The Gory Details (Gross)

Gory Detail #24: "But My Skin is Crawling"

My uncle Bennie is a parasite. I don't just mean a pest. He's a parasite. It's all in the definition. A bookish kind of definition would say something like, "anything that uses the resources of a host but does not give back." That's uncle Bennie. The main goal of his life, other than to sit on the back porch in a busted out lawn chair with a beer and a flyswatter, is to get some more unemployment some way some how. The poor man has been continuously looking for work for going on nineteen years. Between sessions at the unemployment office he hangs on dad. He uses resources and gives back only blond jokes and, occasional, a badly mown lawn. Truly, he is a parasite.

While uncle Bennie isn't very scary unless he's drunk and you're in the pisser, other parasites are. Everybody gets creeped out by ticks and scabies and tapeworms. Lets take a look at why.

Why is it that people pull ticks off with shaky hands and pits in their stomachs? Is it that the tick will suck all or a dangerous amount of their blood? No. Is it that they carry disease? Maybe. Is it that the little bastard has crawled, with eight legged creepiness under your clothes and attached to your body without your knowledge, without your ability to prevent the violation? You bet. It's like a rape writ small and with rasping mouthparts. Oh yeah. Feel the shudder.

To make this useful in a horror story, you need only suggest it. If I write "the demon was like a leech, feeding numbly on her life." I don't have to say; "creepy" or "unhealthy" or "sinister." The word "leech" had all the connotations I needed.

The other great appeal, as far as I am concerned, is that parasites can be down right gross. When we lived in the county and our dogs would get worms my dad would send me out to see whether it looked like tape worms or round worms or some kind of fluke crawling out of the dog's behind. Later, I looked back and wondered; 'Why did the old man send a twelve year old out to look at a sick dog's butt?' Easy, worms are gross.

Again, they're easy to use. "I realized the thin, gray string laying half out of the open wound was moving, twisting its end slowly back and forth. It was a worm. 'My god.' I thought, nearly vomiting. 'Now they're in my muscles too.'"

There are tens of thousands of parasites that infest humans. You are carrying at least a few hundred right now. Rather than try to make a list, let's talk about types.

First, of course, who doesn't love things that fester in the bowels. Of worms there are pin, round, tape, fluke, segmented, unsegmented, jawed, jawless and one's that look like ex-presidents. Almost all of these have eggs that can survive being swallowed. They get these eggs out by putting them in the host's poo. This means that, in order for them to get to your gut, you have to have eaten someone elses...

True story. I had a friend once. In the middle of a conversation she said. "Yeah, I had worms as a kid. I think a lot of kids get worms." Hmmmm. She and I never really dated or anything 'cause damn.

Lot's of other parasites enter the digestive tract and then spread out. Elephanitis is caused by a parasite that plugs up lymph ducts. Another popular place is the liver and even the brain can be affected. The weird thing is doctors don't always kill these parasites when they catch them. In my five minutes of research, I came across a man who had liver flukes so bad they had gathered around his kidneys and on the surface of his brain. The doctors did not treat the condition, however, because they didn't want him full of pounds and pounds of dead flukes. Awesome!

On the skin there are the usual, ticks, mites, tattoos of old girlfriends. Some of the best, according to me, are the mites. A mite is a little speck of a guy related to the spider. There are several thousand varieties that live on humans. Mostly they live on dead skin flakes but there are varieties that live on just about anything we shed. There are a couple of things that make mites great.

First of all is their specialization. There are mouth types designed to scrape hair, munch dead skin, sip oils. Anything that you give off, they've got a sucker or saw for it. Then there are their legs: Some crawl. Some hang onto hair or skin or ducts. Some dig. Even their little body hairs are specialized. Some use them to hold onto the holes they've bored into your skin so they can use their feet to pull food to their specialized mouths. Weird huh? Right this second, little creeps are sawing off bits of your flesh to feed themselves. Say. If they're living in a hole in your flesh, where do they poop?

The other great thing about mites is their survivability. If they run out of water many of them turn hard sort of like a pollen grain and then wake up when wet. They are impossible to get rid of. If you scratched off you skin and hair down to a bare dermis, you'd still have thousands of the little guys living in your hair follicles, sweat and sebaceous glands. If you scrubbed till they were gone as well, you'd have worse problems than mites; like being nuts enough to scratch your own skin off. (You just scratched an itch somewhere didn't you? It's compulsive.)

Did I mention what happens when a bunch of the little creeps get rolled up under your fingernails when you scratch? Ugh! So gross. Trim your nails then get out there and write.

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