Archive of Our Own ^beta

The sun blazed over the sands of Satan’s Anvil like a raging inferno, the very air beneath it shimmering with heat. Lizards scampered among the litter left behind by visitors from long ago, using their camouflage to match the patterns of the various chip bags and soda cans slowly being swallowed up by the desert sand. The light humid breeze blowing along the desert dragged with it dusty old tumbleweeds that, in a few weeks time, would gather en mass to destroy the neighboring Ogdenville. But that is not the tale we’re concerned with at the moment. No, our tale, a tale of mankind reaping what he’s sown from his countless crimes against Mother Nature and the unjust loss of childhood innocence, begins with the young girl walking among the strangely-colored lizards and destructive tumbleweeds.

A young girl named Lisa Simpson.

She and the bulk of her underfunded school had made the pilgrimage to Satan’s Anvil for a field trip, the only one of decent caliber they could afford. Many students uttered grunts and groans of annoyance and despair upon hearing they would be spending a perfectly good afternoon baking in the desert sun but not Lisa. Ever the glutton for knowledge, Lisa immediately saw an opportunity to learn within the trip’s destination, to spend a whole day among one of the last truly wild places untouched by man. Lisa was ecstatic and secured her mother’s signature that very night. Now, having unintentionally wandered away from the relative safety of the group, little Lisa Simpson found herself sauntering through the desert, taking in all the natural beauty it had to offer. From the birds flying overhead to the short-lived mirages on the horizon, Lisa drank it all in with a smile on her face. Once she had run out of things to see, she referred to the tan brochure in her hands, labeled “The Living Desert”

“While beautiful, the desert also harbors hidden dangers,” She read from the sweat-stained pages. “Cacti, poisonous snakes, and most deadly of all-” With her eyes following every word printed along the brochure, Lisa failed to notice the slight elevation of the ground she was treading along. She cried out as her foot stepped over the edge and she lost her balance, sliding down the hill with the rocks scraping her back and behind. The slide itself lasted but a few seconds before Lisa landed on the ground but she already knew at that moment she would be feeling the burns on her back for some time. Dazed, Lisa rested her head against the rock and decided to wait for the pain to subside before she tried to move. It was only now dawning on her how foolish she had been, allowing her curiosity to lead her from the group. She could practically hear Bart mocking her right now, bringing up all the times she had berated him for not following the rules even as she had failed to do so today. Somehow, that very thought hurt worse than the abrasions on her back.

Not but a few seconds after she fell, Lisa felt something crawl onto her leg. She opened her eyes but they quickly shut themselves again as dust fell into them, allowing Lisa only a blurry image of what was on her. She tried to open them again and once again, the dust won. Lisa wiped her eyes with enough force to make them sting and blinked a few times, her vision getting clearer and clearer with each and every blink. By this time, the creature that had crawled on top of her had made it to her chest and Lisa could see it was about as big as her hand. Upon her final blink, Lisa’s vision was clear enough to fully intake her unwanted visitor.

It was a scorpion, black in color but peppered in bleeding sores, the biggest of which hung unto its tail. The stinger was blood-red and the pincers were purple and swollen. Where the scorpion’s cluster of eyes would normally rest, there was a single wrinkled and blood-shot eyeball, almost human like. It seemed to be staring at the sun rather than Lisa and its swollen shape gave the impression that it was fit to burst in the heat at any given moment.

“Scorpion!” Lisa cried as she tried to crawl backward alongside the hill’s edge. A tiny rock dug into her left palm but she ignored the pain as she desperately tried to shake the scorpion off. She thrashed about as she crawled, kicking up her legs and the dust beneath them to drive the horrid creature off her body. Alas, it had no effect and the monstrous scorpion clung onto the fabric of her dress. This chaos continued until Lisa crawled into a small field of wild roses. The hard and sharp thorns lining their stems pricked Lisa and dug into her flesh, stopping her in her tracks. As if waiting for this moment, the scorpion continued to crawl closer to the terrified girl’s face and clacked its swollen claws.

Lisa tried to scream, both out of fear and out of the hope that her group was close by enough to hear. Her scream was cut short as the scorpion stabbed its leaking stinger into her throat. Lisa croaked and felt a single line of blood flow down from the wound. For a brief moment of time, Lisa’s fear turned to rage and she slapped the scorpion off of her, the barbed tail taking a piece of skin with it as its owner flew. The scorpion landed on a nearby rock, breaking its back against the surface and sliding down with a loud and enraged hiss, its massive eyeball popped and leaking. Lisa saw this and, fighting through her pain, grabbed the rock and crushed the dying monstrosity with a single slam.

Lisa tried to breathe, tried to replace the oxygen she lost in the struggle but found to her growing horror that she was gasping when she intended to pant. She felt a wetness in front of her throat and touched it. The scorpion hadn’t just stung her in the throat, it left a goddamn hole in it. ‘Gotta get help!’ Lisa thought as she began to crawl through the wild roses, scraping against even more thorns. ‘Gotta get help!’ Between the grievous wound in her throat and the thorns pricking her, Lisa was in a world of agony. Her only relief came when she noticed her body was starting to go numb and her vision began to fade. “No…” She whimpered as she poked through the edge of the flower field, deathly afraid that she was experiencing her final moments at the tender age of eight. “No….Not yet…..Please not yet…”

She passed out the moment she had pulled her legs out from the roses.

Lisa heard the voices first. They were faint and echoed yet they sounded strangely familiar. Then the light peered in through the darkness and Lisa realized she was awake. Slowly, she opened her eyes, allowing the light to blind her for a few moments. As her vision adjusted to the light, she noticed it was the ceiling fan of an indoor room. The memories of what happened prior to her losing consciousness came flooding back like water from a broken dam and she whimpered as she recalled the grotesque abomination of a scorpion that had stung her. It was this whimpering that had alerted her two guests to her waking up.

The first was Doctor Hibbert who peered into Lisa’s field of vision from her right. “Well well well, would you look at that?” He said with a smile. “Looks like Sleeping Beauty’s finally awake and we didn’t even need to find a prince. Now that’s what I call a true independent woman Ah-He-He-He!”

The second visitor, peering from the left with a tearful, worried expression on her face, was none other than Lisa’s mother Marge. “Oh! My poor baby!” She bent down and planted several kisses on Lisa’s cheeks, wrapping the little girl in her arms in the process. “Thank God you’re awake!”

“What…...What happened to me?” Lisa asked wearily.
“What happened was you collapsed in the desert due to heat exposure.” Hibbert explained with a finger wag. “Looks like someone didn’t properly hydrate themselves.”

“Principal Skinner says you wandered from the group,” Marge continued. “Bart and his friends found you next to a rose bed, covered in scratches. Oh Lisa, what were you thinking?”

“I...I’m sorry, Mom.” Lisa apologized. “I was looking at the brochure they gave us and I guess I let myself get lost. I...I’ll never be that stupid again.”

“It’s okay, sweetie,” Marge reassured her daughter. “We all make mistakes sometimes.” She turned to Doctor Hibbert. “Will she be okay to go home today?”

“Oh of course,” Hibbert confirmed. “We already tested her for heat stroke and Desert Butt. Aside from a few scrapes and a light sunburn, she’s right as rain. I’ll just give the staff the all clear and you can take her right on home in an hour.”

“Thank you, doctor.” Marge replied gratefully.

“Wait!” Lisa croaked. “What about the scorpion?”

“The scorpion?” Hibbert asked. “What scorpion?”

“Back at the flower bed, there was this really, really ugly scorpion that crawled on top of me and it got me right in the throat.” Lisa clenched her own neck for emphasis. “I’m certain I suffered some heat-related damage laying in the desert and all but the real reason I got knocked out was because of that damned scorpion!”

Both Marge and Hibbert exchanged an uneasy glance.

“What’s wrong? Is the scorpion’s venom still inside me?” She gasped. “Did one of my organs shut down?”

Slowly Hibbert turned back to Lisa. “Lisa, there’s no wound on your throat.”

“Huh?” Lisa rubbed her neck. “But I feel-” That’s when Lisa noticed something about the skin on her throat, namely the lack of a gaping leaking hole. She felt her neck all over and failed to find even a scratch on it, let alone a hole. There wasn’t even a rough spot with a stinger still stuck to it. It was as if she had never been stung at all. “...nothing?”

“And, on the off chance that the roses might have belonged to the poisonous Hanahaki mortes family, I had you tested for poison and venom as well while you were out,” Hibbert explained. “And we found neither!”

“But...that can’t be….” Lisa stuttered. “I felt it crawl on me, felt its stinger in my throat…”

Marge placed her hand behind Lisa’s head. “Oh...maybe it was just a mirage from the heat or just a bad dream you had while you were unconscious,” She suggested before planting a kiss on Lisa’s forehead. “In any case, it’s over now and we’re taking you home.”

“Right,” Hibbert agreed. “Now, if you’ll just come along with me, Mrs. Simpson, we can get the annoying paperwork out of the way Ah-He-He-He.”

“What’s so funny about that?” Marge asked.

“Nothing but I recently been obsessing over the saying that laughter is the best medicine and trying to do it as often as I can to try and get rid of this migraine I’ve been suffering from.” He groaned as he rubbed his head. “Nope! Still painful!”

“Ohh.” Marge turned to Lisa. “I’m going with Doctor Hibbert for a bit. Your father’s picking up Bart from school and they’ll be here any minute.” She tried to leave, only for Lisa to grab her wrist.

“No! Please don’t go!” She begged.

“It’ll be alright, Lisa.” Marge gently removed her daughter’s hand from her own. “I know you had a scary experience today but the worst is over now. You’ll see.” She patted her arm and then followed Doctor Hibbert out of the room.

Lisa sat up as she watched her mother vanish into the hospital hallways. Slowly, she looked down at herself. Her dress had been replaced with a teal gown and her arms were wrapped in bloodied bandages. Upon removing the blanket from her body, Lisa noticed those same bandages around her legs and feet as well. She fixed the blanket over herself and looked up to the ceiling, her hands grabbing each other over her chest as if in prayer. ‘I was so sure there was a scorpion on me. That sting it….it felt so real…’ She rubbed her throat again. ‘But there’s no mark, no wound. But then how…’ Lisa sighed in defeat and laid her head back down. ‘Maybe Mom’s right. Maybe it was just a bad dream.’ Laying down made Lisa realize just how exhausted she was and she yawned. ‘In any case, I’m too tired to sort this out now. I’ll just get some rest while I can…’

Lisa fell back into the land of the unconscious within the next five minutes.

Lisa wasn’t sure how she ended up back in the desert. She could not recall ever leaving the hospital or redressing in her old outfit nor could she think of any conceivable reason she would want to return to the place that nearly took her life. And yet, here she was, clad in the same red dress she was wearing when she fainted in the desert, wandering aimlessly through the endless sands.

And yet, everything seemed different now. For one thing, it was night time, the blazing sun having been replaced with a wavy moon that seemed to shimmer in the heat of the desert air. The ground was far more smooth as well, with great dunes of sand replacing the boulders and cliffs usually found at Satan’s Anvil. It reminded Lisa more of the pictures of the Sahara Desert she had seen in books and on TV. The entire desert seemed alien to her even as she still felt an air of familiarity with it.

As she walked, Lisa felt something crunch beneath her shoe and looked down to see a bright-red scorpion in pieces, its yellow innards and shattered carapace stuck to her sole. “Ewww!” Lisa gagged as she attempted to scrap the scorpion’s remains off on the sand. This only resulted in more sand getting stuck to the scorpion and weighing her shoe down until her foot sunk into the ground halfway. Lisa groaned in annoyance and kicked her foot in the air to release it. As she did so, she kicked up a cloud of dust and among this dust, panicking and writhing like serpents, were tiny scorpions that had been sleeping beneath the ground. Lisa gasped and then screamed as the enraged arachnids fell on her, pinching her and stinging her all over her exposed shoulders and arms. She jumped and shook and slapped and clawed at her arms to get the pests off of her, throwing up more sand in the air in the process which in turn released more smaller scorpions to rain down on her. Before Lisa knew it, she was slowly sinking in a never-ending sink pit of stinging, writhing scorpions. The combined venom of their stingers was beginning to kick in, her vision was blurry, her limbs feeling as heavy as concrete. Lisa’s screams turned to whimpers and sobs as she felt the ground give way beneath her, more scorpion than sand now. With a final cry for help, Lisa punched her hand through the arachnids and reached out to the sky, as fruitless as she knew it would be.

The last thought she had before her vision went completely dark was how she could, ironically enough, make out the constellation Scorpio in the sky above.

Lisa woke up with a shout. She sat up in her bed at once and panted heavily. It took her three seconds to realize she had been dreaming and another four for her to remember the trip home from the hospital. She had been so exhausted from the entire ordeal that she elected to go to bed the second supper was over. She wiped her hand against her cheek and realized she was drenched with sweat. She threw the covers off and climbed out of her sweat-soaked bed. She trudged to the window and pressed her face against the glass. It was early morning, the sky a fleeting hue of purple and blue. Within the next hour, she would be on the school bus awaiting the first day since her incident at the desert, an incident she was certain many students and teachers alike were aching to remind her of. With a gulp, Lisa felt the front of her throat one more time. She still failed to feel anything but her skin in that spot and she couldn’t decide if she should be relieved or frightened.

Wanting to distance herself from her dreams and from anything scorpion-related really, Lisa got dressed in a flash and headed down stairs for breakfast. By this time, her whole family were down there as well, her father and siblings at the table and her mother washing dishes in the sink. It was Bart who first noticed his sister stalk into the room and with a sly snicker, he reached into his pocket. “Hey Lis,” He greeted. “My friends got a few lollipops from that new exotic candy store in town. You want one for later?”

“Umm….sure.” Lisa replied as she sat herself at the table. “I suppose.”

With a cackle, Bart pulled a rectangular lollipop out of his pocket and shoved it into Lisa’s face. It was lime-green and virtually normal but trapped within the hardened candy was a small yellow scorpion. “Bon appetite!”

Lisa screamed sharply at the sight of the candy-encased arachnid. “Mom! Bart’s making fun of my trauma from yesterday!”

“Bart, be nice to your sister!” Marge demanded without so much as turning back around. “She nearly died yesterday back in the desert so you should show her a little more kindness.”

Bart scoffed. “Big deal! I nearly die all the time and no one’s ever extra nice to me.”

“It’s called the Double Standard.” Homer explained. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

“Yeah, right!” Bart rolled his eyes and crossed his arms. “If I live long enough to be older.”

“What was that?” Homer suddenly grabbed Bart by the throat. “Why you little!? I’ll show you to be pessimistic at your age!”

“Case...in...point!” Bart wheezed.

Lisa sighed as her mother came by with an empty bowl and a box of Krusty-O’s. She set them down at the table and caressed her eldest daughter’s chin. “How’d you sleep, sweetheart? Any bad dreams?”

“I guess you can say that,” Lisa admitted. “I don’t want to talk about them but suffice it to say, they were about scorpions.”

“Oh dear, again with the scorpions,” Marge pressed the bowl before her daughter. “Maybe you should stay home today?”

“Can’t” Lisa replied flatly. “I have a sinking suspicion Miss Hoover is planning a pop quiz and I don’t wanna damage my perfect streak.”

Marge uttered one of her trademark murmurs. “Well, at least have some breakfast before you go to school. You can’t force yourself to pretend everything’s fine on an empty stomach!”

“Thank you, Mom.” Lisa said as she gripped the bowl before her. Marge planted a kiss on her forehead and returned to her dishes and Homer and Bart continued to fight and Maggie knocked her Cheerios upside down. Lisa poured in the Krusty-O’s and the milk that had been sitting at the center of the table and helped herself to a spoonful. Now, Lisa had never exactly been a super fan of Krusty’s trademark cereal, she wouldn’t even consider it in her top ten. But it was tasty and usually edible so she usually went with it for a quick breakfast choice. It wasn’t the best taste in the world but it was good enough.

Today, however, it wasn’t good enough. In fact, it tasted quite bland, as if what little flavor these colored rings of food-dye possessed had been sucked away and replaced with cardboard. Lisa chalked it up to being stressed and forced herself through the first and second mouthfuls, the milk feeling sour on her tongue. Upon the third bite, however, the repulsive taste became too much and Lisa dropped her spoon in the bowl with a gag. Marge was the only one to notice her daughter quitting breakfast and rushed to her side at once. “Lisa, are you alright?”

“I’m fine, Mom!” Lisa tried to assure her, even as she uttered a sick little burp. She covered her mouth. “I...I guess the milk just stayed out of the fridge too long.”

“Well, maybe I can make you some oatmeal.” Marge offered.

Just the sound of that word made Lisa’s stomach curl. “No, thank you. I...I think I’ll just wait outside the door until the school bus comes. Love you!” She rose up in her chair and gave her mother a quick peck on the cheek. Then she jumped out from the table and did the same thing with her father. “See ya later!” She grabbed her backpack and rushed to the living room.

“Oh Lisa,” Marge whispered as she watched her daughter speed off. “I hope you’re alright.”

Lisa found herself sprinting to the living room and had to stop herself before she crashed into the front door. She started to pant, feeling that same wave of heat she felt in her bed this morning and sweat forming on her skin. This, coupled with the knots in her stomach, made her a very uncomfortable little girl indeed. “What the hell’s wrong with me? My cuts are healed and my sunburn’s gone so why am I still feeling so….sick?” Lisa coughed a little. “Maybe it’s just stress. Yeah, that’s it! Just stress!” She laughed uneasily to herself. “I’m just stressed is all and I need to get over it. After all, it’s a brand new day.” She opened the front door and stepped outside. Already, the brisk morning air cooled her overheating skin and the sky’s soft blue hue combined with the birdsong around her put Lisa’s racing mind at ease. She took a deep breath and sighed with content, her hands on her hips.

‘Yep, it’s over now! The desert. The scorpion. All of it! It’s over now! Today’s a new day and I intend to make the best of it.’ Lisa declared to herself. ‘Mark my words, today will be a great day!’

‘Man, I hate being wrong!’ Lisa thought as she was shoved headfirst into the locker.

She slid down with a groan, grunting as she hit the floor. She could feel the vibrations of her attacker as they stomped toward her and, against her own screaming instincts to flee, looked up to lock eyes with Francine Rhenquist as the heavyset girl ceased her approach. “Why are you looking at me like that, nerd!?” She barked with that same thoughtless expression she usually carried when harassing Lisa. “Trying to start something?”

“I-I’m not looking at you in any way!” Lisa defended, even as she knew it would completely hopeless. “My expression is entirely neutral!”

“Oh, so you think you’re better than me, huh?” Francine growled. “Just because you like to use fancy words?” She kicked Lisa against the lockers, keeping her foot firmly planted on her chest. “I don’t have to take that kinda crap from a nerd like you!”

“Wha...What crap?” Lisa asked. “I was merely-”

Francine cut her off with a punch to the jaw, once again knocking her head against the locker. The entire hallway seemed to reverberate with the sound of her skull smashing against the metal doors, yet no one but Francine was around to actually hear it. The sound put a smile on the bully’s face as she watched a trickle of blood flow from Lisa’s nose. “Heh. Good! Maybe that will knock the smart’s out of you, bring you down to our level, huh?”

Lisa only groaned in response. At this point, it was probably her safest option.

The school bell rang and Francine raised her head to the intercom with a growl. “Grr! Don’t think the bell will save you all the time! You just got lucky!” She stomped on Lisa’s stomach again, dragging her backward until she was completely flat on the floor. She shoved her giant sausage-like finger into Lisa’s nose. “We’ll pick this up next time, you turbo nerd!” She hacked and shot a wad of phlegm onto the starfish-haired girl’s face. “And you better have some lunch money on you next time!” With this, Francine stomped away from Lisa as the hallway began to fill with students heading toward the cafeteria. Not a single one of them gave Lisa so much as a passing glance as they walked, a few of them even stepping over her legs and hand. The middle child of the Simpson clan only groaned in response as the blows to her head left her too dazed to retaliate and she had to wait for it to stop swimming.

It was only when the bulk of the students vanished into the nearby cafeteria that Lisa felt stable enough to sit up from the floor. By now, the line of blood that flowed from her nose had dried and her head was throbbing in pain ‘Why?’ She thought. ‘Why does Francine treat me like this? What did I ever do to her?’ Lisa sighed as she forced herself back to her feet. A wave of dizziness flooded over her as she stood up and she was spared from falling back to the floor only by the lockers catching her. Through this intense dizziness came the all-too familiar sensation of anger Lisa usually felt after being bullied. This was nothing out of the ordinary, Lisa was certain every nerd and geek felt this way after taking the lumps society apparently thought they deserved. That thought alone increased Lisa’s anger.

‘Who does that little psycho think she is? Beating me up just because I’m different? Because I’m smarter? So what? You can’t spell your own name so you think that gives you the right to take it out on me? You only pick on me because you know I can’t fight back! You fucking coward! If I could, If I could hurt you the same way you hurt me, would you be eager to hurt me then? Would you? WOULD YOU!?’

Lisa gasped and shook her head, clutching it between her hands. ‘Oh my God! Did….Did I really think of the Eff word just now? Oh my….I….I’ve never thought that way of anyone before, not even when Bart burned my Pretty Pretty Magical Malibu Stacey at the stake for witchcraft!’ Lisa felt her stomach grumble and jumped at the chance to blame her intense anger on low blood sugar. ‘Heh. Maybe I’m hungrier than I thought. I did skip breakfast after all.’ Dusting herself off, Lisa headed for the cafeteria, feeling just the slightest bit better that she once again had an appetite. Perhaps, she was finally beginning to truly recover from her experience in the desert and from any silly notions of disfigured scorpions stinging her.

Lisa made it to the cafeteria all right. By then, most of the other students, including Francine, were already seated and shoveling spoonful after spoonful of semi-edible slop into their mouths. Lisa got her food and made it a point to find a table as far away from her ginger-haired bully as possible. Usually, as Lisa stalked along the cafeteria with her gaze locked on Francine, she did so in fear and dread, ready to jump out of her skin the moment her tormentor locked eyes with her. But today, at this moment, she only felt more of the venomous anger she had felt in the hallway. Her head still throbbed, her stomach ached with each rumble and she could taste the metallic flavor of blood in her mouth. Lisa glared at her bully as she made her way to the empty table on the other side of the cafeteria.

Lisa took a moment to breath, even pressing her thumbs and index fingers together for a quick meditation. This seemed to lessen the anger a bit but not enough for her liking. With a sigh, she broke up the stance and stuck her fork into her meal of broccoli and cheese. (There were also chicken bits in there but Lisa would just eat around those.) The moment she placed the cheese-covered vegetation in her mouth, however, she felt a sharp cramp in her stomach and coughed it back out onto her tray. Seeing that the broccoli and cheese was now ruined, Lisa opted for the small portion of Mac and Cheese besides it and placed it on her tongue. She tried to force herself to swallow but a great agony seized her throat, making her feel as if she would choke to death if she succeeded. She struggled with it for a moment and then spit it out over the broccoli, erupting into another coughing fit. A few students heard the coughing and turned to Lisa’s table but didn’t hold enough interest in her to ask her anything or approach her table. They simply stared at her.

Lisa could feel the eyes on her at once and looked up with a slight flush in her cheeks. She got up to run off and hide in the bathroom until she felt safe to come out but then she ended up doing something completely against her present will, something that made her realize the heat in her face was not a blush. “What the hell are you looking at!?” She snarled at her unwelcome audience who at once, turned back to their meals and resumed eating. At least one boy shivered as Lisa snapped at him and continued to tremble as he brought the food to his mouth.

Lisa caught herself with a gasp and covered her mouth. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Unsure of what else to do, Lisa dashed from her table toward the playground right outside the cafeteria. She knew it was against the rules to step foot here unless it was recess or at the end of the school day but that wasn’t enough to stop her. Lisa sprinted past the swings and the slide until she came to a tree marking the far end of the playground, far away from the prying eyes of her fellow students. With any luck, no one would even notice she was gone until recess.

‘What the hell’s wrong with me!?’ Her stomach curled again with a sickening moan and she held it with a cough. ‘It’s just like at breakfast! I can’t seem to eat anything!’ Another grumble. ‘But I’m so hungry! Yet, my stomach hurts so much! How is this possible!? How can-’

That’s when Lisa heard it. The sound of six tiny legs scrapping against bark. She wasn’t sure how she knew what it was but as she turned around, she wasn’t surprised in the least to see a giant grasshopper resting on the trunk next to her. The bright green insect stared at her with its seemingly dead gaze, its mouth parts shifting against each other, its antennae bobbing left and right in the air as if searching for something. As a lover of animals, Lisa couldn’t help but marvel at the beauty of the specimen before, the way the sunlight seemed to gleam off its green exoskeleton. Without thinking, she reached out for the grasshopper, holding her hand over it so that, in a blind panic, it ended up headbutting her palm upon takeoff. She gently closed her fingers around it to bar its escape and held it up to herself, ready to set it free in the air and watch it extend its wings as it took off.

Instead, without a second thought and upon yet another agony-riddled grumble from her stomach, she popped the insect into her mouth.

Lisa crunched it between her teeth, allowing its innards and juices to fall over her tongue. She chewed for a few more seconds, taking in the unique flavor she had never experienced before. It was only once she swallowed her prize did it dawn on her what she had just done and the gasp she uttered was practically a scream onto itself. “W-What the hell have I done!?” Disgusted, Lisa clawed at her tongue, trying to scrape away the lingering taste of the grasshopper. “Ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!” Lisa cried softly as she leaned against the tree, her disgust turning into remorse. “I’m so sorry, little grasshopper! I...I don’t know what’s happening to me!” She felt tears welling up in her eyes and wiped them away. “No. No! Won’t cry! Not gonna cry! I’m a big girl and I have to deal with this maturely!” Lisa continued to wipe at her face until she was certain no more tears would surface. By then, the bell had rung once again and a stampede of excited, screaming and laughing kids came flooding out of the doors. Upon hearing their cries of impending rapture, Lisa forced herself back to her feet, using the tree for balance. It was only then that she noticed that her stomach no longer seemed to hurt, even as it still grumbled for food. Lisa pressed a hand against her growling stomach which seemed to respond to her touch with a low gurgle.

‘I don’t know what but something’s going on with me,’ She decided. ‘I need Doctor Hibbert to check over me again. There’s gotta be something that he missed, something he must have overlooked because one thing’s becoming clear to me now and that’s that I didn’t imagine that scorpion stinging me!’ She felt her throat. ‘As much as I wish Mom was right, I know it was real! It had to be and when it stung me, it must have done something to my body!’

Still clutching her stomach, Lisa turned around and headed for the school. She would tell the school nurse about her stomach ache and see if she couldn’t get herself sent home early. (She had already aced Miss Hoover’s little pop quiz anyway.) Then, she would ask her mother for another appointment with Doctor Hibbert. She decided it would be best to leave the scorpion out of the equation for now, and save it for when the doctor did find the venom swimming in her system. For now, all she wanted was to get that visit secured and soon, before these strange symptoms of hers grew worse.

Life had a nasty habit of never letting you have what you want or even need. That was a lesson most people learned later in life. Lisa Simpson had learned it long ago from her experiences with her family. Usually, this little fact of life was simply an annoyance, a mere roadblock to overcome on the way to reach one’s goals. But as the days since her fateful encounter at Satan’s Anvil turned to weeks and the weeks well on their way to a month, it became an unforgivable cruelty that Lisa fear would cost her her very life.

As hoped for, Lisa’s complaints about a stomach cramp were enough to buy her an early ticket home for that day. Her mother was there in less then five minutes after the call and nearly talked Lisa’s ear off with all of her motherly concern. Thus, Lisa was able to secure a promise to visit Doctor Hibbert again rather easily. “I’ll dial his number the second we get home, sweetie!” Marge had promised. And like most of her mother’s promises, it was kept without delay.

But as devoted a mother as Marge was, not even she was a match for the monster that was the bureaucracy of the American Healthcare system. Hibbert was already swamped with appointments, a lot of which were baby deliveries or plastic surgery for wealthy celebrities. Money talks as they say and so Lisa’s crisis was bumped down to the bottom of the list, the lip injections of a B-grade actress taking priority over a child in constant agony. And all the while, her mysterious symptoms continued to worsen.

The pain in her stomach had spread throughout her insides and her back, leaving her in a consistent state of discomfort. Marge tried every medicine they had in the cabinet and even a few over-the-counter drugs she picked up at the pharmacy but all they seemed to be good for was lessening the pain for an hour at most. It hurt Lisa to move at all and thus, it took her forever to get out of bed in the morning or to crawl back into it at night. The only time she was granted relief from the pain was when she was asleep which, of course, was a battle onto itself.

But as bad as the pain was, it was nothing compared to the strange appetite Lisa seemed to have developed. As one can imagine, the turmoil inside her body rendered her unable to eat. She could only manage a few bites at every meal before the nausea became too much and she had to stop. What little she ate, she wound up throwing back up into the toilet an hour later although she had managed to keep this part of the process hidden from her parents at least. Probably for the best considering the vomit was always a thick bloody soup. One would think that, unable to take in any nourishment as she was, Lisa’s health would have deteriorated even faster. But the vomiting was only one secret Lisa was hiding from her family. In truth, Lisa was keeping up her strength, just not in the usual way.

It began with the roaches she found in her room then the crickets that crawled along the house and finally, the beetles prowling in the backyard. She wasn’t sure how she was finding them all so frequently, she was just able to smell the filth lingering on their bodies, hear the chirps they released in the hopes for a mate or spot them hiding within the grass and leaves. However she was able to do it, she was finding them constantly and, against all her morals as a vegetarian and friend to all animals, devouring them raw. All thought of the animal’s suffering, all the diseases that it could be carrying, vanished the moment she crushed them with her teeth and didn’t return until she swallowed them. She always felt disgusted afterward, even trying to make herself vomit once or twice but, as much as she hated to admit it, it seemed these disturbing morsels were the only sustenance her aching body would accept. They would even cause her cramps to numb for a moment, granting her just a bit of relief. This fact didn’t do anything to heal Lisa’s aching heart, however. As far as she was concerned, this whole situation just made her condition that much more of a living hell.

It probably didn’t help that all the insects and spiders in the world did nothing to help the stiffness in her hands.

She noticed it for the first time the night after she first ate that grasshopper. She was trying to calm her nerves with a little one-on-one time with her saxophone, pouring the anguish of the last few days into her music. This worked for a time until she missed a note. It threw her off but she chalked it up to just a simple accident and resumed playing. It happened again and again, her fingers hitting the buttons seconds after they were supposed to, turning the whole thing off-key. With an annoyed groan, Lisa looked down at her saxophone and the hands clasping them. There didn’t appear to be anything wrong with either one but her hands felt...off. She tried to move her thumb and it responded two seconds later. Worried, she dropped her saxophone and rose her hands to her face. She willed her fingers to wiggle and gasped as they responded at different times, like the wonky controls of a broken video game.

Lisa cried herself to sleep that night, more scared and uncertain than she had ever been in her entire life.

Then of course, there were the nightmares.

What exactly occurred in these nightmares varied from night to night but they all had one thing in common; they involved scorpions. In one dream, Lisa was trapped in her room with a giant scorpion the size of her family dog. The overgrown arachnid laid at the foot of her bed, watching her with its beady eyes, its ugly stinger hanging over her poised to strike like a loaded shotgun. Lisa couldn’t remember if she ever left her bed in that dream, she wasn’t even sure if it was a dream or a night terror, all she knew was that the scorpion never blinked, never gave any impression it was even alive until it moved to strike. In another dream, Lisa was laying in the desert, her body completely paralyzed, maybe by venom, maybe by heat stroke. Regardless of what robbed her of her mobility, the scorpions came and started stinging and cutting into her flesh, laying their eggs within her festering wounds. Lisa couldn’t even cry as this was happening. She could only watch helplessly, feeling every single rip and tear and jab at her skin and the sensation of writhing baby scorpions beneath it all.

These nightmares occurred every time Lisa fell asleep and every time, they left her worse than before upon awaking, her aches roaring and her head throbbing.

It was after one of these nightmares that Lisa awoke with a scream one night. She could hardly even remember this one, only that the scorpions were stabbing her eyes out. She panted, her skin caked in sweat, her head and body swimming in pain. She heard her door creak open and jumped in her bed. Turning around, however, she only found her brother poking his head inside, his gaze weary and concerned.

“Lis, you okay?” He asked. “I heard screaming.”

“I’m fine,” She growled, not wanting any of her brother’s mischievous attention when she was trying to sleep, especially with how sick she felt. “I...I just had a nightmare is all.”

“About what?”

“Who cares about what?” Lisa hissed. “Just go back to bed, Bart!”

“But what if you have another nightmare?”

“I’ll be fine. Now, please go,” Lisa begged, expecting her little jerk of a brother to start making scary noises or begin a frightening tale to exacerbate her fragile nerves.

To her surprise, Bart, with a genuine expression of concern, turned away. “Alright Lisa, I’ll go. But, listen. I...I know how sick you’ve been getting these past few days and….I….I just want you to know that I’m here for you if you need me, alright?”

“Bart?”

“Good night, sis. Sweet dreams.” Bart started to close the door but paused. “No pun intended.” He started to close the door again.

“Wait! Bart!”

“Yeah?” Bart popped his head back in.

Lisa shifted in her bed, somewhat embarrassed of the request she was intending to make. “Would you….Would you stay with me tonight?” She asked sheepishly. “Just until I fall asleep?”

Bart stared at his sister as if processing her request then, with a small smile, he reentered the room and leaned down by her bedside, resting his arms on the mattress as he laid his head on them. “Sure thing, Lis.”

Bart wound up staying for only 35 minutes as Lisa was rather tired but she didn’t suffer anymore nightmares on that night.

After weeks of hell, Lisa’s turn at the hospital finally came and her mother wasted no time pulling her out of school and driving her over there at once. The tests were plentiful and somewhat invasive but Lisa didn’t care at this point. She just wanted an end to this nightmare once and for all.

After a day of tests, Lisa found herself sitting on a hospital bed, clad only in a thin white gown with blue dots. Her mothers was with her, rubbing her sore back and planting kisses on her forehead. “It’ll be okay, sweetie.” She tried to assure her daughter. “Doctor Hibbert will be here any minute and we’ll finally get to the bottom of this sickness of yours.”

“I sure hope so, Mom.” Lisa whispered, feeling too drained to even speak. “I sure hope so.”

As if on cue, Doctor Hibbert walked into the room, his clipboard in his hand. “Evening ladies, hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long! Ah-He-He-He..Ah…” He noticed neither mother or daughter were laughing and cleared his throat. “Tough crowd, huh?” He closed the door behind him and stood before the Simpsons women. “So what seems to be the problem?”

“Doctor Hibbert, Lisa’s been sick all month, ever since we last saw you really,” Marge began. “Her tummy’s been hurting, she hardly eats anything and I think I’ve heard her throwing up in the bathroom once or twice.”

Lisa gasped and then looked down at shame. It seemed she couldn’t hide everything from her mother.

“We’ve tried everything but she’s just not getting better so we came back here,” Marge continued. “Just to see if there was anything we missed from last time.”

Hibbert nodded in understanding. “I see, well as a man of medicine, I’ll be the first to admit that even we make mistakes. That’s why this time we made it a point to give Lisa a lot of careful, precise, and expensive test. Ah-He-He-He!”

Marge murmured in concern.

“Now let’s see what we got here,” Doctor Hibbert flipped through his clipboard carefully, reading the contents on the papers to himself in a mumble. Every so often, his eyes widened in surprise but he said nothing to clue Lisa or Marge in on what shocked him. Finally, after an eternal few minutes, he set the clipboard down and pressed his hands over himself, as if about to apologize. “Well, Marge Simpson, I’m sorry to say that we can’t find anything wrong with your daughter.”

Both mother and daughter uttered a surprised “Huh?” at this explanation.

“I mean, sure. There does seem to be an infection of some kind going on in Lisa’s body but nothing more dangerous than the Flu. I’m sure we can fix it with a few good antibiotic boosters.” Doctor Hibbert tore a page away from his clipboard and slapped it on a nearby page projector. He turned out the lights and turned the projector on in their place. It shone a light on the wall before Marge and Lisa and displayed the image on the page, an X-ray of Lisa’s insides. Every single organ looked rather discolored and puffy and Marge couldn’t help but wrinkle her nose in disgust. “As you can see here,” Doctor Hibbert said as he pointed to Lisa’s stomach on the image. “The infections seems to have affected all her organs but not to the degree where they stop functioning. A little concerning sure but, as the old saying goes, it looks far worse than it is!”

“But what could have caused this, Doctor?” Marge asked fearfully. “Did she get it from the desert?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” Hibbert replied. “It is the wild after all. There’s no telling what kind of nasty germs were hiding out there, just waiting for the right kid to swallow the wrong grain of sand. Ah-He-He-He!”

“No…..No!” Lisa finally shouted. “That’s wrong!”

Both Hibbert and Marge turned to the shouting child. “Lisa?”

“What about the scorpion?” She asked. “The scorpion that stung me? Are you forgetting about that?”
“Oh, not again!” Marge placed her hands on her daughter’s shoulders. “Lisa’s we’ve been over this! There was no scorpion!”

“Yes, there was!” Lisa cried. “I felt it, Mom! I felt it crawl on top of me and I felt it plunge its stinger right into my throat!” She gripped her neck as she said this. “I...I know one of the tests you performed on me was a toxicology test! You have to have found something there! You have to have!”

“Lisa, that’s enough!” Marge shouted, although her voice sounded far more frightened than angry.

“Now, now, Mrs. Simpson,” Hibbert said. “There’s no need for such familial drama in the hospital. This is a place of healing after all.” Hibbert pressed his hands together to better illustrate this point and then turned to Lisa. “Now Lisa, you are correct. We did, in fact, perform a toxicology test. As I said, we wanted to cover all our bases.” He took another page out of the clipboard and placed it over Lisa’s X-ray on the projector. It was a toxicology report, one turning up negative results. “But as you can clearly see by this report, there was not a single ounce of venom lingering in your system. Now I don’t know what exactly is causing your illness Lisa but it sure as hell ain’t no scorpion.”

Lisa couldn’t believe her eyes as they scanned the image projected before her, her pupils moving back and forth over every single word in desperate search for some sort of mistake. But even at her young age, she could comprehend enough of the report to know there was no such mistake. As far as the hospital was concerned, there was no venom in her system and there never had been. “B-But...the scorpion….”

Marge groaned as she hugged her daughter close. “Oh Doctor Hibbert, what could be causing Lisa to be obsessing over scorpions like this?”

“Beats me.” The doctor shrugged. “If I had to wager, it’s the aftermath of an extremely realistic mirage combined with a child’s natural fear of scary organ pictures.” Hibbert pulled a notepad out from his pocket, grabbed a pen and started scribbling. “Now, I’m going to prescribe some heavy-duty antibiotic shots for Lisa to take over the next few days. We’ll schedule another appointment next month and see how things are faring.” He ripped the page off and handed it to Marge. “And uh, I also included the number of a renowned child psychologist in there. Just in case she keeps bringing up those damn scorpions.”

Marge uttered another murmur as she took the piece of paper in her hand. She looked down to her distraught daughter who seemed to be on the verge of a mental breakdown. “But I felt it…” She whispered while clutching her neck. “I felt it in my throat. I really did…”

“Oh honey,” Marge scooped Lisa in her arms. It was a bit of a struggle as she hadn’t held Lisa since she was a toddler. Regardless, Marge got Lisa into a semi-comfortable position and pulled her closer. “Thank you, Doctor.” She said in an emotionless voice as she walked out of the room.

“Geesh!” Hibbert uttered once they were out of the room. “What a bunch of drama queens.”

That night, Lisa awoke from yet another scorpion-infested nightmare. The exact details of it, she couldn’t remember nor did she want to. All she recalled was that they were all over her this time as well as inside her, she felt them treading both on her skin and beneath it. She had never felt so violated in her life and the mere memory of that sensation, hazy as it was, was enough to make her squirm in her bed.

After a few minutes of laying awake and trying to will what remained of the memory away, Lisa felt ready to attempt to fall asleep again. A task easier said than done considering the unbearable soreness she felt from her back. She wasn’t sure when it exactly started but lately, she found herself struggling with this intense backache every time she got out of bed. It took forever to ebb away enough for Lisa to process normally and at times, she feared her spine might be stiffening up as a result of her mysterious malady, the same way her hands were. Upon remembering them, Lisa lifted her hands from the covers. As she figured, they were ridged, stuck in a grabbing formation, each finger seeming to hook into something unseen. It reminded Lisa of the zombies on the covers of the FPS video games her brother loved so much, how the undead monster would be lunging toward the player with their gnarled fingers, ready to rip into their flesh. She briefly imagined herself as a zombie, reaching out to something with her hooked fingers.

Lisa shook her head, deciding she didn’t need anymore nightmarish images plaguing her at the moment. She forced her hands to open up, (It was taking longer and longer for them to respond.) pulled the covers over her shoulders and turned toward her bedroom door.

That’s when she heard the voices. At first, they were too distant and quiet to make out and Lisa figured it was just another trick of her mind spurned by her illness. Between the bug-eating and bloody vomit, why not add hearing voices into the mix? She closed her eyes and tried to ignore them but they persisted nonetheless and as they did, the little starfish-haired girl slowly realized how familiar they sounded.

They were the voices of her parents.

Lisa sat up in her bed and remained still for a few moments, listening carefully to the voices, trying to make out what they were saying. They were too far away for her to make out their words but she could tell the conversation wasn’t pleasant, given the tone of their voices. They seemed to be coming downstairs and, with how wide awake she felt at that moment, Lisa knew that she wasn’t imagining them this time.

Slowly and while fighting through the pain of her back, Lisa threw off her covers, swung her legs over the bed and got up. She tip-toed to the door and cracked it open, peeking through to the hallway. Nothing in the hallway, save for her brother’s snoring leaking from his own cracked door. Lisa rolled her eyes and stalked toward the stairs. Every step she took seemed to create a creak that echoed through the house yet, her parents never called out for whoever was there, not even as she finally stepped off the stairs into the living room. From there, she noticed a light coming from the kitchen and stalked into the next room over. She slipped herself besides the couch, right outside the kitchen doorway and peeked over.

As expected, both of her parents were there, Homer seated at the table and Marge leaning against the counter. They were both clad in their night clothes and looked exhausted yet they both had a steaming cup of coffee besides them. Neither of them noticed their daughter watching them from the TV room and thus continued their conversation once Homer had gulped down half his cup of Joe.
“Oh Marge!” He said with a dismissive hand wave. “You’re worried over nothing!”

“Worried over nothing!?” Marge hissed. “Worried over nothing!? Our daughter is sick! Maybe even dying! She’s not eating! She’s throwing up! And none of the medicines we’re giving her are working!” She pointed a finger at her husband. “How dare you say that it’s nothing to worry about, especially when this all started in the same desert Mr. Burns had you dump that toxic waste at!”

Lisa had to fight the urge to gasp, covering her mouth to keep her surprise and shock to herself.

Now it was Homer’s turn to get aggressive, slamming his half-empty cup of coffee on the table. “Oh, so that’s what this is all about, Marge?” He shouted. “Mr. Burns pays me a few extra hundred dollars to toss some old barrels of toxic waste in the desert, fat away from the populace I might add, and I’m the bad guy!? It’s not my fault Lisa’s stupid school decided to have a field trip there!” He took back his coffee mug and finished up the contents. “Besides, you said it yourself. Lisa got sick because she got stung by a scorpion, not from any toxic waste!”

“I said she thinks she got stung by a scorpion!” Marge screeched. “But when Doctor Hibbert checked her over, he couldn’t find any marks on her and there was no venom in her either.”

“Well then what’s your point?” Homer asked.

“My point is Lisa may not have been stung by a scorpion but she thinks she has and I think the toxic waste is to blame! Maybe she breathed in the fumes and thought she saw it or maybe she slipped in it but one way or another, that awful waste you dumped in the desert has hurt out daughter and if we don’t fess up to Doctor Hibbert about it, Lisa could die!”

“Be reasonable, Marge!” Homer shouted as he got up from the table and grabbed her by the shoulders. “If we go public with this, Mr. Burns will sue us right into the poor house! Is that what you want? Is that what you want to do to the kids!?”

“N-No,” Marge whimpered as tears streamed from her eyes “B-But-”

“I’ll take care of it!” Homer declared. “Tomorrow, I’ll look into the accident record for exposure to toxic waste and we’ll find out how to help Lisa without anyone having to know! I promise!” He pressed his lips against his crying wife’s. “Do you understand?”

“I….I….”

“Marge!”

“I….I hope you’re right, Homie.” She sniffled. “I hope you’re right about this.”

“Of course, I am baby.” Homer assured her as he pulled her close. “Of course, I am!”

As they embraced, neither parent noticed their daughter’s horrified face peeking out from the edge of the doorway nor heard her footsteps as she ducked back into the darkness and fled up the stairs. She nearly slammed the door shut behind her as she retreated to her room and jumped onto her bed with sob. Anger, fear, grief, betrayal and despair all welled inside her heart at once. She tossed and turned in a frenzy as if her physical body couldn’t handle all these emotions at once. The pain of her back and stomach paled in comparison to her emotional anguish and her shattered mental state. It was a battle on to itself not to make a sound and alert her parents of her suffering. As badly as she wanted to confront them about the lies, both of their lies, she was too dumbstruck by what the revelation truly entailed about her troubles.

The scorpion that stung her that day appeared in her mind as clear as crystal. It’s human-like swollen eyeball, the oozing sores all over its body, the puffy and overgrown pincers, it all made sense now. Terrible, awful sense.

‘The scorpion…..in the desert….it was mutated!’ Lisa rationalized. ‘That has to be the case! If what Dad said is true, the scorpion must had come into contact with those barrels and then….oh god!’ Lisa started to weep softly as she felt her hands stiffen up again. She threw the blankets over herself once more, this time having them encompass her entire body. She curled up into as small a ball as she could and pressed her stiff hands over her face. The way her fingertips seemed to press into her eyelids made her slightly worried she would accidentally gouge her eyes out if she wasn’t careful but this fear was only momentary. With her very possible demise on the horizon, losing her eyesight didn’t seem to matter that much.

“Am I going to die? Am I going to die? Am I going to die? Am I going to die?”

Over and over again, she repeated that question to herself as she waited for day to break. She was afraid to sleep for fear she would pass away and be forever trapped in her nightmares.

Trapped in her nightmares with those damned scorpions.

The next morning, Lisa awoke to her own finger laying on her pillow.

At first, in her groggy state and with the blanket casting a shadow over her face, she thought it was a worm and felt a hungry pang in her stomach. With her mind only half awake, she quickly surrendered to her unusual hunger and reached out for the strange thing laying on her pillow with her right hand. The second she grazed the object, she winced at how much it felt like, well, skin. She tapped it a few more times, noting how it seemed to have something hard within it, most likely a bone. But weren’t worms invertebrates? She rubbed her eyes with a yawn and pushed the covers off of her head. Then she reached for the object again for a closer examination and realized it was her finger.

Specifically, the ring finger from her right hand, the blackened foul-smelling stump where it once rested now clear as day.

Lisa screamed louder than she ever had in her entire life. She squeezed her right wrist and pulled it close, tearing up as she examined the rotting stump. There was no blood, no red flesh. Just a bunch of darkened skin and muscle giving off the distinct scent of decay, the same smell Lisa would sometimes pick up from roadkill on the streets of Springfield. As she looked closer, she noticed black veins throughout both of her hands and gasped to see most of them were trailing to her remaining fingers. Whatever happened to her ring finger, it wasn’t over yet.

“Oh God…” Lisa started to cry. “Oh god please no!”

At that moment, Lisa heard footsteps rushing to her room and panicked. She grabbed the finger and slid both it and her right hand beneath her pillow. She pulled the covers haphazardly over herself and laid back down just as her mother opened the door. “Lisa!” She cried out. “What’s wrong?”

“Huh?” Lisa replied, doing her best to sound groggy. “Oh, nothing. I-I just had a nightmare is all.”

“Oh...I see,” Marge tented her fingers as she averted her gaze. “Honey, are you sure you’re alright? You look a little pale.”

“I...I just didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.” Lisa chuckled nervously. “On account of the stomach ache and all.”

Marge murmured. “Well, I’m supposed to go pick up your boosters today.” She stalked closer. “D-Do you want to come along?”

Lisa shook her head wearily. “No thanks. Miss Hoover said we’re watching a documentary on the Panama Canal today in class. Wouldn’t want to miss that.”

“Oh.” Marge’s gaze fell downcast. “I see…..are you sure?”

Lisa nodded.

“Alright,” Marge nodded in turn. “In that case, you better start getting ready for school. I’ll fix you breakfast….if you want any.”

Lisa shook her head again. “No thanks. I’ll just have an apple for the road.” The mere mention of food made Lisa’s stomach curl but she ignored the pain.

“A-Alright then,” Marge began closing the door but stopped once the opening was reduced to a crack, allowing Lisa to hear her mother’s footsteps echo through the hall as she left.

As the footsteps faded, it dawned on Lisa that she had just thrown away a perfectly good opportunity to confront her mother about her condition, about the cover up concerning her father’s violation of the desert ecosystem. She groaned in annoyance as she sat up in her bed, allowed the covers to fall from her. ‘What the hell is wrong with me?’ She thought. ‘This was my chance to confront Mom about her lies and I just….let her slip away?' Lisa groaned as her head produced a throbbing ache. It was as if her brain had taken a page from her heart’s book and started beating. She pressed her ridged hands into her head, her fingers hooking into the skin like stingers. Her back and stomach cried out with their own aches at once and Lisa spent a solid minute in total agony, unable to do little else but writhe and whine.

Then, all at once, it stopped. All the aches and pain. Her stomach, back and head were fine for the first time in weeks. Lisa gasped as the pain left her and laid flat on her bed, coated in sweat and panting. ‘What’s going on with me? What the hell’s going on with me!?’ She picked up her right hand and examined her blackened stump. She shook her head. “No, no time to panic. Gotta hide it. Gotta hide it.” She dug beneath her pillow and pulled out her detached finger. To her disgust, it almost seemed to be already rotting, a mushy line of black running beneath it. She touched this line with one of her healthier fingers and gagged as she brought back a thin mucus-like line of the stuff as she pulled it away.

Willing her hands to open up one more time, Lisa got dressed in a flash and dropped the diseased finger in a small plastic baggie. She placed the baggie in her backpack and slipped it over her shoulders before walking before the mirror.

Almost normal. The absence of her constant agony allowed her skin to yellow a bit and even her hands seemed to have a little of their original color back although this was marred by the black veins encompassing them like vines.

‘Hands…..need to hide them….’ Lisa thought simply. She looked around for anything in her room that would help in this situation. At first, nothing jumped out at her and she began to fret. Then she noticed the jacket sitting near the edge of her closet…

…..

Lisa couldn’t believe she got away with it.

Somehow, she managed to keep her decaying hands hidden from her mother. As promised, she forced herself to eat an apple out of the fruit bowl sitting on the dining room table. She devoured the fruit as quickly as she possibly could and fought the urge to throw it back up until her mother left her to attend to a crying Maggie, her hands behind her back the entire time. She retreated into the bathroom to throw up and dashed right back downstairs as the school bus rolled up, shouting a hasty farewell to her parents as she left the house. She rushed as quickly as she could through the bus, praying to Buddha that no one would notice the state of her hands. As luck would have it, the students’ apathy toward her remained as usual and she was able to make it to her usual seat at the back of the bus. There, she pulled the jacket and the matching mittens it came with out of her backpack and slipped them on. By the time any students did take notice of Lisa, it was mostly because of the strange out-of-season outfit she was wearing.

And now here she was, strolling down the hallways near the end of the school day, just waiting for the final bell to ring. She was heading to the bathroom where she had spent most of her day, having become too overcome by her illness to participate in class. Not that it would have helped much, considering the throbbing headaches Lisa had been suffering all day long seemed to have placed a boot on the wheels of her brain. She couldn’t think of anything else but her agony when they took place and afterword, she found it hard to form so much as a coherent thought, let alone a sentence. It wasn’t that she was getting dumber, more like her mind was trapped in a thick, stubborn fog that allowed her only glimpses of the knowledge she held within. It frightened her, nonetheless, to be in such a state. She couldn’t even remember why she left the safety of the bathroom in the first place, except perhaps for her growing hunger pangs.

‘Almost bathroom…..I mean, almost there,’ She made herself think. ‘Just go there….go in there...wait it out….and then…..home?’

As Lisa pondered just what she was to do at home, (and whether or not it would even be worth it to return there,) she turned the corner and found herself in an uncomfortably familiar spot in the hallway.

The same hallway where Francine had thrown her around not but a few weeks ago.

Even in her mental haze, Lisa could still vividly recall the agony the ginger-haired bully delivered onto her in this very hallway, the crash of her body against the lockers echoing in her mind.

‘Have to leave….have to leave….’

Lisa turned around to leave the hallway…

...only to come face to face with a stern-looking Francine, her meaty fists clenched and ready for a beat down. “There you are, nerd!” She hissed as she shoved Lisa hard, nearly knocking the starfish-haired girl on her bottom. “Where the heck have you been hiding at all day?”

“I…..hide…” Lisa tried to answer, only for a massive stomachache to strike at that very moment. With a groan, Lisa clutched her tummy and continued to try and respond to her bully. “I...I..’

“What!?” Francine interrupted. “Did you think you could just skip class all day and I wouldn’t find you!? Guess you’re not as smart as you think you are, huh nerd?” It was then that Francine seemed to notice Lisa’s unusual apparel, her judgmental gaze lowering and rising over her victim. “What’s with the winter outfit? Don’t you know summer’s around the corner?”

“I…..I felt cold…” Lisa lied. It wasn’t a good lie and she knew it but now her back was aching as well and, combined with her stomach pain, was grinding her ability to function to a screeching halt. She tried to step back from her bully and nearly fell over. She was stuck between a rock and a hard place and slowly being crushed into a gory paste.

“Cold?” Francine questioned. “In this weather? You really are stupid!” She looked back down at the pale purple mittens on Lisa’s hands and smiled. “But those mittens do look cute. I think I’ll take them!”

Francine reached for the mittens and Lisa, in a panic, backed off. “No...No!”

“Yeah!” Francine growled. “You owe me for not bringing any lunch money last time anyway so I’m taking those mittens!”

“No….not my mittens,” Lisa whispered. “Please….they won’t fit….”

Francine gasped. “Are you calling me fat now?” She growled. “Oh, that’s it! After I rip those mittens off, I’m so kicking your ass!” With this, Francine grabbed Lisa’s left wrist and pulled her closer. The frightened bookworm gasped and slapped at Francine’s hand as she reached for the mitten. This continued for a few seconds until, completing the triad of agony tearing apart Lisa’s body, her head once again began to throb. Lisa groaned in pain and in that moment, Francine was able to grab her other wrist and pull her in for a headbutt. “What’s wrong, nerd?” She giggled as she noticed Lisa grit her teeth in pain. “Got a headache?” She headbutted her again. “Maybe it’s from all the smarts you got in that overblown brain of yours! Let me help you!”

Francine delivered a third headbutt to Lisa, breaking her nose against her forehead this time. Francine cackled as blood leaked from both of Lisa’s nostrils and down onto her lips. Hurting from all over now, the middle child of the Simpsons family could only hear her tormentor’s laughter as a muted rumbling, as if she was hearing it from underwater. Her mind was foggier than ever, single words failing to form to describe what she was thinking. All Lisa reliably had at this moment were emotions, mostly of agony and rage.

Rage?

Yes, Lisa remembered how angry she had felt at Francine the last time she had been assaulted by her, the pure fury flowing through her as she questioned to herself just why this gorilla of a human being had to single her out. Only there was no questioning this time, no rationalizing, no pondering. No thoughts of fear or bargaining or mercy. In the throes of her unrelenting agony, there was no more higher thought in Lisa’s mind.

Just rage and instinct.

It all happened within the span of two seconds. Lisa felt something, “pop” behind her back. She felt hot steaming liquid running down the back of her legs and felt her jacket rip away from her body, exposing her shoulders to the open air. A few more drops of warm wetness fell on them as well. There was a sharp scream, in Francine’s voice no less, that was cut off by the grotesque sound of something sharp stabbing through flesh and bone. More warmth splattered on Lisa’s face as her pain, her backache, stomach ache, headache, all faded away. Her mind defogged and as she was able to comprehend her surroundings once more, Lisa slowly opened her eyes and beheld the horror before.

Francine was still right in front of her but her manic, sadistic sneer had been replaced with an expression of shock and fear. Lisa noticed a giant, hairy, segmented growth extending out of Francine’s neck. No, that wasn’t right. As Lisa looked closer, she noticed the blood seeping from her throat and realized that the gore-caked growth hadn’t popped up from her bully’s neck, it had stabbed itself in.

And as she slowly realized this growth was in fact the giant tail of a scorpion, she couldn’t help but scream.

In a panic, Lisa accidentally willed her new appendage to lift Francine off her feet, one of her shoes falling off in the process. The ginger-haired bully still had an iron-clad grip on Lisa’s mittens and pulled them off as she rose, causing the index finger from Lisa’s left hand to fall off and land on the ground. The sound of her finger hitting the ground brought Lisa’s attention to its condition and with her entire body trembling, barely able to register suddenly having a tail as is, Lisa forced herself to look at her exposed hands.

The blackness that had been contained in vine-like shapes around her hands had now encompassed them completely, ridges like torn paper over her wrists. The two stumps where her missing fingers once rested were oozing darkened and bloody pus, the stump on her left hand frayed like the end of a knot. From the palm of both hands, a small sharp point was poking through the mushy flesh, sporting the same rough reddish skin that covered the tail. Gasping and with tears streaming down her face, Lisa tried to will her remaining fingers to unlock once more. All this resulted in was her right pinkie and left thumb falling unceremoniously away from her rotting hands and hitting the floor.

Lisa heard a gurgling sound and remembered the bully hanging before her by her newly-grown tail. She looked up to see Francine reaching out to her, tears of her own flowing over her cheeks as she tried and failed to speak out a plea for mercy. “No!” Lisa screamed in fear as she tried to will her tail to tear itself out of Francine’s neck. In her panic and general newness to having such an appendage, Lisa flexed her tail too roughly and ended up throwing Francine against the lockers twice as hard as she once hit them. The ginger-haired bully slid down the locker and landed on her rear, her head lolling to the side and her eyes dazed.

“Oh god!” Lisa took a step closer to Francine, holding a shaky hand out to her. “P-Please don’t be dead. Please don’t be dead!” Lisa noticed the steady rise and fall of Francine’s chest and sighed in relief. “O-Okay. I-I know this must seem bad but….it’ll be okay. We’ll take you to the nurse’s office and then...then…”

Lisa trailed off as she noticed the wound on Francine’s throat, the spot she had just ripped her stinger out of. The skin around it was a bright-pinkish red and beginning to swell. Francine’s chest quickened as the swelling continued and the ginger-haired girl croaked a little, as if gasping for air, Sweat peppered her entire body which began to twitch as if she was in the grip of a seizure. Her pupils flicked back and forth in her eye balls like two balls flying over a pool table. Once they stopped on Lisa, the ginger-haired bully slowly raised a trembling hand toward her former victim. “Please…….hellllp…..mmmmmm….” Her mouth seized up before she could finish her plea.

Lisa took another step and reached out for her bully’s hand. “Francine!”

At last, the two girls got close enough for Francine to graze Lisa’s fingertips, resulting in her pulling off the right index finger as a final convulsion forced her back against the locker. With a gasp, Lisa pulled her ruined hand back and gripped her wrist before turning her gaze to the former bully. Francine started banging her head against the locker again and again, her mouth foaming and the swelling on her neck now nearly as big as her head. With an almost-comical pop, the swelling exploded, coating Lisa, Francine, the lockers, floor and the ceiling in a steaming pile of reddened pus. The force of the explosion ripped apart what was left of Francine’s neck and her head rolled off her shoulder and down the hallway like a misshapen kickball. Her now-headless body slumped down against the lockers, a small spray of blood and pus shooting from her neck stump like a geyser.

Lisa was trembling now, She was all-too aware of the gore covering her body and almost moved her hands to try and wipe it off. Only to remember the state they were in and change her mind. Not that it mattered as the explosion had already ripped away two more fingers from her left hand, leaving only her pinkie. Breathing heavily, Lisa felt her tail lower over her shoulder like an obedient but vicious dog. She shifted her gaze to her left and found herself taking in the full revolting glory of the stinger. Coated in both her and Francine’s flesh as well as bits of her jacket, the muddy-red monstrosity dripped blood and orange venom from its tip, making a small puddle near Lisa’s feet. As Lisa looked behind her and sized up the monstrous appendage, she imagined the entire thing to be twice the length of her body. A quick shifting of her hips confirmed the tail had erupted from the base of her spine, tearing a hole in her dress from which it now swayed.

‘This isn’t happening,’ Lisa mentally pleaded with herself, shutting her eyes as tightly as she could. ‘This has to be a nightmare! Another nightmare! I have to wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! WAKE UP!’

Lisa opened her eyes. Francine’s headless corpse still leaned against the bloody lockers although the spray had stopped. She could still hear the gentle swaying of the giant tail now growing from her, still feel its weight as it hovered over her, still smell the pungent blood all over her body and the overwhelming stench of rot emitting from her ruined hands. She could even taste the bile in the back of her throat as she fought the urge to vomit.

This wasn’t a dream. This was Hell.

“No….No…..No!” Lisa lost her battled and vomited in the hallway. It was quick but painful, most of it blood and stomach acid. She tried to wipe the bit of it left on her lips, only for the smell of her rotting arms to make her even sicker. With a choked-up sob, Lisa did the only feasible thing she could think to do in this apocalyptic situation.

She ran, ran as fast as her legs would carry her, Interestingly, her tail seemed to help her gain speed as she ran, trailing behind her like a gory rudder, keeping her in balance as she turned the corner toward the entrance doors…

“Come on, Milhouse!” Bart demanded. “Before the paramedics beat us to it!”

“I’m (wheeze) trying as fast as I (wheeze) can,” Milhouse gasped while trying to inject a little air into his lungs. “My inhaler has a crack in it and is only working at half capacity!”

The two boys were rushing down the hallway, a few other students they didn’t know well running alongside them. The hallways seemed to echo with their footsteps as they turned the corner toward their destination, toward the totally messed up thing that was spreading around the school like a virus. There was already a crowd of students before them and in the middle of the crowd, one distraught Principal Skinner trying in vain to keep them away. “Nothing to see here, children! Please do not divert your attention to the scene behind me! There is nothing intriguing or morbidly fascinating to find here.”

All but certain they reached the right spot, Bart grabbed his wheezing friend’s hand and pushed through the crowd. “Excuse me! Out of the way! Coming through!’ He pressed forward until he and Milhouse were at the forefront of the crowd and between their principal’s legs, they both beheld the gruesome sight of a young girl’s headless body leaning against the locker, a dried line of blood growing from her stump like a hellish dead tree. “No way!” Bart laughed.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this but I’m sorta glad the bullies took my lunch money today.” Milhouse gripped his stomach as he said this.

Skinner noticed his more problematic students arrive almost at once. “Simpson! Van Houten! Please return to your classes immediately!” He lightly demanded. “This is of no concern to you.”

“No concern to us?” Bart gasped. “Skinner, a girl just lost her head in the middle of the damn hallway! A fellow student! I think that more than warrants our concern.” A couple of students behind Bart agreed with him.

Skinner groaned. “Well, can you at least grant the deceased some respect by observing remorsefully instead of shamelessly gawking?”

“No way!” Sherri Mackleberry shouted from behind Bart. “That was Francine Rhenquist! She took my lunch money and my makeup money!”

“Yeah,” Her sister, Terri, agreed. “She got what she deserved!”

At once, as if some sort of morbid switch had been pulled, the children began to chant.

“Headless Francine, Headless Francine! Head popped off and fled the scene! Headless Francine, Headless Francine! Now she’ll never be eighteen!”

Skinner sighed and shook his head in defeat, pinching the bridge of his nose, as Groundskeeper Willie walked up to him. “Sir, I secured the lass’s head from Mr. Testiclees’s home room!” He held up a bloody bag. “The cowardly little field mice were still screaming in their desks!”

“Good work, Willie!” Skinner praised without taking his face from his hand. “Now grab a bigger bag for the body and keep them both secure in a closet. If we want a snowball’s chance in Hell of not getting sued by her parents, we need to return all of their little girl to them.”

“Aye sir!” Willie nodded as he went to fetch a bigger trash bag.

“Wow,” Bart uttered as he continued to stare at the body. “What do you think happened?”

“She seemed to be a pretty angry person,” Milhouse mused. “Maybe the anger got too great and it caused her head to pop right off.”

“Retaining anger to the point of popping,” Bart pondered thoughtfully. “That’s a scientifically feasible outcome, right, Lisa?” He turned to where he was sure his sister would be by now. With how fast the grizzly news traveled from Mr. Testiclees’s classroom where the head first rolled in, there was no way his sister couldn’t have heard it. Yet, as he studied the crowd behind him, he realized she was nowhere to be found. “Lisa?”

He turned to Milhouse,” Say, Milhouse, you haven’t by chance seen Lisa in all day today, have you?”

“Not since I saw her this morning coming out of the bus,” Milhouse replied. “Not that it’s any of my business but why exactly was Lisa wearing a winter coat so close to summertime?”

Bart shrugged. “I just figured her sickness was making her extra cold or something. To be honest, I didn’t even notice she was wearing that until I got on the bus.”

“And you haven’t seen her since this morning?” Milhouse asked.

“No, not even in the hallway where Ms. Krabappeal and Ms. Hoover’s hallways intersect.” Bart looked around for his sister again. “And you know, seeing that girl’s headless corpse in the hallway has me feeling weirdly….scared for her.”

“Oh, I’m sure she’s fine.” Milhouse waved his hand. “Lisa’s got too good a head on her shoulders for it to pop off like that.”

“I hope you’re right, Milhouse.” Bart said glumly. “I hope you’re...huh?”

Bart happened to be rolling his gaze back to the grizzly scene to his left, aiming for one more glance at Francine’s corpse. As it trailed toward the giant puddle of blood before her, however, he noticed a bunch of smaller puddles trailing from it past the crowd, almost like a set of…

“Uh...uh Principal Skinner!” Bart suddenly shouted as he pointed to the other side of the crowd. “I...I think I saw some kids over there livestreaming everything!”

Skinner gasped in horror. “Oh dear God! Not the Tic of Tock!” He rushed over to stop the nonexistent hooligans and Bart slipped closer to the blood puddle. As he suspected, the smaller puddles were actually a set of footprints leading past the crowd and toward the end of the hallway. Bart wasn’t sure how anyone could have missed these and decided that, with Francine’s headless body still in the hallway, perhaps everyone was just too distracted to notice the footprints. With a sharp “Hmm.”, Bart once again pushed himself through the crowd, Milhouse watching in confusion. Once Bart made it to the other side, he noticed the footprints making a turn into the other hallway, one he remembered right off the bat lead to the cafeteria. He entered the empty room and noticed the footprints leading toward a door on the other side, this one hanging wide open. Slowly, one quiet step at a time, Bart followed the footprints to the door, feeling the crisp outdoor air flowing over him as he neared it. Once he was close enough to do so, he peered outside and looked around.

The trail ended right outside the door, the two shoes that had left the trail discarded on either side of it.

They were his sister’s shoes.

Bart gasped as he picked up one of the shoes and looked it over. There didn’t appear to be any damage to it, its underside was just coated in blood and mud. “Lisa,” Bart dropped the shoe. “What have you done?” He stepped outside and started calling out for his sister. “Lisa!…...Lisa, where are you?” He looked around frantically but could find no trace of her anywhere. As much as he didn’t want to believe it, it was clear she was already long gone. “Lisa!” He called out nonetheless. “Lisa, answer m-’

Bart felt something crunch beneath his shoe. He picked up his leg and looked over the bottom of his shoe. At first, he couldn’t make out just what he was looking at. It seemed to be a slug or a caterpillar, wet and mushy, a mixture of black, yellow and red. Yet, there was a fragile, cracked bone inside of the mess. Bart scraped off the most he could of it and examined it closer. The strange object seemed to lose what little solidity it still possessed and practically melted in Bart’s fingers. He pinched his nose as the smell assaulted his nostrils. “Eww!” He gagged. “Whatever this crap is, it reeks!”

That’s when Bart noticed his fingernail sticking out from the gunk, a little sharper than he remembered, he pinched it in order to clean it off…

...and ended up pulling the disembodied fingernail away from his own. It took him a full second to realize what he was holding and once he did, he reacted with a terrified scream as he dropped it on the ground. “That was someone’s freaking finger!” He started clawing at his hand in disgust. “Ew! Ew! Ew! Whose-”

Bart remembered the shoes and at once, his disgust was replaced by his returning fear and dread.

“Lisa,” As another summer breeze raced through his hair and clothes, Bart turned toward the bulk of Springfield residential area.

Towards the only place he could think his little sister would run off to in such a situation.

“Lisa, what the hell is happening to you?”

With his trusty skateboard, Bart was able to make it back to his house rather quickly. Both of his parent’s cars were missing from the driveway, his father still at work and his mother having taken Maggie with her to pick up Lisa’s medicine. That just left Bart and hopefully, his still somewhat human sister.

With a gulp, Bart pulled up to the front door and dug around for the spare key. He found it and, after a moment’s hesitation, opened the door. He poked his head inside before entering, calling out for his sister. “Lisa? Are you in here? It’s me, Bart!”

No response. Just the unsettling silence of a seemingly empty home.

Bart fought the urge to stay outside and wait for either one of his parents to get home. Depending on just what the hell was going on, they could just complicate matters. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, gulping one more time. “Alright, Lisa! I know you’re in here, somewhere!” He stashed the keys in his pocket. “Look, I’m not mad or wanting to prank you or anything. I just….I just wanna talk! Can we talk?”

Bart waited for a few moments but there was still no response. He waited for Santa’s Little Helper to come barreling down the stairs and pounce on him, the greyhound’s large wet tongue dragging itself over his face again and again. But no paw steps prattled down the stairs, no large brown blur leapt at Bart and as he waited, the only sound he could hear was the ringing his ears were producing to keep the silence in check.

This house had never felt so incredibly empty and yet, Bart just knew he wasn’t alone.

“Lisa?” Bart called out again. “I’m coming up now!” He immediately cursed himself for that. “Dammit, I shouldn’t have warned her like that,” Shaking his head, Bart figured it was too late to back out and ascended the stairs, each footstep seeming to echo in the silence. As he climbed up the steps, Bart felt an overwhelming dread in his heat. His palms got sweaty and he nearly slipped, tightening his grip in the railing to keep from falling. “Lisa, I know you’re up here!” Bart stated in as brave a voice as he could muster. “Look, I just wanna talk so why don’t we just-”

Bart stopped as he noticed the attic door swinging open just above the top of the stairs, the ladder halfway down as well.

And from inside, he could hear his sister’s quiet sobbing.

“Lisa!” Bart rushed up the steps and fully pulled down the ladder. He scampered over it and popped his head inside, only to be greeted with mostly darkness. “Whoa, total blackout in here!” He reached for the chain switch and, upon feeling the metal beads graze his hand, pulled it down.

Nothing. Not even a spark.

“Huh?” Bart yanked the switch a couple more times to no effect.

“Won’t….work….”

Bart froze upon hearing another voice rasp from the darkness. “L-Lisa? Is that you?” He looked around fruitlessly in the dark. “Where are you?”

“Light….won’t...work…” Lisa’s voice rasped. “Broken….for….darkness….”
“Broken? What are you…” Bart whispered as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. He turned on the flashlight and shone it on the ceiling directly above him. Only now could he see that the light bulb connected to the switch had been busted, two severed wires surrounded by broken glass. “What the? How did that happen?” Bart asked as he lowered the flashlight directly before him.

“No!” Lisa cried as she ducked behind the boxes, giving her brother a brief glimpse of her spiky hair in the process. “No light! No light! Don’t look at me!”

“Lisa?” Bart pulled himself fully into the attic and stood up. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Don’t look! Don’t look!” She cried from behind the boxes, only the tips of her hair poking out. “I….I’m monster!”

Bart gulped as he knew exactly what his little sister was talking about. ‘So it is true. Lisa’s sickness is changing her somehow. Maybe giving her super strength or something. Not to mention making her talk stupid,’ Bart shook his head. ‘Better put a stop to this before she goes full slasher on the town.’ Slowly, Bart took a step toward the boxes. “Lisa, it’ll be alright, okay? I’m here to help you.”

“No!” Lisa whined. “Bart….can’t...help….I….am….monster….”

“Why? Because of that whole thing with Francine?” Bart mentioned with a scoff. “Oh please. No one suspects a thing and I already got rid of the evidence!”

“Ev….Evidence?” Lisa asked.

“Your shoes!” Bart clarified. “You took them off back at school because they were leaving a trail, right? Well, I got rid of them for you.” Bart took another step. “Trust me, Lisa. No one suspects a thing.”

Lisa remained quiet for a moment, allowing her brother to get a few steps closer. Then she started crying. “But Bart…..Francine…..dead….”

“I know, I know,” Bart replied. “And that’s not a good thing but it could be worse! You could have killed someone that would have actually been missed!” Bart chuckled loudly, only to stop as he heard his sister’s sobbing grow louder. It seemed humor, dark or otherwise, would be of no help here.

Time to get serious.

With a sigh, Bart took another step toward the boxes his sister was cowering behind, his phone’s flashlight surrounding them like a halo. “Listen Lis, I….I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here. If you’re sick or something or what exactly you did to Francine. All I do know for sure is that you need help, a lot of it, and I….I want to help you.”

“No!” Lisa cried. “Bart…..Bart can’t help!”

“Balderdash!” Bart retorted. “I’m freaking Bart Simpson! The Prince of Pranking! The King of Chaos!” Another step closer. “But most importantly, I….I’m your brother, Lisa. And I know I don’t always act like it with all the pranks and the teasing but it’s the truth! I’m your big brother, and as such, it’s my job to look out for you in times like these!”

“B-Bart?”

“Look, I may not know what’s going on but I’m still going to help you, anyway I can.” Bart promised. “We’ll find a good doctor or a scientist or even a doctor-scientist! We’ll turn to God, Satan or even Cthulhu if we have to, whatever it takes to get you well again!”

Lisa slowly rose her head over the boxes, meeting her brother’s warm, familiar gaze with her ragged, tear-drenched own. Her eyes were red and bloodshot, yet Bart could recognize the softness of his sister’s gentle nature within them.

“Whatever’s going on, we’ll get through it together Lis, and I promise to protect you every step of the way.” Bart held out his hand. “You understand?”

“Bart?” Lisa sniffled as the corners of her lips formed a trembling smile. “Bart….help...me?”

Bart nodded. “Bart help.”

“Bart….Bart….” Lisa stared at Bart’s hand for a few moments, her smile still trembling as if she was in a state of great relief. She shuffled behind the boxes, and from the top, Bart could see her shoulder moving upward.

He sighed in relief to see his sister responding to his offer to help. “Everything’s gonna be alright, Lis. Everything’s gonna be-

Bart was cut off by the searing pain that suddenly exploded from his wrist. In the dim light provided by his phone, Bart could see a grotesque, hairy pincer cutting into his wrist, blood dripping from both the top and bottom of his arm. He screamed in terror and pain and tried to pull away but this only resulted in more agony. With his terrified gaze, he followed the pincer up to his sister’s shoulder, the little girl now giggling madly even as tears continued to stream from her eyes. It occurred very briefly to Bart that the pincer, still covered in strips of skin that used to comprise Lisa’s arm, resembled those of a scorpion but this thought was quickly forced out of his mind as, with a sharp tug, his sister pulled him closer, making him drop his phone in the process.

“Lisa!” Bart shouted as he grabbed the pincer with his free hand and tried in vain to pry it off. “What the hell are you doing!?”

“Bart help….Bart help….” Lisa replied through her giggling, a tone of remorse in her voice.

“Not like this!” Bart screamed. “Let go! Let go!” Bart clenched his free hand into a fist and tried to punch Lisa in the hopes of knocking her out or at least making her release her grip. A split second before his fist could actually make contact with her cheek, however, her other pincer clutched his wrist and stopped the punch dead in its tracks. Bart screamed in pain again as the boxes between him and his sister suddenly flew to the right, the very top box somersaulting over their arms. Without any obstacles in the way, Lisa lunged at her brother, forcing him back as her pincers continued to cut into his flesh.

With tears running down his face, Bart fought through the agony and tried to pull himself free. “Lisa! Stop it! I-I’m trying to help you!”

“Bart help Lisa!” His sister replied with a strange noise following her words. He wasn’t sure if it was a laugh or a sob. “Bart help Lisa!”

“Let go of me!” Bart kicked Lisa in the stomach as hard as he could in one last attempt to get free. She doubled over in pain but the pincers only tightened their grip on Bart’s wrist, having carved fleshy niches for themselves to fit in already. Both kids cried out, Lisa nearly dragging Bart down with her as she fell to her knees.

“Bart….hurt….Lisa….”

“Lisa hurt Bart!” Bart shouted as he tried to pull away from her. He could no longer even feel his hands and at that moment, Bart considered simply pulling away from them in order to be free. “Let me go, Lis!”

“Bart…..hurt…..Lisa….” Lisa looked back up to her brother with a new emotion in her eyes, a silent but burning fury. “Bart….hurt….”

Bart heard a strange stretching sound all around him and looked around feverishly in the darkness for its source. He couldn’t see anything at first, just darkened shapes. Then, a soft white glow came into his vision. Bart noticed a serpentine shape producing this glow and watched as it erected itself over his sister, the glow spreading to her as well. As Lisa illuminated the darkness with her neon-white aura, Bart recognized the shape behind her as a giant scorpion’s tail. Now he knew what had knocked down the boxes between them and more importantly, what his sister intended to do next. “Lisa!” He choked out through a sob. “Please don’t!”

The tail lunged down at Bart like a bird of prey, stabbing its putrid stinger right into his heart. Bart screamed the loudest he ever had in his life as the venom was injected. He could feel the foreign substance spread through his heart which pumped it out throughout his body. It was like a liquid fire burning him alive from the inside out. At once, he felt the need to vomit as his stomach curled into itself and his mouth began to foam. His mind raced with a million random thoughts and his vision began to blur.

Lisa giggled and sobbed all at once as she watched the venom take hold, her brother writhing and groaning in her grip. With a final squeeze, her pincers separated his hands from his wrists and he fell to the floor, the stinger sliding out of the gaping hole in his chest. Lisa stepped closer and watched her brother as he continued to convulse on the attic floor, the stumps ending his arms spraying crimson like a sprinkler. Inside his chest, his heart began to inflate like Francine’s neck, a small section of the pink, pulsating organ poking out from the gaping hole in his chest. In what little remained of her human mind, it reminded Lisa of the inflatable nose of a hooded seal.

Bart tried to speak, tried to plea with his sister for mercy but as with Francine, his seizures forced his lips shut. He continued to choke on the very air itself, continued to thrash about on the floor like a landlocked fish until, at last, his heart popped like a balloon within his chest, shooting up a geyser of blood and plaque in the air as the boy finally stilled, dead. The venom-laced gore rained down on both Bart’s corpse and Lisa who continued to laugh and cry and scream.

The last bit of her human personality slipped away as she watched her brother die, as if following him to the afterlife. In its place, the angry, hungry instincts of the scorpion were free to take over now Lisa’s laughter and crying slowed progressively, falling in decibels by the minute until they finally went silent and Lisa’s expression turned neutral.

“Hungry,” she communicated to no one as she got on her knees and gripped Bart’s bloody wrists with her pincers. She lifted his body closer to her and curled her tail around the both of them for even closer proximity. Satisfied, Lisa lowered her head to the gaping hole in her brother’s chest and slowly opened her mouth. A large section of her upper teeth had fallen out, the gory point of her left chelicerae taking their place. Soon, all of her upper teeth would fall out and she would have another chelicerae to match. Two sets of teeth from two different species, the best of both worlds.

But for now, she was only concerned with the steaming red sustenance that leaked from the boy’s wound. She knew it would be more than enough to satisfy her hunger for awhile. The boy was fairly large and this nice, dark place was dry enough that she could store what she didn’t finish for later. She could eat for three days tops before rot spoiled the food.

Yes, she would store him in the corner, along with the other, furrier victims she had claimed.

And as for the others the man, the woman, the infant, she didn’t need to worry about them. They would be home soon enough and eventually, for one reason or another, they would have to come up here to the attic.

Her new home.

With a single, soft exhale, she allowed the light in her body to fade so she could enjoy her meal in the comfort of the dark.