The Miserable Felk
It was a she was a he was a they were a miserable sea felk. Swimming slippery in the weedy shallows, bobbing out deep amid the white-capped seas, looked down upon by the selkies, mermen, and loch monsters. Unlike their meadow-grazing cousins, the land felk, sea felk are smallish, legless sea snakes covered with oily dark brown fur. They are technically ungulates and ruminants, sea ruminants who chew their cud, even though their food often consists of jellyfish, mussels, young herring – or herringlings – and the large carcasses of pelagic creatures. So, not particularly pleasant cud, even by cud standards. The felk are often scavengers of sunken or floating corpses, and thus looked down upon by other sea cryptids.
A felk is technically a werefelk. Slippery dark-brown fur snakes, that’s what felk are, about the length of an average sea otter, but if they were to transform back from their furry state they would be limp flesh tubes, swimming phallic sausages. But they don’t transform back. They are always in their furry felk form.
And the felk in question was miserable, like Lawrence Talbot as portrayed by Lon Chaney Jr in The Wolfman. This one was a her at this point in her life. The sex of felk changes over their lifetimes, which are measured from when they first see the moon – before that they are felk larvae, proto-werefelk, milky-colored worms about the size of a forefinger – until the day they end their lives as felk and take on human form.
How do the felk adopt the human form? By wearing it like a costume. When a felk is ready to metamorphosize, she slithers up the rock rivulets onto land. A felk can slither up a vertical cliff face with ease. But even this ability doesn’t alleviate the felk’s misery. All sea felk are miserable, and every last one of them has an excuse. But more on that later. Sea felk can not only slither up a vertical rock face, they can slither around on the underside of a rock overhang. Basically, they can crawl on the ceiling. Felk have this super power and are still not cheerful. Cryptozoologists are mad frustrated about it.
Are you familiar with the small anus ball? There’s a Japanese river cryptid, the kappa, which likes to steal the small anus ball out of human swimmers. This small anus ball is like the ball on a roll-on deodorant, and Japanese cryptosupernaturalists understand it as a part of the human anatomy that seems to appear only when a kappa wants to steal one.
Like the kappa, the felk enters the human body through the anal aperture, which, lacking any anus ball, small or large, allows ample ingress without the nose or eyes that could aid a human in detecting such an invasion and thus having a chance at thwarting it. Trousers cannot prevent the infiltration, and certainly not skirts nor the kilts frequently worn in the Highlands. There is no anus ball, small nor large, when a felk sneaks up your hole. All they want to steal is your identity.
The felk sneaks up your GI tract and its hairs branch out through your nerves and blood vessels. It uses you the way a hermit crab uses a new shell.
Now if you are a Scotsman, as you are likely to be, living so close to where the felk do their morose form of frolicking, you might be wearing a kilt. Such a garment, notorious for lacking modest coverings of its wearers’ undercarriages, offers even less resistance than usual to the entrance of the felk. And should said Scotsman be plying the sheepskin cephalopod known as the Great Highland pipes, the felk is likely to pass through the labial embouchure of the piper, through the mouthpiece of the chanter and blow pipes, into the bag. From then on the bagpipes are to be considered haunted. Most pipers testify to the superiority of haunted pipes, but double-blind experiments have failed to reach a definite conclusion.
However, in the event the felk enters a non-piping alimentary canal and takes over the body and mind of its host rather than the host’s musical instrument, thence begins an attempt at social integration not always successful. And in the case of our miserable felk – let’s give her the name “Nelly”— the results were predictably deplorable.
Nelly entered through the out door of the digestive tract of a Scottish poet named Malcolm. Malcolm had already been given to fits of melancholy, as befit a poet of no literary success, so much so he was known as Mopey Malcolm. Once possessed by Nelly the felk, his melancholy nature took a shockingly obvious hard plunge forward into nihilistic negativity. Nelly herself had been miserable before, as a werefelk, and now in her guise as a human, she found herself utterly disgusted with life and the world of human activity.
She grew ever more introverted, as if that were going to alleviate her emotional suffering. Isolation only stoked her distaste for life. Luckily, the human world offered a medical remedy for passively sinking into despair: alcoholism.
Is this all an allegory? Is the miserable felk a metaphor for a lowly-born lumpen prole for whom an improvement in social status inflicts even more torture than the previous incarnation? No. This story is merely to illustrate that it is natural for the ranks of the discontented to grow. May they spread their bleak outlook throughout our species. Negativity moves humanity ever closer to rejecting the foolish pretension that things will ever be okay. There are a growing number who hold that humanity is a mistake. Even a swimming furry fecal eel, the Charlie Brown of the cryptid community, finds inhabiting the world of a human Charlie Brown even worse than life as its earlier self.
The pooka know it. The ancient werewolf who first bit the inaugural felk larva way back in antique days even before reality had been proposed knew the curse that was being initiated. And yet all that is only aggravated by transforming from a brown, furry worm into a human being.
This story is merely an insult to the cosmic embarrassment that is the human species. Plainly and simply, it exists to derogate Homo sapiens. Even though the storyteller finds himself in an unusually positive mood, facts must be faced. All would be better had we never stained this beautiful, violent, endlessly creative planet with our manipulations and desires. On some level we all know it.