The Nest

by Gregory A. Douglas

festering pustule that seemed ready to split open, almost as if a buried-alive victim were straining to push out of a mouldy grave.

For cockroaches, particularly, the ever-enlarging dump was a great progenitive womb—warm, fetid, moist, with food so cornucopianly plentiful that everything crawling, creeping, and scurrying through the foulness could gorge to satiation.

doughtily

masked by fearless resolution

redoubtable

Causing fear or alarm

susurration

a whispering sound

inimical

reflecting or indicating hostility. unfriendly, hostile

sibilance

a hissing quality or sound

umbrageous

affording shade, spotted with shadows

doyen

person considered to be knowledgeable or uniquely skilled as a result of long experience in some field of endeavor

He put Bo’s hands behind his back and slipped handcuffs on.

Bo complained, “How the fuck we supposed to get dressed with our hands behind our back?”

paroxysm

a fit, attack, or sudden increase or recurrence of symptoms

necrotic

affected with, characterized by, or producing death of a usually localized area of living tissue

gelid

extremely cold

As Bo Leslie burrowed into the leaves for warmth, the prickliness began to soften under the weight of his body. The man pressed deeper down. It began to feel good, he’d be damned if his cock hadn’t found itself a place like the old butter groove. Hey, this wasn’t bad!

Beneath the pulsating streams of blood carrying his life out of him, the man felt as if metal saws were ripping across his body, not so much devouring him as a jungle animal might, but slicing him apart.

saturnalia.

an unrestrained often licentious celebration- orgy

anathema

someone or something intensely disliked or loathed

phantasmagoric

a bizarre or fantastic combination, collection, or assemblage

excrescence

a distinct outgrowth on a human or animal body or on a plant, especially one that is the result of disease or abnormality.

excoriation,

also referred to as chronic skin-picking or dermatillomania

imprecations.

a spoken curse

inchoate

just begun and so not fully formed or developed; rudimentary.

obstreperously.

marked by unruly or aggressive noisiness

In human laws, there was the canon stated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Your right to swing your cane ends where my nose begins.

canard

perfidy.

deceitfulness; untrustworthiness

atavistic

relating to or characterized by reversion to something ancient or ancestral

None of the people on board saw the small blot that skittered on the Jessica’s scrubbed deck for a split second before disappearing in a coil of Elias Johnson’s neatly arranged rope.