FEESTER
"Boneless pale creatures with ragged mouths full of teeth lived at the bottom of the lake. We called them feesters."
"Little Clio’s sturdy legs, just coming fully under her control, and much used for running and jumping, became traitors; they bent at odd angles and would not support her weight. Her bones were softening; not just in her legs, but all the bones of her body, becoming not bone but flexible cartilage or baleen. Her small, even teeth fell out and were swiftly replaced by new ones, twice as many as she had had before, crooked, crowded and pointed, changing the shape of her softened jaw. Her skin turned deadly pale, and then a sick frog-belly white. Her legs began to fuse together, and her arms to fuse to her sides.
She seemed to believe that the pallid cylinders humping wetly across the floors of the dark house (dark because their great lidless eyes could not abide light) were still her four little girls, to be played with and sung to and tucked in at bedtime."
"'Why, I know all about them,” I said. “You told me yourself. Five-foot aquatic maggots with shark’s mouths. Members of the local gentry until The Curse of Hoog, Fish-God of the South Seas, fell upon them. Named for selected Muses. I’ve always wanted to meet a maggot named Polyhymnia.'”
Bob Leman, Feesters In the Lake
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