Cartoons in the Suicide Forest

by Leza Cantoral

  Petrified, she tried to get up but was too weak and too broken to move. She had no choice but to remain where she was as the spiders eagerly explored her every exposed and burned-out crevice. Tears welled up inside her titanium eye sockets, blurring her vision. Some of them clustered inside the massive chest cavity that had once held her huge DDD’s. They crawled up the walls of her charred cervix. They worked their way up to the back of her spine and out through the hole where her mouth used to be.

  She tried brushing them off in vain. Her flesh was being chewed and slurped up by her ravenous spider babies.

  She could hear the chewing like a faint buzzing that grew louder as they ate their way from her frontal lobe to her brain stem. Soon they were crashing like cymbals inside her ears.

  The spiders finally collapsed, engorged with sickly black goo churning in their bellies like a million demonic taffy machines.

  Spider Orgy

  Outside the dilapidated warehouse, night was falling, snuffing out the sun like a candle, the flames of day smoldering and dripping down the skyline in waves of blood red and mashed up peaches. Fireflies danced in through a shattered window and circled festively above Candy’s corpse.

  Fresh horror burst in her brain like a black supernova. Pheromones exploded into the air, misting her in a thick pinkish fog, as piles of frantic, humping spiders swarmed over her entire frame. Her body had devolved from corpse being devoured to an arachnid sex pit of wild debauchery and mayhem. The males had doubled in size; the females had positively quadrupled. They had all turned a shade of milky white that glowed in the darkened room. Their eyes had grown huge and deep black.

  They eyed each other suspiciously and began to sniff each other out, growing bolder and more excited. The males began to dance, waving arms in the air, doing cartwheels, and jumping over each other with incredible acrobatic timing. At first the females were not impressed. They chortled and walked off. Some approached and presented their behinds, and just when the males thought they could mount they would skitter off, roaring with mirth. The males became bolder and faster, as adrenaline shot through them in raw pulsing jolts.

  The fireflies swirled like disco lights. The dance devolved into the blind feral spasm of creatures merging and coalescing. Pleasure and urgency colliding in a psychedelic orgy of hard spider bodies bashing against each other, and spider fangs sinking into milky glowing spider throats. Tiny screams and wails became audible as they swelled in volume and frequency, becoming a single unified roar of sighs, moans, and screams of pure unbridled spider lust. Males approached, females retreated, waving their arms wildly.

  Bands of males, fueled by deadly, grim determination swarmed upon the more reticent females, pinning them down, each having their way with her, taking turns ejaculating into her as she wailed and finally faded into semi-conscious twitches and low moaning. Some females simply bit the heads off the males as they emptied themselves into them. The noise and the mad scrambling did not stop till all the males were empty shells piled at the feet of the engorged females, who then began laying piles upon piles of eggs. They worked nimbly, weaving webs and inserting their egg sacs all over Candy’s naked frame.

  Candy was soon covered like a mummy, in head to toe pink egg sacs and thick spider web gauze. A sickly sweet aroma surrounded her plugged up orifices, forcing her into a thick velvety unconsciousness.

  As she drifted, her titanium frame began to soften and absorb the spider goo. Body tissue began to grow like moss upon her bones. Muscle tissue bloomed like bloody roses, brambles of tendons shot up, her heart exploded like a garden. Skin spread over her body; sheer like a river of peach toned silk, layer upon layer washing over her newborn flesh. Pink hair bloomed from her head and between her legs, soft and fluffy.

  Candy awoke to find herself complete, and the spiders along with their new eggs were gone. She touched her breasts in wonder. They were soft like play dough, and though not nearly the size of the man-made breasts of her previous body, she was delighted to find that they bounced back into their original shape no matter how much she squeezed them. She ran her fingers down her sides in awe. A satellite of sensation ran through her fingertips and into her nerve channels. She gasped. Her fingers ventured further down her body, grazing the sharp curve of her hip bones to the downy patch between her legs, and after a momentary hesitation her fingers ventured into the crevice that she had never felt, though others had on a daily basis invaded this mysterious space with their own bodies and whatever array of colorful foreign objects and contraptions the director saw fit. It felt like a trespass she had never even thought to cross herself.

  It was warm and moist and she ventured further, amazed at the intricacy of textures packed cleverly into such an enclosed space. After one finger she ventured another and then another, until all her fingers save her thumb were deep inside. Upon moving them slightly upward, she noticed a warm tingling spreading throughout. A white hot rush shot through her brain as the pleasure bubbled forth in waves, crashing and building over and over again. She felt something warm squirt out of her, but was too consumed with this fascinating new sensation to care. She continued until the sweat dripped off her brow and her brain was shot apart over and over by white blinding spasms of orgasmic delight. Finally, unable to breathe, think, or move, she rested as the mad convulsions subsided.

  Once her racing heartbeat resumed a more measured gallop and her legs had stopped shaking, she sat up. Her blue eyes widened in amazement at the sight of a huge pile of cotton candy before her. She grabbed a handful and tasted it. It was delicious!

  Cotton Candy for Kisses

  Read the neon pink bubble-lettered sign above her booth.

  For a kiss you could get a gob of cotton candy, delicious beyond your wildest dreams. The color and amount would depend on the quality and length of the kiss.

  The air was positively buzzing with excitement and nervous tittering.

  Candy had become a regular fixture at the very same carnival where she had once been the coin-operated fortuneteller. Her booth had become wildly popular almost overnight thanks to very enthusiastic word of mouth. Crowds began to gather in the morning and by noon it was like a new ride at Disneyland. People of all ages lined up eagerly.

  When someone kissed Candy the crowd would hush and whisper; judging the person’s performance, speculating eagerly on the color and size of the candy they would get. When Candy lifted the stick full of spun candy over the counter, the crowd would inevitably ooh and ahh amongst victorious I told you so’s, and children whining that they wanted that color, mommy, please.

  Teenage boys and men in general were the most excited and felt the most pressure to deliver a truly magnificent kiss. They would fidget and awkwardly hide their stubborn erections. The returning fans could be easily spotted by their tell-tale low slung, baggy jeans.

  Within a month, the queue was filled with sallow faced jittery customers, itching for another fix. Seemingly replenished, they would walk away devouring the candy like wolves on crack.

  By the next week the fairground had become a ghost town. Lolling addicts of Candy’s special concoctions were everywhere, leaning against trees and sprawled on the grounds, smiling blissfully as they expired into a sugary sweet purgatory.

  Pink webs coated the treetops and the bodies of her devotees.

  Corpse hatcheries popped open like meaty walnuts and armies of spider babies swarmed the abandoned fairgrounds. The hungry creatures soon picked every corpse clean, gleefully sucking eyeballs out of smiling faces and lolling tongues out of pliant candy-coated lips, gorging themselves on twisting spools of intestinal licorice delight.

  A she walked the fairground littered with the rotting corpses of her victims, Candy knew it was time to move on. She raised her arms and dropped them as if signaling the start of a drag race, and her spiders rushed to her sides. Some clambered into her hair, others frolicked on her shoulders or tucked themselves into the folds of her flowing powder blue gown.

  And so, as the sun san
k once again into its bloody bed, Candy forged ahead, flanked by her army of spider babies, leaving all her dreams and nightmares behind in piles of corpses and ash.

  Her heart sang as she headed down the dusty road into the next town, beaconing newer and sweeter flesh horizons.

  PLANET MERMAID

  Chapter 1: Mermaids

  Underwater it is always dark. We live down so deep that we never see the light of the moon. Our eyes are designed for the darkness. Our pupils drown out our irises but they contract under bright lights. In the light our eyes look white, like we have no pupils—a tiny black dot in the center that opens up like a telescope in the deep.

  Our skin is pale, cold, and soft as oysters. Our tails are slimy, scaly, and black.

  Our bodies might be cold but we are not cold-hearted. We are very protective of the life we have because we grew up with tales of horror and genocide that our people experienced at the hands of the Land Walkers.

  The horror stories are endless and we younger ones have never seen the surface.

  Our kind migrated north many centuries ago to avoid the dangers of warmer waters. In this land of eternal night and ice, we are safe. Our bodies have adapted. Our teeth are sharp and pointed and our webbed hands have long thick black claws that help us crack ice or open clams with ease.

  We know that we did not used to look like this because we have seaweed scrolls of paintings from our past. Mermaids used to have hair of many colors. Now it is black, white, or gray. We used to have multicolored tails but living in the depths has washed most of the pigment out of our skin.

  We have everything we need, but I always feel unsatisfied.

  ***

  I look up as my sisters snore bubbles beside me and wonder what it is like up there. My sisters tease me because I always ask questions about the surface. They have no desire to go.

  They are happy weaving moon magic under the sea and having endless batches of babies with the mermen.

  I don’t know why but I have always wondered what was up there, ever since I was able to understand the stories that my nana told me about our histories and origins. As soon as I learned to read I began to devour all the legends and lore. I read our ancestors’ histories with hunger and longing. I read all the myths and the dreamtime tales. I stared at the pictures painted in the Mermaid Temple, of the great battles and massacres with the Land Walkers. The main thing I kept staring at was their legs. They looked grotesque and strange, but the more I looked at the drawings, the more enticing the Land Walkers looked and I grew bitterly envious.

  We mermaids are a proud race. We are never supposed to envy anyone but our elders. All of us are magic and are born with certain innate talents. Each family has certain skills that get passed down through the generations. My sisters are all psychic to varying degrees, which makes it nearly impossible to keep secrets.

  We are brave and the only creature we are taught to fear is the notorious and immortal Sea Witch. She is depicted in the earliest murals of our people, frozen at the same age she was when she swam to the surface. There are rumors that she uses vile and horrific black magic in order to stay forever young.

  Some say she lives off blood sacrifices she makes to the ancient, vicious Sea Gods who predate the gentle Moon Goddesses that we worship today. Others say that she is so well-versed in plant lore that she is able to make her cells regenerate. Some say she is a bloodthirsty and heartless cannibal monster that eats her own babies.

  Whatever the variations in the story, the one true constant is: keep far, far away from her.

  My nana tells me all the stories of our people and the older I get, the more curious I become. I ask her about the Sea Witch and the Land Walkers but she always freezes up when I ask her about the Sea Witch, which of course, just makes me even more curious.

  One night before bed, after she’s done telling me her stories, I still cannot go to sleep, so I start grilling her again about the Sea Witch and the Land Walkers.

  “Did you know the Sea Witch, Nana?”

  “I was not born yet when she was still young, but my nana went to school with her.”

  “Was she nice? Was she weird?”

  “She was perfectly normal back then, my darling. It was not until she disobeyed her elders and swam all the way to the surface that she went mad. They say she went mad on moonlight, but we will never know. She is not normal. She does not follow the rules that we all follow. For instance, we do not know how she stays young forever. She travels to the surface a lot, and when mermaids travel to the surface they usually disappear forever. That is how your mother disappeared.”

  “Did the Sea Witch kill my mother?”

  “I do not know for certain if she did, but I do know you must never look for her. You must never go to the surface unless you want to end up as mad as her.”

  I stay quiet for a minute, thinking about my mother and trying to picture her, wondering what really happened. Could she really be evil?

  “Nana, do the Land Walkers still exist?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Can a mermaid be with a Land Walker?”

  “No, my darling.”

  “But why?”

  “We are made different. Can a jellyfish mate with an octopus?”

  “I guess not. But then why does it show in the paintings of the Mermaid Temple drawings of mermaids with the Land Walkers?”

  “Child, you ask far too many questions for your own good. Can’t you see those unions ended in tragedy?”

  “But why? I don’t understand.”

  “One day, when you meet a nice merman, you’ll understand,” my nana finally says, frustrated but tender, as she pats me on the head. “Now go to sleep, you have a big day tomorrow. It is the Blood Moon Ritual. And don’t tell your sisters I was talking to you about this nonsense. I will never hear the end of it!”

  I scowl at her but then smile. It is hard to stay mad at Nana. She is everything to me. She raised me and my sisters and has taught us so many things, like which plants are poisonous and the proper way to eat shellfish. She’s taught us the ancient dances to call down the moon magic. It fills the water with lunar energy, and we can harness the moonlight from the water itself. When the moon is full, the water is full of power.

  Chapter 2: Secret Temple

  My sisters make me so angry all the time. They keep making fun of me for not liking any of the young mermen. They call me Lilia Princess Mermaid. I have no interest in those savage mermen. They only want one thing from a mermaid. I think my sisters have very low standards. The mermen tell rude jokes, drink all day, and my sisters always come back full of new babies that I end up having to baby sit while they go coral dancing.

  My sisters want to celebrate the Blood Moon with a batch of mermen who returned from a long voyage into the depths of our planet. They find me looking at a picture I tore out from one of Nana’s storybooks. It is a picture of a Land Walker and I draw a heart around him. They pass it around and laugh and laugh.

  “That Lilia, nobody’s good enough for her.”

  “You want to end up like the Sea Witch.”

  “At least she doesn’t have to deal with stupid, annoying sisters!” I yell and swim off, as they burst into fits of laughter.

  I leave them and go to the temple. They can have all the mermen. They deserve each other.

  The reefs by the Mermaid Temple have the best oysters. They are the biggest and the juiciest. I grab a handful and throw them in a messenger bag made of woven seaweed. I collect pearls all the time and gather other unique things I find along the way.

  I find a spot where I can eat and gaze upon the strange and fascinating murals that are painted all along the ancient, moss-stained walls.

  The oysters are soft and soothing on my tongue. I love the ritual of eating them, prying them open with my long nails and sucking up their soft, gooey insides. Sometimes I’ll find a beautiful pearl and keep it. I like to make jewelry out of the pearls. Wearing fresh pearls during moon magic rituals makes my
magic stronger, at least that is what my sisters always say. They say the pearls soak up the lunar rays.

  Sometimes when I get angry I make hate balls with my pearls. It’s fun and really easy. I just hold one in my hand, think real hard about what I am angry about until I feel all the rage pouring from my fingers into the pearl, and then I toss it at whoever has made

  me angry. My sisters get so mad when I do that and call me a brat. The hate pearls don’t do any harm but they do hurt like hell. I always laugh when I toss it and see one of my sisters jump and scream. It is like an electric shock and makes their hair stand up. It looks super funny, so I just laugh more as they yell and chase me off.

  ***

  With new pearls from the oysters, I swim deeper into the temple and decide to visit the lower depths where the younger mermaids are not allowed. Only the anointed high priestesses ever pass through the tunnels and down into the lower caverns. I swim so deep, I can barely see.

  I pull a net out of my bag and use it to grab a glowing jellyfish that is gliding by. I hold it up in front of me like a squirmy lantern and swim deeper. There are caves within caves and smaller and smaller networks of tunnels leading further and further inside. My heart is racing and I’m frightened but I also feel a growing sense of anticipation. I have always wanted to come down here.

  I see strange murals on the cave walls of things I have never heard of or seen before. There are men coming out of something that looks like a moon and standing around in a circle holding hands. Their heads and eyes are very large. There are flying shapes of all different sizes hovering in the air above them. Further along, there are sprawling cities above and below the water. So much bustle and activity. I see fish with legs crawling out of the ocean shore. I see mermaids being dissected with big blades by the big-eyed bulb headed creatures. Their eyes are all black.