothes were coated in all sorts of fragrant conversations. He wondered if tick people knew the history of each other’s conversations based on the smells they carried with them. It must’ve been impossible for them to cheat on their wives.
Only a few ticks he came across could actually speak English, but they couldn’t help him at all. There were so many Ectoparasites in that area of town that they couldn’t possibly all know each other. But for some reason, he was never discouraged. He was disgusted with every step he took in The Cluster and couldn’t wait until he could finally leave, but he was patient. He didn’t mind how long it took. He was not going to stop looking until he found the creature he was matched with.
There was just one woman who recognized the picture. She was older and more intelligent than the other tick people in the neighborhood and could speak English fluently. Outside of her hair-hut, which was only large enough for her to squeeze her body into when she needed to sleep, she stared at him, twitching her antennae back and forth. She said the woman in the photo was one of her thirty-six living daughters.
“You’re the man the reporters told me about,” said the old tick woman.
Her human face was wrinkled and covered in dried dog blood. Her exoskeleton was also wrinkled; it was gray and brittle, almost soggy. She smelled diseased and rotten. She was the most disgusting tick woman he’d ever met. He couldn’t believe that she was the mother of his perfect mate.
“Yeah, how did you know?”
“They came here looking for my daughter as you came to look for her.”
Fernando was thrown off by what she just said. He had no idea the reporters knew who his matchmate was. They’d been trying to get that information out of him for days. He wondered if one of them secretly paid somebody at the Matchmaking Bureau to give up that information.
“What did you tell them?”
“Nothing. Just as I’m going to tell you nothing.”
She squirted a noxious cloud of bile at him, as if cursing him in her native tongue. Fernando had coughed and choked on her odor, then stepped back and covered his mouth.
“I think it’s sick that you were matched with my daughter,” she told him. “It’s unnatural. Our kind should never be paired in such a way. We were not meant to interbreed.”
Fernando coughed and waved her stink away.
“I agree,” he said. “I don’t want to be matched with her either. I just want to meet her and explain to her why we shouldn’t be together.”
The tick lady squinted at Fernando. “No, you’re lying. I can tell.”
“I’m not lying.”
“Your human words tell me one thing but your smells tell me another,” she said.
“I don’t smell.”
“It’s very faint, but I can read your human smells. They are not much different than our smells, only you speak in muffled whispers. Your smells are saying that you want a mate.”
Fernando shook his head at her. “I don’t care what my smells are saying. I don’t want a mate. And if I did, it wouldn’t be with a filthy bug.”
She flared at him with her cold eyes and raised a pincher at him in an almost threatening way.
“My daughters are not filthy bugs,” she said.
Fernando tried not to offend her again.“I’m sorry. She’s not a filthy bug. The point is I don’t want to have anything to do with her. I just want to meet her once and then I’ll never see her again.”
“You can live without meeting her.”
“Have you told her about me yet? Does she know a human is her matchmate?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t plan to tell her anything. She will never know a human is her matchmate.”
“But don’t you think she would want to know? It would be cruel for her to go her whole life wondering who her matchmate is.”
“It’s better she never knows than end up forming a vile union with you.”
“I agree, but that will never happen. I promise.”
Fernando couldn’t believe he was arguing so much. He didn’t know why he was so desperate to meet his tick matchmate. He wondered if what the woman smelled on him was true, maybe he did have some kind of deep instinctual urge to mate with something, anything, even a filthy bug, and he just didn’t realize it. But, more likely, she was just sensing his sexual repression. He hadn’t had sex with anyone for years and rarely even masturbated. Anyone could tell that he was in need of sexual release. But that didn’t mean anything. He’d rather relieve the tension through masturbation than sex with an insect. Or he’d rather do what lonely old perverts did and cut a penis-sized hole in the warm meat ground and fuck that. Though it was something he would never actually do, it was still preferable to having sex with a tick woman.
He paused, changed his voice to a calmer tone, then said, “Look, I just want to meet her and get it over with. I need closure. Otherwise, I’m worried she might show up on my doorstep someday. All she has to do is go to the Matchmaking Bureau and they’ll tell her where I live.”
The old woman paused for a moment to think about that.
Fernando continued, “She’ll find out eventually. There’s nothing you can do to stop that. Don’t you think it would be better to get it over with now?”
The woman frowned and sprayed a potato-bug odor at him, as if she hated that she couldn’t come up with an argument for him.
“You’re not going to stop until you find her, are you?” she asked.
“Nope. I have all the time in the world.”
“And you swear that you don’t want to be with her? No matter what your smells say?”
“After I meet her, I have no intention of ever speaking to her again. No offense, but I’d rather die than marry your daughter.”
“Good,” she said. “Because I, too, would rather you die than marry my daughter. And I’ll make sure that happens if I ever see the two of you together after this day.”
Fernando nodded in agreement. “So you’re going to tell me where I can find her?”
“I’ll tell you where she lived the last time I saw her five years ago.”
“She doesn’t live in The Cluster?”
“Not since she was a teenager.”
It was dark by the time Fernando finally found Google Pockopa, his parasitic matchmate. She lived far away from other Ectoparasites, in the art district on Old Gloomy’s lower back. Her hut made of dog hair was similar to the one her mother lived in, but it was placed between two dumpsters, in an alley behind a record shop.
“Hello?” Fernando asked as he entered the alleyway.
It was where her mother said Google would be. The old woman mentioned that her daughter lived there because she liked listening to the music that issued from the record shop next door, swaying to the classical violin concertos they played in the morning and tapping her crustacean-like claws to the bouncy pop music they played in the afternoon. It was like a hobby to her, which her mother felt was a bit eccentric since most tick people didn’t have hobbies outside of eating and breeding.
“Hello?” Fernando called out again. “I’m looking for Google Pockopa.”
He didn’t see anyone in the alley, but he could tell the tick woman was still living there. He found her hair-hut between the dumpsters. The ground was covered in scabs and mounds of black crusty feces.
“Are you here? Your mother told me where I could find you.”
Then he saw her hiding behind the corner, peeking out at him. Her antennae wiggling like curious puppy tails.
“I wanted to meet you,” he said.
She ducked behind the wall when he stepped closer.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
When he went around the corner to see her, she curled inward like a roly-poly, closing herself up inside her outer shell to protect her soft human parts. She had paint sprayed on her back, dents and scars covering the insect sections of her body. It was obvious that she’d been abused. He imagined it had to be the work of hooligan teenagers who probably went into her alley and threw rocks at her for fun.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She flinched at his words and hid deeper into her shell. As he examined her wounded body, Fernando became more and more angry at what had been done to her. He wanted to find those street kids and throw rocks at them, show them what it felt like to be hurt in such a horrible way. But, as he had these thoughts, he was surprised that he was so offended. He knew she was just a pathetic bug, she was just trash, no better than a stray dog. But, still, somewhere deep inside he knew she was a part of him. And it pissed him off knowing that somebody had been hurting a part of him.
“I’ve come to talk to you,” he said. He pulled out his papers from the Matchmaking Bureau and showed them to her. “For some strange reason, we’ve been matched.”
As he held out the papers, she peeked out of her shell. She looked confused, but he wasn’t sure if she was confused by what he said or if she was confused that he was a human who didn’t want to beat her. She squirted a pine-flavored scent at him.
“I’m your matchmate.”
As Fernando said this, she looked at the paper and then looked up at him. She didn’t seem to be able to speak English, she couldn’t read the words printed on the paper, but she still recognized her file from the Matchmaking Bureau. She understood what it meant.
“Mate?” she asked.
Her voice was slow and crackly, like that of a deaf woman. It was obvious she didn’t use her human vocal chords very often. She only knew a few words.
“Yes,” Fernando said. “We’re matchmates.”
As Fernando said this, she opened her shell and a warm, buttery aroma drifted toward him. It was a comforting, welcoming smell. He had no idea what she was trying to say with that smell, but if he had to guess he’d say she was expressing how happy she was that she finally found her home. Obviously, he didn’t like it.
“My name is Fernando Mendez,” he said.
Then he paused. She stood up, her shell wide open, coming closer to him to investigate the human she was matched with. Now that she was exposed, he could finally get a good look at her. She was definitely different from other Ectoparasites, but not at all more human. Her head was round instead of drill-shaped, like she was wearing an exoskeleton helmet with antennae sticking out the top. Her skin was softer and paler than that of a normal tick woman, probably from living in a dark alleyway where the sun never shined.
“Mentis,” she said, trying to repeat his name.
Her face was not very pretty. Fernando was happy for that. He didn’t know what he would do if he thought she had a pretty face. Because she didn’t have human hair or makeup, she didn’t look very feminine and Fernando was only attracted to the most feminine women. Although she had sexy, heart-shaped lips and big dark brown eyes, he thought she looked too much like a little boy. He hated women that had that little boy look to them.
However, though she didn’t have a pretty face Fernando still felt attracted to her—or at least parts of her. She had unusually large breasts for a tick woman, breasts that seemed to ooze out of her shell, dangling over her insect appendages, the kind of breasts that you could only find in Japanese comic books. Although they were white as paper with nearly invisible areolas, he couldn’t take his eyes off of them. They didn’t seem to belong on such a disgusting insect body.
“I’ve only come to tell you that we were matched,” Fernando told her as she wiggled her antennae at him. “But I’m not interested in being with you. I just wanted to meet you and let you know that I don’t want to form a relationship.”
She discharged gray fluids from her lower abdomen, releasing more of the buttery smell. The closer she got to him, the stronger the scent. They were trying to communicate with each other, but neither knew what the other was saying.
“I’m sorry, but I have no interest in starting a family, especially not with a…” Fernando lost himself as she looked at him with her dark brown eyes. “Anyway, I thought you should know, just in case you were waiting for your matchmate all these years. You can finally move on.”
He could tell what he was saying wasn’t getting through to her. She sprayed him with a sweet flowery tequila odor. It was almost flirtatious.
“How do I explain myself…” he said.
Then he looked her in the eyes again and realized meeting this woman was a terrible mistake. He could tell she was desperate. She had been all alone for so long, treated horribly by humans and probably treated as a freak by her own kind due to her unusual features. The excited look in her eyes was not only because she’d finally found her mate, but because she’d found her hero—the person who would take her away from her life of misery. It was so pathetic that he couldn’t help but feel like such a horrible person for not being willing to give her what she so desperately needed.
“We can’t be together,” he said. Then he thought of the one word he knew that she understood. “No mate. Do you understand? No mate.”
“Matchmate…” she said.
She grabbed his arms with her crustacean-like pinchers, almost like she was trying to hug him. The warm, buttery smell oozed out of her skin and soaked into his t-shirt as she pressed herself against him.
“No,” Fernando said. “No matchmate.”
He pushed away from her and shook his head, trying to get her to understand that he was rejecting her. She just stared at him, unable or unwilling to understand. Fernando looked down at her vagina. He didn’t want to, but curiosity got the better of him. He wanted to know how it was even possible for her lock to be the perfect match for his key. Her vagina was on the insect part of her body. It was a dark crusty mucus-filled hole on her lower abdomen. He couldn’t believe that his human penis could possibly be shaped to unlock it. Just the idea of it was disgusting. He was beginning to feel sick.
But as he imagined turning his key inside of that foul crispy hole, he found himself getting erect. It was out of his control. Something inside of him didn’t care if her lock was disgusting. It was designed for him. It was his nature to want to unlock her.
