Eczema: A curse

scritch scritch Oh? Don’t mind me. I have everything under control. I have different techniques and contingency for my… shall I call it for what it truly is, a curse. Unlike Fred, the man that gave, no contracted, the curse to me in the first place. Mind you, scritch I am not a sufferer of this curse like Fred, although I have suffered plenty for it. I consider myself a container, so it doesn’t spread to others like it did to me, and to share what I have learned with others. See how I haven’t been scratching at all? The trick is to only slightly scrape it with the tip of your nails, scritch, like that. It calms my skin enough to allow myself to think, while not wake them.

Them? Yes, I have a name for them, the fairies that scrawl inside of me, that try to take over my body, like they did poor Fred. You can think of them as bees how they travel across my legs and arms and chest and back, leaving their magic dust behind on the boils and patches of tattered flesh, expanding their dreaded domain. Attacking them only spreads the dust further, destroying not only myself, but others unfortunate enough to scritch scritch be too close. just a moment i might need my cream the inspectors dragged me here too suddenly for me to get a new tub, but this one will do trust me this isn’t too much cream.

Many sufferers of the curse, like Fred, did not know this. But I do. I have learned of their tactics, and now I am here, on purpose, not to be “evaluated” or so your inspectors called, but to share knowledge. the cream is homemade soothes the itch and weakened the fairies damn fairies My condition, as you can see, might not project confidence, but as you may have gleamed from our conversation, I fare much better than those of the same ill fate, like Fred.

Let’s start from the beginning. I was born in 1937, and joined the force when I was of age. After serving for 10 years, they sent me from the front to the backline, doing speeches and encouraging more youngsters to join. I was supposed to retire at 40, fully decorated with honours and badges and diplomas and medals. But they sent me back for the Third. I didn’t mind it one bit, to be perfectly honest with you. I am not a man of peace. I was the strongest, toughest in my squadron. Even now I barely know what a cold is, except for the occasional sniffle when the weather changes. But in 2012, I met Fred.

Flakey Fred, we called him, for you would see his scabs before his face. By the time we met, the curse had already eaten him alive. At any moment of the day, you look at Fred and you’ll see him biting his nails and murmur “don’t scratch.” But 7/10 times, you would hear it, the satisfying, relieving scritch scritch. As commanding officer, I had to deal with him, after the squad was tired of him tossing and turning and the scritch scritch he did to his head, his shoulders, his back, his arms, his legs, his face, his neck. No order, no rhyme or reason, it spreads where it pleases.

Give in to the call, and you’ll initially rub it a bit. Ah, that feels good, I can stop now. Then it came back, more uncomfortable than before. You want to feel relieve again, if only a little bit. Before you know it, your body became a warzone, with scarring and red patches of unhealed, healing, ruptured skin, of flaky parts, of trenches where you dug your fingers in lightly, of moats of blood where you stab yourself with your nails, of a bomb blast, like the one on Fred’s leg. You can see it, the pink, sensitive to the touch crater. Ugly, so ugly. the itch becomes reactive connect its own synapses to the brain just thinking about it makes me want to scratch Thing is, the thing never heals, never had a chance to. It’s just there, forever, because the man keeps touching it, rubbing it, peeling the skin off it…

That morning, as usual, you would see Fred dragged himself into the dining hall of the base, dark bags under her eyes. As his doctor’s request, the cadet was allowed to wear his winter uniform even though the thermostat never went below 28 where we were stationed. No one could eat when he was around, for in addition to the scritch, blood would constantly drip out from his sleeves into his plate, even though I he just showered, under my supervision flaky fred’s body was always raw and bledding, shredded, cut, blistered, scars and newly form gapes crisscrossed intersected like railroad tracks. The ointment and anti-itch cream (we have plenty for the mosquitoes) did help: the chemical burns when the cream got inside the cuts, according to Fred, was heavenly.

scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch Ah, you’re back. No, I wasn’t scratching, but yes, it would be best to handcuff me. That’s what we did to Fred to save him. He told us, as long as he can live a whole day without touching rubbing scrubbing himself, he’ll be fine. And no doctor, he said, Fred hated the doctor. I too have grown to hate those men in lab coats. Some wanted to experiment on me, although I was willing to share the knowledge to fight against this curse. No, they are not like you at all, if I can believe what your inspectors said. Anyway, Fred did not look better after the 24-hour period, where he asked us to put him in a straitjacket, diaper included, and to cuff his hands and legs, suspending him mid-air so he couldn’t rub himself on any surface.

It was too late for him, the curse had its root too deep, and Fred was no more a man than an incubator for the fairies. And they will get out. When we came to check on him, Fred was staring at the ceiling, his breathing was so shallow my heartbeat drowned it out. “Fred, are you better now?” we asked and he nodded. Our first mistake. Our second mistake was thinking we could handle a starving, sleep-deprived man. We took his nod as a sign that he was okay, that he was better, but he wasn’t. Fred was long gone. They were in control, and they waited. They waited until we freed their host. The body looked like the result of a gardener’s hard work, raking and combing through the tissue-soil. Then, Fred cried no the itching wouldn’t stop i thought it would but it didn’t something is inside of me please make it stop make it stop make it stop please kill me.

“Let me stop you there, Mr. Monroe, we already know the rest of that story.”

“We’ve heard of the condition before, and it is understandable for someone to freak out, to think that they were infected given the horrible experience they were subjected to. Couple that with the stress of your situation, à la the Third War, and no wonder you developed such a strong case of phantom itch.”

“We can assure you, Mr. Monroe, that the condition is not contagious, and everything you’ve experienced so far is merely psychological.”

“We have, however, develop medicines for exactly this phenomenon. To use your terms, we can put those “fairies” latching onto your brains to sleep.”

“Thank you for your service, Mr. Monroe. For the country, and for fighting against your “condition” for so long. But you’re in good hands now, soldier. Let us ease your struggle.”

end of tape 2. Tape 1 is currently located at coordinates XX-XXXX, file marked under Year 2035.

“He came close, I gave him that.”

“He was going to break sooner or later. Look at those hands, tranquilizers enough to subdue an elephant and they are still moving.”

“You got to give it to the guy, no one has been “cursed” for that long. Just imagine the size of the hive inside him.”

We couldn’t pronounce their name, but we called them Fred, the Writhing Hivemind. We learned of their existence around the First War, when a hive of fairies bursted out of a marine. We didn’t lie to Monroe, the “condition” isn’t contagious. He was just unlucky to have been chosen as the next host. Fred claimed to be an Ancient One, and “they have awakened to quiet the Earth once again.” We have heard that before. In fact, Fred sits at the bottom of a long list of Ancient Ones, bickering days in days out to see who would get the honour to wipe out humanity. We often bring those that has been affected by Fred here, breaking them open like a pinata as an offering to Fred. A self-proclaim strategist, this Ancient One is content with sitting back and waiting for his “army” to grow sizable enough to infect every man and woman in one fell swoop.

Two issues with the plan: by the time the new patch of fairies grow inside Fred’s chosen one, the last patch would have already died out without their host. Second, Fred knew he wasn’t the most powerful. So, there he stewed in the cottage we assigned for him, sleeping, pulsating, groaning. Now about Monroe. The dedicated soldier Monroe, the strong-willed, physically fit, has been alive for at least 3000 years Monroe.

We found Fred in Australia, after a mining company dug straight into his lair. Pictures showed a giant, black honeycomb system, where the walls would flake off revealing millions of those fairies. Even now, teams are mapping the structure out as best as they could, knowing full well those fairies could decide to change move an inch to the left and everything would change. In the pile is a picture of my grandfather, or at least his face, poking out of the wall of miniscule creatures, smiling. A few flips of the photos, and grandpa wasn’t smiling anymore. He couldn’t, with his stomach split in the middle and a black cloud spewing out of it. The artistic integrity is not loss on me. You find entertainment in this job whenever you can.

I remember meeting Fred for the first time, long after he was brought into the cottage, but before Monroe. Fred sent someone for me, specifically (or as I was told by my supervisor), and I was to come with two “feeds.” Feed A was a young man of about 15 years old with 20 murders under his belt, and another was a bodyguard for a drug lord. Healthy, despicable men, whose suffering were swift in comparison to Fred’s usual methods. They were hungry, I was informed, after a long nap, and the results were two human… sheets, flat and punctured and bloodless, as if squeezed by a hydraulic press.

After the meal, Fred got to talking, his thoughts pierced directly into my brain. They wanted a deal. A simple, yet effective way for him to grow their power and followings: a name. Not to him, but his curse. Normalize it, let his power runs deep into the lexicon of mankind, give hope with pills and creams and herbs and alternative treatments, allow some to think they can overcome the condition with willpower, fund groups of sufferers, and help those groups grow. Of course, Fred could easily make his curse contagious, but that would enrage the Ancient Ones far stronger than he was, not to mention we could easily quarantine and deal with plague-adjacent diseases (after all, we have survived the black plague, corona, the Z outbreak…). No, Fred’s aim was our genes, to put his fairies inside our DNA, and eventually, as they envisioned, men’s sense of community will bring about its downfall.

And thus, eczema was created.

This story was originally published on my Substack. If you would like to: