"Spiders" by Anonymous

There are spiders that live in my head

As they grow restless, they creep down my throat and into my stomach

Burrowing through the soft flesh of my abdomen, digging tunnels into the delicate tissues coating the underside of my skin 

I feel every sharp slice of their pincers, every brush of the scratchy hair sprouting from their spindly legs

I feel every beady little eye squeeze in and out of the small spaces between muscle and bone

There’s thousands upon thousands of them, taking up every inch of my body, their small frames squeezing my heart so tight I can feel the blood slowly oozing out of its veins and filling my lungs with a rich, copper tang. 

Often I can't breathe. 

The spiders harmonize with the ringing in my ears as they scurry up and down the expanse of my body, 

I can feel them, I can feel them, I can only feel them.

It’s not mine

My body isn’t mine, it will always be theirs 

I itch and pick and scratch and pull at the skin that used to be mine,

hoping that if the red welts on my arms outnumber the ones that are embedded into the fleshy planes of my insides

maybe my body will come back to me.

I can only hope that maybe one day I’ll feel the stinging stretch of their small bodies squeezing out through my tear ducts

Or maybe I’ll feel the tap of their legs scratch against my tongue as they pour out of my mouth. 

But maybe,

after my skin is mine once more I’ll see their small bodies,

covered in blood and bile, bulbous eyes shining with fear and dread. 

Maybe, just maybe my eyes will be drawn to the slight tremor of its leg, broken and bent, curled around its failing body protectively, clinging onto the last moments of its meaningless life. 

So maybe, just maybe, I’ll cup each of those pathetic, withering masses in my hands and lay them gently in the grass.  

A final resting place for a creature that was nothing more than small and scared.