Parasite Milk

by Carlton Mellick III

  I ask, “But what if you get a really terrible chef that day and he ruins your meal?”

  Bolgot nods. “Yes, that’s why only the best chefs work in cloning restaurants. It is also common for males to give large tips to their chef before the meal is prepared so that he puts extra care into doing a good job.”

  When the waitress comes back, Mick flirts with her. Even though she doesn’t speak English, he’s able to hit on her with horrible pick-up lines using only his translation device. I try to block him out and just focus on the Kynarian man.

  “But sometimes a chef ruins a meal and it results in ending a relationship before it even begins,” Bolgot continues. “If a couple believes their chef was at fault and they believe they would have enjoyed eating their date’s flesh if it were prepared properly, couples sometimes will go to a different restaurant and try again. If they enjoy their flesh the second time it will usually disgrace their original chef. In extreme cases, he will very likely be embarrassed into retirement.”

  I nod. I couldn’t imagine having to go through that every time you went on a first date with somebody.

  “It’s just a tradition, though,” Bolgot says. “A lot of people don’t really believe it. I have plenty of friends who are happily married despite being disturbed by their spouse’s taste.”

  I look up at Mick who is still giggling and flirting with the Kynarian waitress. He holds up the burger of himself, trying to get her to taste it.

  “Come on, try it,” he says, gripping her by the elbow. “I’m delicious.”

  She shakes her head, trying to get back to work. But Mick doesn’t take no for an answer.

  “Just try it,” he says, his translation device spewing back his voice in Kynarian. “If you don’t like me I’ll leave you alone.”

  The woman gives in and takes a small bite, just so that she can get rid of him. He lets go of her and she turns and races away. But she only gets ten feet. When she turns back, I watch her savoring the flavor in her mouth with a big round-toothed smile on her mushroom face. She races back to Mick and wants to take another, much larger, bite. I’m not sure if it’s because she likes Mick or because human meat is delicious to Kynarians.

  As she’s gobbling on his flesh, Mick looks at us and says, “See? I’m delicious. Everyone should eat my meat.”

  He slams his hand on the table and chuckles.

  Then he says, “I’m going to bring this technology back to Earth and open up my own chain of restaurants that only sells food made with my meat.” He laughs again. “It’ll be great. And there’ll be pictures of me all over the menu so that everyone knows whose meat they’re eating.”

  Bolgot and I just nod at him. We have no idea if he’s joking or serious.

  Snot keeps flowing out of my nose. The pressure inside my head is killing me. My brain feels itchy, like it’s on fire.

  “You’re bleeding,” Bolgot says, pointing at my face.

  When I rub my nostril, I notice that my stream of snot has turned into blood.

  “Sorry…” I say, embarrassed to be bleeding at the table.

  I hold my nose tightly with a furry napkin for a few minutes, but it doesn’t stop.

  “Are you okay?” Bolgot asks. His voice stresses genuine concern. “I know what it’s like trying to adjust to the climate on another planet. My first few months on Earth were not pretty at all.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine,” I say.

  Although Bolgot is concerned by my unending nosebleed, Mick doesn’t even notice. He’s still messing with the waitress. Only now she’s not annoyed by his advances. She’s sitting down at the table with us, flirting back. Her rubbery knees rubbing against his thigh.

  I wait a few more minutes, but the blood won’t stop. I get out of my seat.

  “I’m going to go to the bathroom,” I tell Bolgot.

  He nods with understanding.

  The bathroom is filled with a row of waterfalls. A large orange Kynarian male is bathing in one on the end, brown ooze leaking from his skin as he washes. It is a unisex bathroom as all bathrooms are on Kynaria, but there aren’t any women in here at the moment.

  I go to one of the waterfalls and rinse the blood off of my nose. The Kynarian looks at me like I’m a crazy person for using it without taking off my clothes or stepping all the way inside.

  When I stick my finger in my nostril, I feel lumps inside. It’s like I’ve got marble-sized boogers trapped in there. I blow my nose hard and dig one of the bloody globs out, but it’s not a booger. It’s something else.

  I squeeze the slimy chunk while washing it off. It feels like a spongy piece of meat, like a part of my nasal cavity wall had broken off inside of my nose. But once I rinse the blood away, I see that it is bulb-shaped with pink and white speckles. It’s a tiny mushroom.

  I put my finger in my nose again and feel around. There are more of them. Mushrooms are growing inside of me. I go to the mirror and take a closer look. Dozens of tiny toadstools are clustered inside, covered in mucus. A thick milk gushes out as I press too firmly on the nostrils.

  “What the fuck…” I say, wondering how the hell they got there. “Mushrooms?”

  I’ve got a fucking mushroom infection. I don’t know if it was caused from the spores I’ve been breathing in, like it’s the Kynarian equivalent to seasonal allergies, or if it’s something I got from my encounter with the jelly bug. It could be some kind of alien disease she gave me.

  The fungus isn’t only growing inside my nostrils. I can feel them throughout my entire nasal passageway, spreading into my sinus cavities and all the way to the back of my ear canals. I can feel a collection of them in the hollow space behind my left eyeball, scratching against the optic nerve whenever the eye rolls inside its socket. They’re even in my throat, heading toward my lungs.

  The speed at which they’ve spread is mindboggling, but I remember toadstools growing on my lawn practically overnight back on Earth. If the mushrooms sprout this quickly, what’s going to happen in a couple more days? What’s going to happen in a week? The mushrooms could grow so large that they block my airways, fill my lungs and suffocate me. Or maybe they’ll just grow right into my brain and kill me that way. Either way, I need to get to a hospital immediately.

  Before I leave the bathroom, I decide I should take a piss first. I’ve had to go ever since I’ve gotten there, but have been worried about using public Kynarian bathrooms since I heard about them.

  I probably shouldn’t just stand outside of the shower and piss into it. I’m pretty sure that’s not acceptable behavior. But with the big Kynarian man watching me, I don’t really want to get naked and shower next to him. I consider waiting until he’s done, but he could be going for a long time. He seems to be excreting a lot of sludge from his body. I wonder if the taste of his date didn’t agree with him.

  After debating it for another minute, I decide I can’t hold it any longer. I remove my clothes and put them on hooks near the mirror. Then I crawl inside the basin on the other end, away from the Kynarian.

  But once I’m in the water, letting the warmth wash over me, I can’t get myself to piss. I wonder if it’s the Kynarian watching me. I wonder if he’s giving me the bashful bladder. But then my penis starts to hurt. It feels like pressure is building up, as if I actually am pissing but there’s something inside my urethra, blocking the urine stream.

  I squeeze the shaft of my penis and feel lumps inside. There are five lumps, most of them collected near the base.

  “Shit…” I say.

  The pain builds as my urine stream continues to be blocked. It burns all the way to my bladder. I squeeze on the lumps and they move. Something is inside it. The mushrooms must also be growing through my urinary tract. I squeeze again, pushing the mushroom bulbs upward.

  I cry out at the burning pain, still trying to urinate, wondering if I can piss them out like kidney stones. But the panic hits me even harder than the pain. If there are mushrooms growing in my nose and inside of my penis, that mus
t mean they are spreading throughout my entire body. They’re probably growing through my stomach and intestines. They’re probably growing around my heart, spreading through the blood.

  Squeezing my shaft like a tube of toothpaste, milk oozes out of the tip of my dick, spilling onto the floor of the water basin. I continue applying pressure, trying to force the mushrooms out. The first one comes out as mush, just a brown paste that doesn’t resemble anything anymore. But it does have a very strong fungal aroma, like a yeast infection on a dead pig. I immediately rinse my hands off in the flowing water after I smell it.

  Next to me, the Kynarian watches me, wondering what I’m doing. He probably knows nothing about how humans go to the bathroom, so this could be how we shit for all he knows. But something in his eyes makes me think that I’m doing something offensive. So offensive that he wants to throw me out of the bathroom or stomp me into the floor. But I’m in too much pain to worry about that.

  The next lump resists, like it’s still attached to the inside of my urethral walls. I grip the flesh beneath the lump and push upward until I feel a tearing sensation and blood oozes out with the milk. But I ignore the blood, push past the pain and keep tugging. Once the lump reaches the opening, I notice it’s not the same as the last one. It’s not just brown fungal mush. It’s gray and crusty, like a large chunk of scab.

  But once I force it out, the thing crawls across the tip of my penis. I scream and brush it away. The creature scurries across the basin floor.

  “What the fuck!” I cry.

  My voice echoes through the bathroom. I nearly slip and fall out of the tub onto the hard floor. The Kynarian male is so angry with my outburst that he grunts, screams something in his language—obviously a profanity—and then he gets out of the water, unable to continue using the bathroom in peace.

  I look down at the bug that came out of me. It scuttles through the pooling water on the basin floor. The thing is a small crustacean, like a roly poly or a baby shrimp.

  “Are you kidding me…”

  That was inside of my penis. How the fuck did it get in there? Was it the nymph woman? Was her vagina filled with bugs when I fucked her? Was she full of tiny shrimp-like parasites?

  When I feel the shaft of my penis, I realize that it wasn’t the only one. The three remaining lumps feel exactly the same as the last one did. They have the same crusty, tearing sensation when I touch them. They twist and curl within me, burrowing down the urethra into my bladder. I’m sure there’s even more than three deeper inside of me.

  I need to get them out.

  After what feels like a gallon of blood and milk and brown fungus paste, I eventually squeeze all of the crustaceans out of me. At least all of the ones I can reach. Weak and shivering, I dry off and dress and return to the table with Bolgot and Mick, only Mick isn’t there anymore.

  I sit down.

  “Where’s Meyers?” I ask, still out of breath from my experience in the bathroom.

  “The waitress was done with her shift, so he left with her,” Bolgot says.

  I nod. I’m perfectly fine with that. I need to get to a hospital and would rather go with Bolgot anyway. He seems like he’d be of better help.

  “Are you okay?” Bolgot asks. “You were in the bathroom for a very long time.”

  I shake my head and lower my eyes.

  “About that…” I begin.

  But with my eyes on the table, I notice that somebody has taken a large bite out of my sandwich. Because I wasn’t going to eat it, I shouldn’t mind. But it was made of my flesh. Somebody eating a sandwich made of my flesh without my permission seems like it should be impolite. I kind of feel violated. I’m guessing it was Mick who wanted the taste, maybe to compare it to his own meat.

  “Yes?” Bolgot asks.

  I shake the distraction out of my thoughts.

  “I think I need to go to a hospital,” I tell him.

  His bulgy eyes get bulgier. “What’s wrong?”

  I shake my head, not knowing where to start. I’m not sure I feel comfortable mentioning the bugs or even the mushroom infection. I decide I better just go straight for my main concern.

  “I slept with a jelly bug,” I say.

  When I say the word, he shushes me, telling me to keep my voice down. Like jelly bug is a dirty word or something.

  He wants me to clarify. “Did you say jelly bug?”

  I nod. “That creature Elder How killed back on the cluster fruit farm. You called it a jelly bug. Well, last night I had sex with one. I thought she was a woman.”

  His face is filled with dread.

  “You have to be joking…” he says.

  “No, I’m serious.”

  “How could you have sex with one of those things? That’s disgusting.”

  “I thought she was beautiful.”

  When he hears me use the word beautiful to describe it, he cringes like I just said something horribly offensive, like I just called a dung beetle sexy.

  “But they are vermin… They are like Earth cockroaches.”

  “She looked more human than Kynarians do.”

  “It doesn’t matter what she looks like,” he says. “Would you mate with a rodent if it looked like a human female?”

  I shrug. “I guess not. But at the time I didn’t know.”

  He waves the conversation away, realizing it’s not important why I did it. It’s already done and there’s no going back.

  “How do you feel?” he asks. “Are you sick?”

  I nod my head, but don’t get into the details.

  He sighs at me and then drops into deep thought.

  “So what do I do?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “I’m not sure. Jelly bugs usually only go after animals. It’s never happened with intelligent beings before. Normally, we just put down infected livestock. We don’t try to save them.”

  “So there’s nothing I can do?”

  He takes another long pause to think.

  “You have to go back to Earth,” he says. “Leave Kynaria immediately.”

  I’m surprised by his words. “Leave the planet?”

  “Right now. Get a ticket to Earth and go to a human hospital.”

  “Why can’t I go to a Kynarian hospital?”

  He shakes his head. “They’ll just put you in quarantine. They’ll think you’re a pervert or think humans are a primitive subspecies that isn’t worth saving. They’ll show you no sympathy.” He gets to his feet and stands me up. “Human doctors will at least do everything they can to save you.”

  My hands are trembling as he tells me this. He tries to hold me steady.

  He says, “Don’t worry about the show. Just get out of here. The longer you’re in Kynaria the more danger you’ll be in.”

  I don’t say another word. He walks me out the door and puts me on a slug-taxi. I don’t even think about doing anything else but follow his advice.

  Back in the hotel room, Mick has company over. The waitress from the cloning restaurant is with him, her clothes spread across the floor. I don’t bother being polite and race through the room toward my luggage. Mick and the woman are naked in the pool of mud, moaning, writhing together. The Kynarian’s naked flesh is pale and puffy. It makes it appear as though Mick is fucking a giant marshmallow.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Mick asks me.

  He doesn’t seem bothered to start up a conversation while in the middle of having sex. The Kynarian woman also doesn’t seem to mind, continuing to bounce and wiggle against him as though sexual intercourse around other people isn’t uncommon in their culture.

  “I’m leaving,” I say.

  Mick looks over the woman’s shoulder and glares at me. “What did you say?”

  I pack clothes from the bathroom into my luggage as I say, “I’m going back to Earth.”

  “No…” Mick says, finally pushing the woman off of him. “You’re staying here. You’ve got a job to do.”

  I shake my head. “I’ve got to get to the h
ospital.”

  Mick swims through the mud toward me. The woman stays wrapped around him, riding on his back, squeezing his leathery flesh against hers.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he asks.

  I don’t bother explaining it to him. I don’t have time. After I finish packing, I realize I’ve forgotten something.

  “Shit…” I say.

  I pat down my pockets and then dig through my coat. Then I reopen my luggage and tear furiously through my clothes.

  “My passport…” I say. “Where the fuck is my passport?”

  Mick rolls over in the muck and nibbles on the mushroom girl’s neck. “How should I know?”

  “Did you do anything with it?” he asks.

  He shrugs. “No.”

  “I had it yesterday…” I say.

  But the outfit I was wearing yesterday isn’t here anymore.

  “What happened to the clothes from last night?” I ask Mick.

  He doesn’t seem to care enough to answer, completely over the fact that I’m abandoning the show and focused more on the woman again.

  “You said you found me naked outside the brothel,” I tell him. “What did you do with the clothes I was wearing?”

  Mick just snorts a laugh. “I never found your clothes. I brought you back naked.”

  “Are you serious?” I cry.

  He doesn’t answer, dunking his head in the mud to lick the girl’s sludgy breasts.

  When I realize I have to go all the way back to the sex-slug brothel to find it, I say, “Fuck…”

  I don’t have a choice. I have to go back there. They’ll never let me teleport back to Earth without it.

  On the way out the door, I call out, “Tell Andrew Zimmern I’m sorry.”

  But Mick is too deep in the mud to hear me.

  Chapter Six

  I take a slug-taxi toward the brothel outside of town. The place is over an hour away. I wanted to get off this planet as soon as possible, but now I probably won’t leave until late tonight. I don’t even know if there will be any more trips to Earth available by the time I get to the transport station. I could be stuck here until tomorrow. And if trips between Kynaria and Earth aren’t very popular, I could be stuck here for days. I might even have to go to a completely new planet for treatment if there’s no way I can get to Earth soon enough.