Residents

No one has a name here, not anymore. What nomenclature clings in attribution, like pond scum, is forged in loathing and dread and what few shared experiences connect the haunted nameless. There is the Sitter, crawling with vermin she treats as offspring, who offers eroded nipples and gnawed finger stumps for suckle, introduces them all as Junior. Then there is the Digger, who pockmarks the mountainside with prairie dogged intensity, one graveyard after the other, as worn and weary as his battered shovel, his splintered hands. The Shriekers cannot stand each other, and ears bleed to hear their cries of vehement hatred, or greeting, since neither can they leave each-others company. The Shadow is named for his absence, his relentless pursuit of definition he cannot find, the empty places he fills that fill him.

But all of them fear the Bitch.

Every hiding place is her hunting ground, and she makes her home in the black and twisted heart of the mountain. When names are sheared like damning karma, they are lost in the void she keeps. Her chitinous, numerous appendages race and taste and pierce and pinch. Her body rises like dome, cancerous and Cancerous, a crab with a perfect shell of rust-red armor split by a long, bruised slit. When she feeds, rages, sings, the swollen vulva contracts and she crowns, a face peering, a mouth yawing open, and then shoulders, arms, a torso with little to do anymore with human musculature, breasts flopping and a long ribbon of unhealthy grey labia trailing down her stomach to the hideous perineum that marries once-woman and beast.

The Bitch must feed. Pale, sun-starved skin spattered in blood, she is a messy eater. Jaws unhinge and teeth erupt from the empty void that is her mouth, and all that lives and bleeds and suffers sustain her, but her hunger burns unending. Like the black heart of the mountain, the Bitch can never be sated.