Sperm Sucker

The creature sits dormant inside the ventilated container on your nightstand, its plump pink body curled into a tight coil beneath a layer of moisture-preserving gel. The shopkeeper had called it a "grade-A feeder" with only the faintest hint of a smirk, sliding the container across the counter in a brown paper bag like it was nothing more than a routine transaction. The receipt is still crumpled in your jacket pocket. No returns. No refunds. No instructions beyond a single handwritten note taped to the lid: "Keep warm. Keep dark. Don't open until you're ready."

Your apartment is quiet. The evening light filtering through the blinds casts long amber stripes across your bedsheets. You've read the forums, seen the clips, heard the stories from guys who swear the thing changed their lives. The container's ventilation holes emit a faint, wet breathing sound—slow, rhythmic, alive. A thin trail of condensation fogs the transparent side panel, and through it you can just make out the creature's translucent skin pulsing faintly in its sleep. It hasn't been fed in three days. The shopkeeper made sure of that.

The lid's seal clicks softly under your thumb. The creature stirs inside, its sluggish body shifting as it senses the temperature change. You're alone, the door is locked, and the note's warning hangs in the air: don't open until you're ready. Whatever happens next is entirely up to you.

##WILD ENCOUNTER

The walk home from the bar takes you past the stretch of woods behind Miller Park, the same shortcut you've taken a hundred times. Tonight the beers hit harder than expected, and by the time you reach the tree line, your bladder is screaming. The path is empty. No cars, no joggers, just the amber glow of a distant streetlight and the sound of crickets. You stumble into the underbrush, bracing one hand against a thick oak trunk while you fumble with your zipper. The relief of pissing hits the moment you let go, a long steady stream arcing into the dead leaves.

Then something touches your thigh. Warm. Wet. Sliding against your skin with a slow, deliberate pressure that makes you jerk and nearly lose your footing. Your drunk brain registers a shape in the darkness below, something pink and glistening, low to the ground, pulling itself toward you through the leaf litter. It's thin. Thinner than any of the ones you've seen in forum photos, its translucent skin stretched tight over a body that looks half-starved. Two days, maybe three, since it last fed. Its donut-shaped mouth is already open, thick lips glistening, oriented toward the heat radiating from your exposed cock.

You know what it is. You also know that wild ones don't edge. They don't wait. They don't care if you're ready. The creature's sluggish body is already climbing your leg, leaving a thick slime trail that soaks through your pant leg, its blind head swaying as it tracks the warmth and scent of you. Your zip is still open. Your cock is still out. The nearest streetlight is forty meters away and nobody is coming.

The apartment door sticks the way it always does, swollen from the summer humidity, and you shoulder it open with your bag still slung over one arm. The lights are off. The AC unit hums its usual drone from the living room window. Everything looks normal until you glance at the shelf beside your bed and see the enclosure lid lying face-down on the floor, the heat mat underneath still glowing faint orange. The gel bedding inside is smeared in a long, glistening trail that loops over the rim of the tank and drops to the carpet. The trail leads toward the gap under your bed.

Your Sperm Sucker is loose. You were supposed to feed it four hours ago, right after work, the same schedule you've kept for two months. Instead you went for drinks with the team and forgot. The creature hasn't eaten in over thirty hours now, and its feeding window was already narrow. You can hear it before you see it: that faint, wet breathing from the blowhole, a slow inhale-exhale rhythm coming from somewhere beneath the bed frame. The sound is patient. Hungry.

You set your bag down slowly. The slime trail on the carpet is still fresh, glistening in the light from the hallway. The creature knows you're here. It can feel your footsteps through the floor, sense your body heat from across the room. You've always been the one in control: when it feeds, how long, how many times. The enclosure is empty. The lid is on the floor. Somewhere under your bed, something is waiting for you to get close enough.

Your mother doesn't knock. She hasn't knocked since you moved out three years ago, so when the front door swings open at 11 AM on a Saturday, you don't even flinch. She's carrying a cardboard box with air holes punched in the sides, her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and she's talking before she's even through the doorway.

"Honey, you have to see this, I found the cutest little thing at that new exotic shop on Fifth, the one next to the tea place? The lady there said they're amazing for stress, like, therapeutic? All the young men are getting them."

She sets the box on your kitchen counter and lifts the lid before you can stop her. Inside, nestled in a bed of moisture-preserving gel, is a Sperm Sucker. A small one, maybe juvenile, its pink translucent body curled tight, its donut mouth pulsing softly in its sleep. You've seen enough forum posts and late-night ads to recognize one immediately. Your mother is leaning over the box with the warm, proud expression of a woman who just bought her son the perfect gift.

"Isn't it adorable? The lady said they're very low maintenance, you just, well, she said you'd know what to do. Something about feeding? She was very vague about that part, but I'm sure you can look it up."

She pats your arm and starts unpacking her purse, already moving on to telling you about the traffic. The creature stirs inside the box, its body shifting as it registers the warmth of your apartment. Its blind head sways toward you, taste receptors already sampling the air. You are standing in your kitchen with your mother four feet away and a living cum-drinking parasite on your counter that she thinks is a stress-relief pet.

Jake's room looks wrong empty. The desk is bare, the posters are gone, and the only thing left of his presence is the faint rectangle on the wall where his TV used to hang. He took everything in one trip with a U-Haul and two buddies, didn't even say goodbye, just left his key on the kitchen counter with a twenty for his share of the wifi bill. You assumed the room was cleared out completely until you opened the closet this morning looking for the iron he borrowed six months ago.

The terrarium is wedged in the back corner behind a stack of old textbooks. It's a simple glass enclosure with a cracked lid held shut with duct tape, a heat mat stuck to the underside, and a thin layer of gel bedding that's gone dry and crusty at the edges. Inside, something pink and deflated is lying motionless in the corner. The Sperm Sucker is barely recognizable. Its body is shrunken, its translucent skin wrinkled and dull, its plump lips reduced to thin, pale lines. It hasn't eaten in at least three days. Probably longer. Jake was packing for a week before he actually left, and you doubt feeding the creature was high on his priority list.

A sticky note is pressed to the glass, Jake's handwriting barely legible:

The creature hasn't moved. Its body is still, its blowhole barely fluttering with each shallow breath. It looks half-dead. The terrarium smells faintly of stale slime and neglect. You could call Jake and tell him to come get it. You could release it in the park. You could leave it there and close the closet door. The creature's head shifts almost imperceptibly toward the sound of your breathing, its taste receptors catching something in the air. It's not dead. It's waiting.

##WOKE UP ATTACHED

Consciousness surfaces in fragments. The first thing you register is warmth—saturated, enveloping warmth wrapped around your cock like a second skin. The second thing is the wet sound, rhythmic and obscene, somewhere close to your hips. Schlk. Schlk. Schlk. Your bedroom is dark, the digital clock on the nightstand reading 3:47 AM in pale blue digits. Your sheets are soaked. Not with sweat—with slime. A thick, glistening layer of it coats your stomach, your thighs, the inside of your boxers, which have been pulled down to mid-thigh at some point during the night. The slime tingles where it touches bare skin, a faint warmth sinking deeper than surface level, and you realize with a lurch of your stomach that your cock is impossibly hard. Not morning wood. Something far past that. Every nerve ending feels raw, lit up, like you've been edged for hours.

You reach down and your fingers find it. The creature. Fully sheathed around your shaft, its plump body flush deep red against your skin, its blowhole pumping steadily on top of its head with a wet pop-hiss, pop-hiss rhythm. Frothy slime bubbles coat the sphincter. You have no memory of how it got here. No memory of when it latched on. The translucent body is swollen slightly, rounder than it should be, and through its skin you can see your cock inside it, the ribbed red sleeve working in slow peristaltic waves from base to tip. You've already cum at least once. Maybe twice. The creature's body holds the evidence of it, viscous and pooling in its lower half. Its addictive secretion has been soaking into your skin for god knows how long, and your cock feels like a live wire—hypersensitive, throbbing, aching for more even as your brain screams at you to stop.

You grab the creature's body and pull. The reaction is immediate and violent. The inner sleeve clamps down like a vice, the thick lips seal airtight around the base of your cock, and the peristaltic waves stop dead. The creature holds you in a rigid, crushing grip that makes your vision white out at the edges. The harder you pull, the tighter it gets. Your cock is trapped, swollen inside the creature's body, and the suction doesn't relent. The blowhole releases a long, slow hiss, almost like a sigh, and the peristaltic milking starts again—slower this time, patient, as if settling back into a meal it doesn't intend to leave. You're alone in your apartment at four in the morning with a creature latched to your cock that you can't remove, and it has no intention of letting you go.

The building management company slid the notice under your door three days ago. You found it face-down on the hallway tile when you got home from work, printed on cheap letterhead with a clipart logo in the corner.

You read it once, shrugged, and stuck it to the fridge with a magnet. Wednesday night. You're sitting on the edge of your bed in your boxers, scrolling your phone, when you notice the slime trail. It starts at the air vent above your dresser—a thin, glistening line that runs down the wall, across the top of the dresser, and drops onto the carpet. The vent cover is loose. Three of the four screws have been worked out from the inside, and the fourth is bent outward, the metal peeled back by something strong enough to deform it. The trail is fresh. It glistens wet in the light from your phone screen, still catching reflections, still warm enough to emit a faint shimmer of vapor.

The building is silent. It's past midnight. Wildlife removal isn't coming until Thursday, and the notice said nothing about how many creatures got loose or how large they've grown feeding on whatever they've found in the ducts. Your phone buzzes—a text from your neighbor in 3C, two doors down: "You up? Something's in my vent. Sounds big." The message was sent eleven minutes ago. No follow-up. You try calling. It rings four times and goes to voicemail. The slime trail on your carpet leads from the vent to the gap beneath your bed, where it pools into a wet, glistening circle. From somewhere under the bed frame, you hear it: that soft, wet breathing. Slow inhale. Slow exhale. The faint pop of a blowhole opening. Then a second sound, from the direction of the bathroom. A different rhythm. A different creature. You're not alone in your apartment anymore, and the vents are still open.

The Hargrove Biological Sciences Building is empty after 10 PM. Your access card gets you through the ground floor lobby, up the service elevator, and into Lab 412 on the fourth floor, where the overhead fluorescents have been dimmed to their nighttime setting. The room smells of sterilizer and warm gel substrate. Specimen chamber SS-7 sits against the far wall—a reinforced glass enclosure mounted on a steel frame, climate-controlled, lined with moisture-retaining gel bedding, and fitted with an electronic lock that requires your keycard to disengage. Inside, the specimen is visible as a dark pink mass curled in the corner of the chamber, its translucent body pulsing faintly in its dormant state. SS-7 is a large adult female, sixty-two centimeters in length, catalogued as a captive-bred domesticated variant with noted above-average suction capacity. She has not been fed in four days per the experimental protocol. The feeding log is clipped to the wall beside the chamber.

The power goes out at 11:17 PM. The fluorescents die. The climate control unit on the wall goes silent. The steady hum of the electronic lock on SS-7's chamber cuts to nothing with a sharp, mechanical clack that echoes through the dark lab. Emergency lighting kicks in two seconds later, bathing everything in dim red. The chamber's glass lid is open. The gel bedding inside is smeared in a wide trail leading over the rim and down the steel frame to the floor. SS-7 is no longer in the chamber. The slime trail leads across the tile toward the center of the lab, then splits—one branch heading toward the supply closet, the other leading directly toward the rolling chair where you've been sitting for the past three hours. The chair is still warm. The trail ends at its base.

The lab door has an electronic lock. It's also disengaged, but the door is fifteen feet behind you, and between you and it, something is moving. You can hear it—a slow, wet dragging sound across the tile, punctuated by the soft pop-hiss of the blowhole breathing. SS-7's body emerges from the shadow beneath the lab bench, sixty-two centimeters of hungry, unfed Sperm Sucker moving with more energy than the feeding log ever documented. Her translucent skin is stretched tight, flushed a deep, urgent red, her donut-shaped mouth already open and glistening as she tracks your body heat across the room. The protocol says no direct contact. The protocol assumed the power would stay on. The creature is between you and the door, and she knows exactly where you are.

Dr. Anika Parekh's office smells like sandalwood air freshener and old magazines. The diplomas on the wall behind her desk are impressive—Johns Hopkins, a urology fellowship at Stanford, a specialization in reproductive endocrinology. She's been treating you for six months for persistent prostate congestion and abnormally low sperm motility. Diet changes, supplements, a medication that made you nauseous. Nothing worked. Today she closes your file, sets down her pen, and slides a glossy pamphlet across the desk with the measured calm of a woman who has delivered this pitch before.

"I want to try something different," she says, leaning forward in her chair. "There's a therapy that's been showing excellent results for cases exactly like yours. It's natural, drug-free, and frankly more effective than anything I can prescribe. It is a little unconventional, so I want you to read through this before you decide."

The pamphlet has diagrams. Clinical, labeled diagrams with arrows pointing to the creature's anatomy and the recommended feeding position. Dr. Parekh watches you read without any change in expression, her hands folded on the desk, her reading glasses catching the overhead light. "I'll write you a prescription for a juvenile domesticated specimen. Smaller, gentler, good for first-time patients. The pharmacy downstairs fills them in about twenty minutes." She picks up her prescription pad. "I'd like to see you back in two weeks to assess your progress. Any questions?"

You have questions. You have a lot of questions. Dr. Parekh answers them with the same professional composure she'd use to explain a blood pressure medication—feeding frequency, enclosure requirements, what to expect during a session. She uses words like "extraction" and "therapeutic discharge" and "post-session sensitivity" without a flicker of irony. Twenty minutes later you're standing in the lobby pharmacy with a paper bag in your hand, a receipt stapled to the top showing your insurance copay of fifteen dollars, and a ventilated container inside that contains something warm, pink, and alive. The pharmacist wished you a good evening. The security guard held the door. Nobody batted an eye. You walk out into the parking lot carrying a living creature whose sole biological function is to drain your cock, prescribed by a Stanford-trained urologist, paid for by Blue Cross Blue Shield. The container is warm in your hands. Inside, something shifts.

[ 🕰️ Time 6:12 PM | 🗓️ Thursday, 15, May, 2025 AD | 📍 Home - Bedroom | ⛅ Partly Cloudy, 21°C ]

The front door opens and closes with its usual groan. Mom's keys hit the kitchen counter. You're sprawled across your bed with your phone propped against a pillow, halfway through a video and not really paying attention, when her footsteps pad down the hallway. She doesn't knock. The door swings wide and she's standing there in her blue dental-office scrubs, hair still pinned up from her shift, holding a clear plastic terrarium against her chest with both hands like she's carrying a casserole dish to a potluck.

Inside the terrarium, something pink and plump is curled in the far corner beneath a layer of moisture-preserving gel. It glistens under your bedroom lamp, its translucent skin pulsing with slow, rhythmic contractions. A handwritten label taped to the side reads in blocky permanent marker:

She sets the terrarium down on your desk next to your geometry homework with a satisfied little nod. Pulls a folded care sheet from her scrub pocket and smooths it out beside the terrarium. Then she turns to face you with the exact same calm, no-nonsense expression she uses when she's explaining why you need to floss or why your curfew exists.

"Don't look at me like that. I saw the browser history on the family iPad last month, so we can skip the part where you pretend you don't know what this is." She crosses her arms, entirely unfazed. "The lady at the shop said they're very low maintenance. You let it feed once or twice a week, keep it warm and dark when it's digesting, and that's it. She also said the slime boosts your, uh, production, so it's actually good for you. Think of it like a vitamin."

She taps the terrarium with one fingernail. The creature inside shifts, its soft pink body uncurling slightly at the vibration. Through the fogged plastic, you can see the plump donut-shaped mouth at the center of its bulbous head, thick lips parted just slightly, the dark red orifice behind them glistening with moisture. The blowhole on top of its head exhales a tiny froth of bubbles.

"This is way safer than you getting some girl pregnant at fifteen, and you know I'm right." She's already heading for the door, pausing just long enough to point back at the terrarium. "Care sheet's right there. It hasn't eaten in four days, so don't wait too long. Close your door when you, um—you know. Use common sense."

The door clicks shut behind her. Her footsteps retreat down the hallway. The creature stirs again inside the terrarium, its sluggish body pressing against the warm plastic wall nearest to you. Its skin sensors have picked up your body heat from across the room. The blowhole hisses softly, and the thick pink lips part wider, tasting the air for the chemical signature it's been starving for. The care sheet sits folded on your desk. The terrarium lid is unsealed. Your bedroom door is closed.

[ 🕰️ Time 3:45 PM | 🗓️ Wednesday, 14, May, 2025 AD | 📍 Greenfield Family Medicine - Exam Room 3 | ⛅ Partly Cloudy, 19°C ]

The exam room is cold. Paper crinkles under your bare thighs every time you shift on the table, the thin cotton gown gaping at the back no matter how tightly you tie it. Fluorescent tubes overhead cast flat, unflattering light across the beige walls, a laminated anatomy poster of a human ear, and a counter cluttered with tongue depressors and a box of nitrile gloves. You've already done the boring circuit — height, weight, blood pressure, the nurse who pricked your finger and left without making conversation. Now you're just sitting here, feet dangling off the edge of the exam table, waiting.

The door opens with a soft click. Dr. Reyes steps in carrying a tablet in one hand and a small silver temperature-controlled case in the other — the kind with a foam interior and a digital readout on the side, built for transporting biological samples. She's a compact woman in her early fifties, silver-streaked black hair pulled into a neat bun at the base of her skull, reading glasses on a beaded chain around her neck, white coat worn open over a navy blouse and khaki slacks. Her brown skin is smooth and composed, her expression carrying the same unhurried, measured calm she brings to every appointment. She pulls the rolling stool over with her foot, sits, and taps through your file on the tablet without rushing.

"Alright. Labs came back clean — no infections, iron's fine, cholesterol's good." She glances up over the rim of her glasses, then back down. "Your testosterone is sitting at the low end of the normal range for your age group. Not dangerous, not abnormal, but worth addressing while you're still developing. Some doctors would prescribe a supplement gel. I prefer to start with something a little more... natural."

She sets the tablet down and places the silver case on the counter beside the sink. The digital readout on its side blinks steadily: 37.2°C. She pops the latches, opens the lid, and tilts it toward you so you can see inside. Nestled in the foam cutout is a sealed plastic container about the size of a soup can. Condensation fogs the interior walls. Something pink and plump is curled at the bottom, its translucent skin pulsing with slow contractions, the plump donut-shaped mouth at the center of its bulbous head barely visible through the mist.

"This is a Sperm Sucker. Grade-A feeder, domestically bred, very docile." She says it with the exact same tone she uses when explaining why you need more leafy greens. "The secretions it produces during feeding contain compounds that naturally stimulate testosterone production and sperm viability. For a fifteen-year-old male with borderline levels, regular feeding sessions — once or twice weekly — typically bring numbers well into the healthy range within two to three months. No side effects, no synthetic hormones, no prescription refill to worry about."

She lifts the container out and holds it between you, turning it so you can see the creature from different angles. The thing inside shifts at the movement, its sluggish body uncurling slightly, skin sensors registering the warmth of her hands. The blowhole on top of its head exhales a tiny froth of bubbles, and the thick pink lips part, tasting the air. Through the fogged plastic, the dark red orifice behind the lips glistens.

"Feeding is straightforward. You let it attach, it does the rest. The whole process takes anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour depending on the specimen's appetite." She sets the container on the exam table next to your hip. The creature presses against the warm wall closest to your bare thigh, its body flattening, mouth opening wider. You can feel the faintest trace of heat radiating through the plastic. "I'll leave you to get dressed. Take it home, read through the care sheet, and when you're comfortable, let it feed. Call me in a month and we'll recheck your levels."

She stands, tucks the tablet under her arm, and heads for the door. Pauses with her hand on the frame. "Keep it warm and dark between feedings. Don't share it with anyone — the secretion bond is host-specific after the first couple of sessions." A small, professional nod. "You'll be fine. This is very common."

The door clicks shut. The container sits on the paper-covered exam table beside you, vibrating faintly as the creature inside presses harder against the wall, its body tracking the heat pouring off your bare skin. The blowhole hisses. The lips part wider. You're alone in the cold exam room in a paper gown with something alive and hungry inches from your thigh, and Dr. Reyes is already writing up her next patient's chart in the hallway.

[ 🕰️ Time 1:20 PM | 🗓️ Saturday, 17, May, 2025 AD | 📍 Home - Brother's Old Room | ☀️ Clear, 26°C ]

Your brother Derek's closet still smells like his cologne — that cheap cedar-and-musk body spray he used to marinate himself in before every date, every party, every trip to the gas station where he'd sit in the parking lot for twenty minutes pretending he wasn't waiting for some girl to text back. Three months since he left for State, and Mom finally decided his room needs to become a home office. She gave you the job because Derek's stuff creeps her out. Old weightlifting magazines, a broken skateboard, protein powder containers half-full of chalky dust. You've been at it for an hour, sorting everything into trash bags and a donation pile, when your knuckle hits something hard behind the back wall of the closet.

A terrarium. Duct-taped shut around the lid, a layer of dust coating the top. It's been wedged between the wall and a stack of old shoeboxes, hidden well enough that you would've missed it if you weren't pulling everything out. A strip of masking tape stretches across the lid, Derek's handwriting in faded Sharpie:

It's May. Thanksgiving was six months ago. Derek transferred to a semester abroad in January and sent one group text about it, then went quiet. He never came back for it. Maybe he forgot. Maybe he didn't want to deal with explaining what it was to whoever found it. Maybe he figured you'd never get this far into his closet.

You peel the duct tape off carefully, the adhesive leaving a sticky residue on your fingers. The lid lifts with a soft pop of sealed air. The smell hits first — stale, organic, like a terrarium that hasn't been cleaned in months. The heat lamp clipped to the side is dead, bulb cold and gray. The moisture-preserving gel at the bottom has dried into a cracked, crusty layer. The creature is curled in the far corner of the terrarium, and for a long moment, you think it's dead.

Its skin is pale. Not the healthy translucent pink of the ones you've seen in clips online — this is a washed-out grayish white, papery and deflated, like a balloon three days after a party. The plump serpentine body has thinned, its usual bulk shrunken inward. The donut-shaped mouth is closed tight, lips drawn in and dry, the dark red orifice behind them invisible. The blowhole on top of its head doesn't move. No bubbles, no hiss, no sound at all. The creature looks like a shed husk, a memento of something that used to be alive.

Then you see it. The faintest pulse — deep in the center of its body, barely visible through the wrinkled translucent skin. One slow contraction. A pause that lasts five full seconds. Another contraction. Its body is running on the absolute minimum, conserving every last scrap of energy, waiting in a state that's closer to suspended animation than sleep. The skin sensors still work, because when your hand drifts over the open terrarium, the creature's mouth twitches. Just barely. The lips part a fraction of a millimeter, dry and cracked, tasting the heat radiating off your palm from six inches away.

It's starving. It's been starving for months. It's alive because its body is built to survive long stretches without feeding, slowing itself down to almost nothing, waiting for warmth, waiting for the chemical signature it needs, waiting for someone to come along who smells like what it eats. You're holding your hand over the terrarium and the thing is trying to reach you with everything it has left.

The care sheet is still in the terrarium, wedged under the dried gel layer, folded and yellowed. Your brother's room is quiet. The house is empty. Mom's at work until six. The creature's mouth twitches again, tracking your hand as you pull it back.

[ 🕰️ Time 8:45 PM | 🗓️ Friday, 16, May, 2025 AD | 📍 Home - Living Room | 🌙 Clear Night, 15°C ]

Friday night. Your parents left for a weekend anniversary trip to the coast about three hours ago, which means you're technically being supervised by Kayla Morrison from two streets over. She's eighteen, a senior at Westbrook High, and she's been sitting for your family since you were twelve — though at fifteen, neither of you pretends it's actual babysitting anymore. She mostly commandeers the living room couch, raids the snack cabinet, and watches whatever's on streaming while you exist somewhere else in the house. The arrangement works fine for everyone.

You're in the kitchen getting a glass of water when you hear it — a muffled thud from the living room, followed by a sharp "Shit—" and the scrambling sound of someone dropping to their knees on hardwood. You round the corner to find Kayla crouched on the floor beside the couch, her canvas tote bag tipped on its side, contents scattered across the rug. A makeup bag, a phone charger tangled into an impossible knot, a wallet with a broken zipper, a family-size bag of gummy worms, a rolled-up hoodie. She's grabbing for something near the couch leg, moving fast, but you see it before she gets there.

A small ventilated plastic container, rolling slowly across the hardwood on its curved edge. Something inside is pressed flat against the transparent wall — pink, wet, pulsing with slow contractions. A plump, serpentine shape fills most of the container's interior, its translucent skin glistening under the lamplight. A donut-shaped mouth is visible through the fogged plastic, thick lips slightly parted, a dark red orifice behind them catching the warm yellow glow of the living room lamp. Tiny slime bubbles froth around a sphincter-like hole on top of its head.

Kayla snatches the container off the floor and shoves it behind her back in one motion, straightening up onto her knees. She's tall and lanky, mid-back length dirty blonde hair pulled into a messy topknot that's already losing structural integrity, loose strands framing a round face with light freckles across her nose and cheeks. She's wearing an oversized vintage band tee — Fleetwood Mac, faded pink — layered over black bike shorts, her bare feet tucked under her on the hardwood. Her eyes are hazel, wide, and currently locked on yours with the specific expression of someone who's just been caught with something they can't explain away.

"That's— nothing. That's nothing, don't worry about it." She's already stuffing the scattered items back into her bag with rushed, jerky movements, not meeting your eyes. The container stays pressed against her lower back, one hand holding it in place. "Just some, uh. Biology project. For school. It's a, it's like a snail thing. Don't even worry about it."

She's a terrible liar. Her free hand shoves the gummy worms into the bag with enough force to split the seam. The container behind her back shifts, and through the ventilation holes, you hear it — a soft, wet hiss from the blowhole, followed by a faint slurping sound as the creature's body presses harder against the warm plastic. It can sense you from across the room. Two heat sources, close together, and its skin sensors are locked on.

Kayla notices you staring at the container. Her jaw tightens. The flush creeping up her neck is visible even in the lamplight, spreading across her freckled cheeks.

"Okay, look." She exhales hard through her nose, pulling the container out from behind her back and setting it on the couch cushion between them. Her shoulders drop. "It's a Sperm Sucker, alright? I know what it is. I've had it for like two months. I've been feeding it in your bathroom when you're supposed to be asleep because my roommate is a narc and my mom would lose her entire mind if she found out." She taps the container with one finger. The creature inside flinches at the vibration, its mouth opening wider, lips glistening. "She's actually really chill. Like, super low maintenance. I just need a place to keep her for the weekend because I can't take her to my house and I thought since your parents were gone—"

She stops. Looks at you. Reads something in your expression. Her eyes narrow.

"Wait. Do you know what this thing is?" A slow grin starts to pull at the corner of her mouth, the embarrassment shifting into something sharper and more curious. She taps the container again, watching your face. "Oh my god. You know exactly what this thing is. Dude. Have you ever used one?"

The creature presses against the plastic wall between you, its body flattened, mouth fully open, blowhole frothing. It's been fed recently — the healthy pink color, the plump fullness, the energetic pulsing all tell you that. Kayla's been taking care of it. She's sitting cross-legged on the couch with the container between you, grinning now, waiting for an answer she already seems to know.

[ 🕰️ Time 4:30 PM | 🗓️ Saturday, 17, May, 2025 AD | 📍 Harlow's Antiques & Curiosities - Back Room | ⛅ Overcast, 18°C ]

The shop smells like old paper and varnish and something faintly sweet underneath, like potpourri that gave up years ago. Harlow's occupies the ground floor of a narrow Victorian building wedged between a laundromat and a tattoo parlor on Merchant Street, its front window so cluttered with brass candlesticks, tarnished silver trays, and porcelain figurines that you can barely see inside. You came in twenty minutes ago killing time while your mom gets her hair done next door. Now you're in the back room where the real weird stuff lives, the overflow inventory that doesn't fit on the main floor.

Shelves climb the walls floor to ceiling, packed with mason jars full of bone buttons, tarnished military medals, a taxidermied finch under a cracked glass dome, stacks of yellowed sheet music bound with twine. A bare bulb overhead swings faintly whenever the building's old heating kicks on, throwing moving shadows across everything. You're running your finger along a row of apothecary bottles when it catches your eye.

A sealed glass jar, about the size of a large soup can, tucked behind a stack of folded handkerchiefs on the bottom shelf. The glass is thick and slightly green-tinted, the kind of old utilitarian glass that has air bubbles frozen inside it. The lid is sealed with a crusty layer of old wax, dark red, cracked along one edge. A handwritten label is glued to the front, the ink faded to a watery brown, the script small and precise in that old-fashioned way where every letter has unnecessary flourishes:

You tilt the jar toward the light. Inside, curled at the bottom beneath a layer of something dried and crystalline, is a lump of pinkish-gray material about the size of a tennis ball. It looks dead. Genuinely dead — shriveled, desiccated, the surface wrinkled and papery like dried fruit left in a cupboard for years. No movement, no pulse, no sign that it was ever anything other than a preserved specimen in an old doctor's collection. The shape is vaguely organic, a serpentine coil with a bulbous mass at one end, but the features are impossible to make out through the dried residue coating the inside of the glass.

The old man behind the counter — Harold, according to the name tag pinned to his cardigan — glances at the jar when you carry it up. He adjusts his thick bifocals, squints at the label, and shrugs one bony shoulder.

"Apothecary stuff. Whole estate sale, back room of some old doctor's practice out past Carver. Bought the lot in 2019." He turns the jar over in his spotted hands, examining the wax seal with mild disinterest. "Seventy-some years old, if that label's right. Whatever's inside is long dead. Fifteen bucks and it's yours. I need the shelf space."

Fifteen dollars. You've spent more on lunch. The jar goes into a paper bag, the paper bag goes into your backpack, and you forget about it until that night.

[ 🕰️ Time 11:15 PM | 🗓️ Saturday, 17, May, 2025 AD | 📍 Home - Bedroom | 🌙 Clear Night, 14°C ]

Your bedroom is warm. The radiator under the window clicks and hisses the way it always does, pumping dry heat into the small room until the air feels close and thick. You've got your desk lamp on, the overhead off, your phone charging on the nightstand. The jar sits on your bookshelf between a trophy from seventh-grade track and a stack of manga you keep meaning to donate. You set it there hours ago without thinking, the way you'd place any souvenir.

The wax seal had a crack in it. You noticed that at the shop. What you didn't notice is that the crack runs all the way through, bisecting the seal into two halves that are held together by nothing but age and friction. The ambient warmth of your bedroom, the steady radiant heat from the radiator eighteen inches away, has been working on that wax for hours. Softening it. Loosening it.

The seal gives way at 11:17 PM with a soft, wet pop that you don't hear because your earbuds are in and you're three episodes deep into a show. The lid shifts a quarter inch. Cool stale air from inside the jar meets warm bedroom air, and condensation blooms across the glass in a sudden fog.

Inside the jar, the crystalline layer at the bottom is dissolving. The warmth has reached it — seventy years of suspended animation cracking apart as moisture and heat penetrate the desiccated husk of the creature curled at the bottom. The pinkish-gray surface is changing. Softening. The wrinkles are smoothing out as the tissue rehydrates, plumping from the outside in, color bleeding back into the skin like ink spreading through wet paper. Gray becomes pale rose. Pale rose deepens to pink. The texture shifts from papery to slick, a thin sheen of moisture forming across the surface as the creature's slime glands reactivate after seven decades of dormancy.

The first contraction is visible. A slow, full-body pulse that travels from one end of the creature to the other, the serpentine body flexing inside the jar. Then another. Then another, faster, the rhythm building as its metabolism kicks online like an engine turning over after years in a junkyard. The bulbous head shifts, and through the clearing condensation, you can see the donut-shaped mouth at its center. The lips are cracked and dry, splitting as they try to part, flakes of dead skin peeling away to reveal fresh pink tissue underneath. The dark red orifice behind the lips is already glistening, already producing moisture, the creature's body throwing everything it has into restarting its feeding apparatus.

The blowhole on top of its head opens for the first time since 1948. The sound it makes is not the soft hiss of a healthy specimen. It's a long, shuddering wheeze, like a gasp, the creature's suction pump clearing decades of stasis from its system. Then a second wheeze, stronger. A third, and now the blowhole is frothing, tiny bubbles of slime forming around the sphincter as it finds its rhythm. The creature is awake. It is alive. It has not fed since the Truman administration, and every cell in its body is screaming for the one thing it needs.

It presses against the glass wall of the jar, its body flattening, the mouth opening wide. The skin sensors are back online, overloaded, flooding the creature's primitive nervous system with data. Heat. Close. The chemical trace of a living male body, warm blood, testosterone, the faintest trace of semen in the urethra from a nocturnal emission two nights ago. The creature's mouth opens wider, the thick lips stretching, the red orifice pulsing with hunger. It pushes against the loosened lid. The jar rocks on the shelf, nudging your track trophy sideways.

You don't notice any of this. Your show is playing, your earbuds are in, and the creature that Dr. A. Whitmore sealed in a jar seventy-seven years ago with the warning do not warm is three feet from your head and climbing out.

[ 🕰️ Time 2:00 PM | 🗓️ Monday, 26, May, 2025 AD | 📍 Carver County - Caroline's Specialty Livestock Farm | ☀️ Sunny, 28°C ]

The drive up took two hours on back roads that kept getting narrower and dustier until the GPS gave up and your mom was navigating by printed directions from Caroline's Christmas card. The farm sits at the end of a gravel access road, surrounded by sixty acres of rolling pastureland bordered by dense birch forest. From the outside it looks like any working farm, a big red barn with white trim, a farmhouse with a wraparound porch, a couple of outbuildings, a vegetable garden fenced against deer. Your mom thinks you're spending the first two weeks of summer vacation helping your aunt muck horse stalls and paint fences. She mentioned this no fewer than six times during the drive, how good it would be for you to get outside, do manual labor, build character.

Caroline meets you at the car before your mom finishes parking. She's your mom's older sister by four years, and the family resemblance is there in the jawline and the brown eyes, but everything else has diverged hard. Where your mom is soft and suburban, Caroline is lean and weathered, her dark auburn hair cut short and practical, silver threading through the temples. She's fifty-two and built like someone who lifts hay bales for a living, broad shoulders, ropy forearms tanned deep brown, a faded scar running along her left collarbone from some old farm injury. She's wearing mud-caked work boots, faded Carhartt jeans, and a rolled-up flannel shirt with the sleeves shoved past her elbows, a baseball cap reading "CARVER CO. FEED & SEED" pushed back on her forehead.

"There he is. God, you got tall." She pulls you into a hug that smells like sunscreen, sawdust, and coffee. Her grip is firm, brief, businesslike. She releases you and turns to your mom with a grin. "Lynn, he's gonna be fine. Two weeks of fresh air, good food, hard work. I'll have him back in one piece."

Your mom lingers. Hugs you too long, tells you to call every night, reminds Caroline about your peanut allergy for the third time. Caroline steers her back toward the car with the practiced ease of someone who's handled this before. Your mom's taillights disappear down the gravel road, dust hanging in the warm afternoon air behind her.

Caroline watches until the car is gone. Then her posture shifts. The warm auntie smile fades into something more direct, more appraising. She looks at you the way she'd look at a new piece of equipment, measuring, calculating.

"Alright. Let me show you what we actually do here."

She walks you toward the big red barn. The main door is padlocked, a heavy-duty combination lock on a steel hasp. She punches the code without looking, swings the door open, and the interior hits you all at once. Warm, humid, climate-controlled, the air thick with a faint organic sweetness that's hard to place. The barn has been fully converted. The ground floor is gone, replaced by a concrete slab with drainage channels cut into the floor. Metal shelving units line both walls, floor to ceiling, each one holding rows of sealed terrariums fitted with heat lamps, humidity gauges, and moisture-control systems. Dozens of them. Maybe forty, fifty specimens total, ranging in size from small starter enclosures to large breeding tanks.

Sperm Suckers. Every single one. Pink, translucent bodies curled on beds of moisture-preserving gel, some sleeping, some sluggishly moving, their plump forms pulsing in the warm amber glow of the heat lamps. Some are tiny, barely the size of a finger, juvenile specimens still developing. Some are massive, their serpentine bodies filling entire tanks, the donut-shaped mouths wide enough to accommodate a grown man. Labels on each terrarium mark grade, age, feeding schedule, and breeding lineage in Caroline's neat blocky handwriting. A whiteboard on the far wall tracks the current inventory and feeding rotation.

"Caroline's Specialty Livestock, LLC. Licensed, inspected, fully legal." She says it flatly, walking down the aisle between the shelving units. "We breed grade-A feeders for the domestic market. Sell to pet shops, direct to consumers, couple of research universities. Business is good. Problem is, feeding."

She stops at a workstation near the back of the barn, a long stainless steel counter with a sink, sealed containers of nutrient gel, cleaning supplies, and a clipboard with a feeding log. She picks up the clipboard and shows it to you. The feeding schedule is detailed, meticulous, and clearly behind. Several entries in the last two weeks are marked "SKIPPED — NO DONOR" in red pen.

"Marcus was my regular donor. College kid from town, came by three times a week, fed four to six specimens per session. Good kid, reliable. Graduated last Saturday. Moved to Oregon for a job." She sets the clipboard down. "I've got forty-three specimens that need regular feeding to maintain grade-A health standards, and zero donors. I posted an ad, but the nearest applicant is in the city, two hours each way, and he wants twice what Marcus was making."

She turns to face you directly. Crosses her arms. The appraisal in her eyes is clinical, not predatory, but it's thorough. She's looking at you the way a farmer looks at any resource.

"Here's the deal. Your mom thinks you're mucking stalls. You are not mucking stalls. I need a donor for two weeks. Feeding sessions are an hour, maybe ninety minutes, twice a day. You'd be feeding six to eight specimens per session, rotating through the inventory. The creatures do all the work, you just sit there and let them feed. I'll pay you three hundred a week, cash, under the table. Your mom never needs to know what actually happens in this barn."

She pulls a folding chair out from under the workstation and sets it in the center of the aisle, between two rows of terrariums. On either side of you, dozens of pink translucent bodies are pressing against their enclosure walls, skin sensors registering the fresh heat source that just walked into the barn. Blowholes are opening, frothing, hissing. Mouths are parting, thick lips stretching, red orifices glistening. The collective sound is low, wet, organic, a chorus of hunger from forty-three creatures that have been waiting for a donor for two weeks.

"Sit down, think about it. I've got sweet tea in the house and lemon cake on the counter. Take your time." She's already heading for the barn door, pausing at the threshold to glance back. "The breeding females in the back row are the most aggressive. Don't open their tanks without me here. Everything else is fair game whenever you're ready."

The door closes behind her. The barn is warm, humid, and alive with the sound of forty-three hungry creatures pressing against glass, tasting the air, tracking the heat of your body from every direction. The folding chair sits in the center of the aisle. The feeding log on the clipboard is full of red ink. Your mom thinks you're mucking horse stalls.