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Wellness Check — Description

This is the 10th image I produced for my Afflicted Lands, Plague Core world building project. Perhaps, a mile stone. IDK, the others are in my recents, but part of my intention with these is that their accompanying page-length tales don’t have to be read in order, or in their entirety. In fact, I jump around on the time line, all in effort to increase focus on the individual experiences of the characters and their many dark secrets. Triggers, horror, weird fiction safe for work. That said, here is my latest iteration -
You Can Call Them Beautiful
“I don’t think I can abide other people right now.” I said to the one person I could abide, a person who probably shouldn’t have been as happy as a raven, considering the times. It almost made me envious. Erin turned to face me, her tone accusatory. “Are the lichenids people to you? Be honest.” I laughed, “What if I said no?” Her mouth was hidden behind the long nostrils of her velvety, protective snout, but her eyes smiled. “Then I’d ask if you could abide them.”
“Just how many are we talking about?” “Only one, maybe two, not sure, they’re all rather shy.” She took the lead as we crossed the empty parking lot of a repurposed shopping mall where our fellow crow-suited quarantine envoy sipped stimulants while starring at walls, and continued across fields of turf grasses turned to clawed and corralous weeds by plant-affecting strains of endemic miasma. The fields were patchy and therefore navigable due to leather jackets feasting unseen, spawning crane flies that floated fairy-like through the evening air.
Our lights became necessary within the gutted buildings, mall additions left unfinished by the calamity. I saw a green luminescence scale a wall and near feinted. “Fran-cis, you said you’d seen these before.” “I’ve seen them in pictures!” I barked, recalling that lichenids didn’t like loud, harsh sounds. “I wasn’t warned about the crawling-up-walls, or the speed of it.” “They don’t like moving too much, so when they do move, they like to get it over with. At least that’s what Ampersand says.” “Ampersand?” Her light revealed a graffito of the shorthand symbol, below it, was a plastic ice chest, streaked with mildew.
I opened the chest and perused the books and papers therein, nothing about who Ampersand was before the calamity, just drawings and amateurish writings on fictional universes. “So no identification, no medical records, no deeds to property, only this? You’d think they would have at least signed their work, so we could have a name.” “Their name - ” my companion cast a quick glance toward the rustlings behind us. “is Ampersand.”
The feathery whisper of crane flies butting against our heads and faces became too much, and we rested the fuel, and batteries of our lights. In the darkness blue-green bead strings, hanging from the porous faces of afflicted perched within the skeletal rafters above, became visible and a beacon to the pests. The quantity of trapped prey intensified the glow, as the strings became garlands of legs and wings. Photosynthetic crests on the elongated necks of the crouching creatures became traced by additional luciferin as absorbed calories allowed, and I saw three, and four-fingered hand prints dimly from well trodden vertical paths.
Erin softly breathed. “You can call them beautiful, it helps. Maybe not with everyone but these appreciate it more than you’d know. Also, you’re beautiful. Sure, beauty is subjective but you’ll do better not to berate yourself every time a smile tugs at the corners of that funny little mouth I know is under there. Is it solidarity with the lost, or having not properly earned it? It’s one thing to consider an action but a thought? When a thought floats by just take it in, let it nourish.”
It felt awkward standing there, dining with Erin’s friends. They on crepuscular insects and I on metaphors.
(Excerpt from the compiled histories of Francis Ziegler.)