You reject this gift

The hum inside you should feel like belonging. It feels like trespass.

It is not the warm press of being wanted but the slow insinuation of fingers prying open a door you did not invite them through. The filaments around your ribs tighten like a net; the welts on your arms gape like small mouths. You feel them wriggling deeper, tasting every crevice of you.

You stumble, gasping, one hand braced on the spongy trunk beside you. It beats faintly under your palm — a heart that isn’t yours. The whole forest hums, insects in your blood answering insects in the trees, and the sound makes your teeth ache.

“No,” you rasp. It comes out a wet hiss.

The brood answers with a vibration down your spine, like a purr.

Your stomach cramps, harder this time. Something rolls beneath the skin, the shape of a knot moving just under your navel. You clutch at it with both hands and feel not muscle but bodies — small, slick, flexing against your fingers. They shift when you touch them, like fish pressing at a net.

You gag. A thin filament slides up your throat and pokes between your teeth before dissolving back down.

This is not a gift. This is an invasion.

You stagger to your knees in the husk-littered hollow. The smell of honey and vinegar is overwhelming, the sweetness gagging. All around, the insects cling to the moss like a congregation, their pin-heads tilted in unison. Waiting.

You reach into your own mouth. Two fingers hook behind your molars and drag. Something catches. You pull.

It resists, sticky, alive. You hook harder, knuckles bruising your own gums. A wet filament comes free at last, ropey and shining with saliva. On its end is a lump the size of a grape, pale and jointed, wings still soft. It twitches once in your palm.

Your stomach lurches. You throw it. It sticks to the moss with a sound like chewing gum. Immediately three larger insects scuttle over and begin eating it.

You are shaking. Not from weakness. From fury. They did not ask. They have defiled you.

You dig again — not at your mouth this time but at your arm, at the welts. Your nails gouge down, splitting the softened skin like wet paper. Beneath, pale threads writhe. You pinch one between your nails and drag it free. It stretches, thin as a worm, then snaps wetly, spraying clear gel across your wrist. The skin around the wound turns grey. You don’t care. You keep digging.

One by one you hook them out — little glistening shapes, half-formed wings, jointed legs — and fling them into the husks. The forest hums louder, a low warning. The insects on the trees rise like smoke.

“Get out,” you snarl, voice cracking.

Your chest convulses. The filaments across your ribs tighten, pulling your sternum like a drawstring. Something bigger moves inside, shifting up under your heart. You drive your fingers into your own skin. The lattice splits with a soft crack. Clear gel gushes out, hot and sticky, slicking your palms. You dig deeper.

Pain blooms at last, bright and cold. But under it is a terrible relief: the feeling of prying open a door that someone else locked.

You hook something thick, the size of a mouse. It writhes, claws scraping your ribs. You pull with both hands. It tears free in a gush of fluid — a pale thing with folded wings and a pin-head already hardened to a point. It screams, a thin steam-whistle, then dies in your grip. You fling it.

Your knees buckle.

Another swell inside you. You reach again, deeper, up under your own ribs. Fingers slide along something slick and jointed. You tear it loose. Another. And another. The pain climbs from sharp to incandescent. You cannot breathe through your mouth anymore — too much gel, too many filaments — so you breathe through your nose, ragged.

The insects outside the cage of your body swarm now, battering at you with their wings, pinpricks opening across your shoulders and face. You keep digging.

Every handful of them you throw hisses on the husks. Their siblings devour them before they stop twitching.

You vomit. Not bile this time but translucent pulp crawling with pale specks. It splatters across the husk-carpet and steams.

“Out,” you choke. “OUT.”

The hum spikes high, like metal on glass. The branches above thrash as though in a wind you can’t feel. You tear more filaments, rip more larvae free. Your skin tears with them. Strips of it hang, slick and glistening, but beneath is not muscle anymore; it is pale chitin, thin plates already hardening.

You keep going.

Minutes blur. Hours. You kneel in a heap of expelled brood, your hands slick with gel and blood and something else. Your chest is a hollow wound lattice-worked with cracks. Your arms are a ruin of gouges. Your mouth tastes like copper and vinegar.

At last there is nothing left moving inside you. Only echoes. Only your own ragged breath.

You pitch forward onto your hands. The husks crunch under your palms. The forest is silent except for the rasp of your lungs. The insects have retreated to the trees, watching. Not attacking. Not leaving.

You should feel clean. You don’t. You feel defiled.

Your body is shaking but not from weakness now. From the wrongness of it. The brood is gone but its shape remains, carved into you. The welts do not close; they gape like empty sockets. The lattice across your ribs has hardened into ridges, pale as ivory. When you flex your fingers, they click — nails splitting into thin hooks.

You crawl to the black pool in the center of the hollow and lean over.

The thing in the reflection is not you.

Its eyes are rimmed in yellow glow. Its skin is translucent where torn, showing a faint shimmer of light beneath, like trapped fireflies. Its chest rises and falls not with breath but with small convulsions. Its hair is matted with gel, strands glued to plates of new chitin along its skull.

You open your mouth. Your tongue is forked now, the split hidden until you stretch it. The sound that comes out is not a voice but a low, broken hum.

You slap the water. The reflection ripples but does not disappear.

The insects on the trees tilt their pin-heads, as if considering. You can feel them even now, a faint pressure at the edges of your mind — no longer a hive, but a residue. Like smoke after a fire.

You push to your feet.

Every movement feels wrong, joints bending too far, skin pulling oddly over the ridges. Your bare chest catches the sick light of the hollow, and for a moment you think you see hexagons moving beneath it, fading when you blink.

You take a step. Your toes leave faint imprints glowing yellow before fading. The husks crunch louder under your weight than they should.

You have thrown the brood out. You have refused. And still they have left their signature in you.

The forest parts ahead, a narrow scar of black earth like before. You walk toward it. The insects do not follow. They hang back, wings shifting restlessly, but none approach.

The moss pulls away from your feet as you pass. The trees lean aside. Even the silence has changed — no longer heavy but expectant, as if the whole place is holding its breath. You brush your fingers against a trunk. The bark recoils.

You are an absence now, a negation. The hive’s echo but not the hive.

The smell of honey and vinegar fades as you leave the hollow, replaced by a metallic tang. You glance down. The ridges across your ribs are leaking thin threads of clear fluid that harden into glassy beads on your skin. They glitter like frost. You scrape one off. It cuts your thumb. The wound closes immediately, skin knitting back together with a faint crackle. Your heart stutters. You press a hand to it. There is still a beat there — slower, heavier — but each pulse feels like something scraping along your insides.

You stop walking. You stare at your hand. The nails are longer, curved into hooks. The cut on your thumb has left no mark. You flex. The hooks click together softly.

“No,” you whisper.

The forest hums back.

You walk again. Because there is nothing else. Because you have rejected the gift and survived, but survival is not escape.

Every step carries you farther from the hollow, but the scar-path under your feet still pulses faintly, like a vein. Your own pulse syncs to it despite yourself. You try to slow it. It quickens. You claw at your chest. The ridges do not give. The glow under your skin pulses faster, faint hexagons flickering.

You do not want this. You did not consent. But refusal does not undo intrusion.

You break into a run. Branches slash at you. Moss whips your face. The path narrows, darkens. Still you run, as if you could outrun what’s inside you.

Your feet hit the earth harder than before. Each impact leaves a faint echo of light. The trees lean back from you as though in fear.

At last you burst out into a clearing. Grey daylight filters down, weak and normal. The air tastes like rain. No insects. No hum. You fall to your knees, chest heaving. For a moment you think you’re free. Then you see your reflection in a puddle at your knees: eyes glowing faintly, chest ridged, nails hooked. Steam rises from your skin where rain touches it.

You are not free.

You are something else now.

Not hive. Not human. Not wanted.

A thing scraped clean of its brood, still marked with their pattern. A refusal made flesh.

You stand. The rain hisses against your skin. It smells like copper and vinegar.

You walk. You do not know where you are going. You only know you cannot go back. And the forest watches you go, silent, as if brooding on what you have become.