MicroHorror

Srinivasan was at the village well one night when he was bitten on the left ankle by a snake. It wasn’t a snake he had seen before, and he thought he had seen all the snakes. The wound swelled. Srinivasan hobbled back to his hut, and had his uncle look at the bite. Uncle sucked on the bite and spat out anything that might have been inside, and said to go to the doctor to get the snakebite medicine. That was a large needle in the rump, which did not make his ankle feel better but made his rump feel worse. The ankle reduced swelling, and in a week it was back to normal. Srinivasan was relieved the wound was not fatal. But it did have lasting effects. Four weeks after his bite, the wound began to be irritated. It turned itchy, and greenish, and Srinivasan worried it was gangrenous. But it was worse. Srinivasan’s left leg began to pull into his torso, as if it were a turtle’s leg. The right leg did so, too, as did his arms. Srinivasan was changing, becoming some malformed stump. But his neck felt longer, and the feeling wasn’t horrible but invigorating. His clothes began falling away from him, and he crawled, slithered more aptly, out of them and out his hut’s door. The last conscious thought Srinivasan had before a night of mindless killing was that he thought this sort of thing only happened with wolf bites.