$30.00
The birthday party was set beneath a dim chandelier, balloons sagging with moisture, a cake in the center of the table—but this cake was not ordinary. It was a puss-filled pie, quivering and steaming slightly, the surface dotted with tiny wriggling shapes that crawled just beneath the golden crust. Guests laughed nervously, unaware—or perhaps unwilling to notice—that the filling pulsed like a heartbeat.
Somewhere in the corner, the SPYKES untitled 2 one-sided 7" lathe cut spun, the needle hissing and scraping the grooves in rhythmic insistence. The music was both celebration and warning: a warped birthday march overlaid with ghostly screeches, scratches, and low-frequency hums that made the teeth itch and the gums prickle.
As the guests sang along, a subtle horror unfolded. Tiny larvae began crawling from the pie, wriggling along forks, onto plates, and across lips. They were small, pale, cylindrical, spined—mouth larvae in miniature, feeding off curiosity and fascination, drawn by sound and sugar alike. One child giggled as a larva wriggled across the frosting, unaware that these pests would thrive in the warm, moist environment.
The host, holding the pie knife, whispered instructions half in jest, half in dread: “Topical chloroform… mineral oil… turpentine… push push push… hemostats for removal…” Guests stared blankly, some leaning back in horror, some leaning forward to taste. The lathe cut hissed in agreement, scratches echoing the extraction rhythm, each note a reminder that treatment was necessary.
The cake was cut. The birthday party stretched into impossible hours. The puss-filled pie sat at the center of the table, wriggling slightly with every pulse of the SPYKES untitled 2 one-sided 7" lathe cut. Each scratch, hiss, and groan of the record seemed to guide the larvae, commanding them to crawl, coil, and squirm in rhythms too precise for human comprehension.
Guests had begun to notice the writhing movement—but it was too late. Small, spined mouth larvae crawled over plates, forks, and frosting, slipping between teeth and under lips. The air smelled faintly metallic, a mix of custard, pus, and vinyl residue. As the needle traced grooves, the larvae synchronized their gnawing, scraping against gums, embedding themselves in frosting, and multiplying with every pulse of sound.
Some guests tried to retreat, but the glassy eyes of children and adults alike were drawn toward the cake. Each note from the lathe created micro-vibrations that spread through the floorboards, making mucus in noses thicken and tingle. The birthday song fractured and stuttered, warped by the hiss of the record, yet every voice sang along, entranced.
The host, trembling, held a pair of hemostats. “Chloroform… mineral oil… turpentine… push push push…” They whispered, but the words had become part of the music itself. Guests felt an involuntary urge to assist, to extract, to feed the larvae in rhythm with the lathe’s scratch. Some whimpered; some laughed; some tasted the wriggling pie, the larvae slipping easily into mouths, finding warmth and moisture.
The pie itself had become more than dessert—it had become a microcosm. Within its creamy, pus-filled body, larvae scuttled like tiny stars forming their own galaxy, the grooves of the lathe above serving as cosmic gravitational currents. Each bite released a miniature eruption of writhing life, and the music amplified it, echoing through walls and ceilings.
Time fractured. One chorus of “Happy Birthday” might last a century; the next, a second. Guests transformed subtly: skin grew pallid and slightly translucent, eyes shimmered with reflective larvae, fingers twitched with compulsive gnawing motions. Mucus thickened and pooled, dragging hair and clothing into its viscous, pulsating rhythm. The room itself seemed alive, breathing in time with the record.
The lathe cut continued endlessly, repeating its single side. Scratches became rivers; hiss became wind; pops became the heartbeat of larvae colonies. Guests, pie, and music merged into one symphony of decay and ecstasy. The host’s hands, gloved in trembling latex, moved in ritual extraction, hemostats clamping and lifting larvae in perfect synchrony with the music.
Warnings from the distant, sane world—get rid of flies, maintain hygiene, monitor the vulnerable, practice oral cleanliness—felt absurdly irrelevant here. The pie, the larvae, and the lathe created their own ecosystem, complete with rules dictated by sound and slime.
By the time the record ended—or seemed to—the entire room had become a single, writhing organism. Mucus rivers pulsed with larvae, music vibrated through every inch of the birthday hall, and the guests existed simultaneously as audience, participants, and nourishment. The SPYKES 7" lathe had become a conductor of chaos, the pie a breeding ground, and the larvae a symphony of grotesque delight.
Even as the music looped, endlessly spinning, every extraction, every gnaw, every pulse of pus and sound became immortalized in rhythm. The birthday had no end. The larvae multiplied, the mucus thickened, the guests sang, and the SPYKES untitled 7" cut continued to hiss and scrape, orchestrating a celebration of slime, sound, and living horror that would persist for eternity.Spoons plunged into the filling, and larvae wriggled in protest. The guests recoiled and recoiled, but curiosity—and perhaps survival instinct—kept them engaged. It was a celebration of chaos: pus, larvae, and music, a nightmarish feast set to the eerie, hypnotic sound of SPYKES spinning endlessly.
Outside the bubble of the birthday room, wisdom whispered: prevent mouth larvae. Get rid of flies, improve hygiene, maintain cleanliness, monitor vulnerable people, practice good oral hygiene, and travel cautiously in areas prone to infestation. But here, at this birthday, those warnings dissolved into the hiss of vinyl and the wriggling horror in the pie.
And still, the guests sang, off-key, horrified, entranced. The SPYKES lathe spun on, the cake pulsated, and the larvae multiplied. The birthday party would never end, not until surgical removal or total containment—but for now, the celebration of slime, music, and fear played on in perpetual, grotesque harmony.
Numbered edition of 1.