Interview with a Hivemind[1-18-08]


Every morning I wake up with tsitsi flies and locusts creeping into my nose and mouth. I bathe in sodium peroxide and pesticides to kill off the generation of fleas and lice born overnight. If I cough too hard, I'll dislodge the dragonflies roosting in my throat that feed on the mosquitoes born in the liquid sitting in my lungs. Ladybugs crowd around my eyelids, fat from greedily eating up the aphids that pour from my corneas like tears.

My name is Zeti Carter and I have been a Hivemind since childhood.

I haven't had human contact in five years. In 1997, I was enrolled in a government experiment as an attempt to understand and conquer viral diseases. I left the program two years later to start a bait farm in Wisconsin. I was driven out of business when I could not meet the health standards.
I am currently twenty-three. I have never been sick a day in my life. I am immune to viral diseases because I am a carrier of nearly every pathological disease known to man. I have never had a boyfriend or a lover, and everyone who has dared befriend me has died of poison or disease. I write computer viruses for a living and do Tech Support over the phone for the victims that fall prey to them. Pestilence can't spread over audio wires.

Nonetheless, I must spend half an hour previous to the calls gargling vinegar and pesticides to placate the hornets so that when I speak, I can be heard above the swarm escaping my lips. I haven't eaten solid food since I was thirteen. Solids only get digested before they reach my stomach. I've lived on an insect diet since then. As a result, I have less than ten percent body fat. I wouldn't recommend it.

Smoking helps. Tobacco, marijuana, hooka--any kind of aerosol puts the hordes down nicely. Sometimes when I feel particularly malevolent I will attend a pot den. Maybe if I infect enough junkies, people will stop using and leave the drugs to people like me, who need it.

I smoke for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It sedates the insects enough to force them down the digestive tract without too much resistance. Just enough for them to reach the maggots and carrion beetles sitting in my lower intestines. My stomach acids don't work so well anymore, so I make do with what I've got.

I have steel grey eyes, same shade as my skin. I hate them. I wish they were green. I hate grey. So cold and simple and uninteresting.

I currently live in Alaska, a few miles from a small town. The cold keeps the swarms sluggish and dim, but it also keeps them inside. I have to keep an eye on my temperature to make sure the bitter winds don't take my life, too. I'm saving up for a ticket to a South American rainforest. I was thinking somewhere in Chile. They're more active in heat, but at least they leave the Hive.

I love television. I spend hours prostrate in front of my squat little one-eyed god, munching on crickets and obsessing over bad soap operas.

I really don't have much to say. This account only exists because the stupid hobo waiting outside won't leave without this book, and it won't close until I've written something in it. I've told him again and again, it's not safe for him here, this close to the Hive. Whatever. Now it's written. It won't close. Why won't it close? There, now I'm done. NOW I'M DONE. THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER THE END.

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Pnelma's Pen