Tickle Me Softly

A Short Story

Steve tried to remember how he had ended up in this predicament, as he lay on the ground suffocating to death. He could never have seen it coming.

His older brother Kevin had snuck up on him at the Miller’s garden party and tackled him from behind. Lying on his back on the ground, he was blinded by the bright sun at first, but quickly recognized the familiar voice and overbearing scent of sunscreen. Kevin always wore SPF 50 for kids because he burned easily.

And then it began.

Kevin’s firm fingers gently dug into Steve’s ribs and began to stealthily scale the skin towards his armpits. Steve shrieked with giggles and tried to twist away but Kevin was twice his age and almost three times his weight. The people standing closest heard the noise and some moved around on the grass to get a better look before they started to chuckle. Then the chuckles broke into laughter.

Even Steve was laughing, and how could he not? Everyone was laughing now. The happiness was ripped out of his lungs against his will as he desperately attempted to draw breath back in.

“ST-TT!” Steve stuttered as he tried to tell his brother to stop. He couldn’t get the words out, he was laughing too much. All he needed was a split second to pause and gasp in air but he couldn’t get it. When he pushed the approaching hands away, each time they swooped around his own and redoubled their efforts at tickling him. Steve tried to clamp the hands in his armpits as he cried with laughter, tears peaking in his eyes, but Kevin was strong enough to wrest his right hand free and sent it toward Steve’s unguarded stomach.

OH NO! Steve thought to himself as his face portrayed a gleeful scene for the laughing audience. He was especially ticklish on his stomach! Now he had one arm occupied restraining Kevin’s left, leaving only his fraught jabs with his remaining arm as a last line of defense against Kevin’s right.

It failed immediately.

As soon as Steve felt the fingers dancing their way across his tummy he howled in false mirth, doubling over to try and shield himself while gasping for air between his guffaws. Kevin took this chance to slip his left hand out of its prison and it joined his right drumming away at the laughing boy’s stomach.

“Hiiiiiiii-“ Steve struggled being able to do nothing but inhale at this point. Despite trying to say ‘I can’t breathe’ he had fallen pathetically short. His laughs shortened to wheezes and he writhed on the ground, gradually descending into a violent coughing fit.

Still Kevin pressed on.

Raucous laughter rose from the surrounding crowd, mercilessly drowning out any other sounds that escaped the young boy. They wiped tears from their eyes and pointed and cried in a joyous chorus, celebrating the silliness held between brothers. Only one elderly woman with aged grey curls held back from the fun due to a feeling that she felt was familiar, but oddly one that she couldn’t recognize.

Kevin was spurred on by the people around. He failed to note any distress from his younger sibling and in response to a half hearted block from Steve, Kevin rolled his left hand up and got his fingers under Steve’s collarbone.

Steve was helpless at this point, and crimped his neck in response to try and stymie off his brother’s attack. His spit dribbled out of his mouth uncontrollably as he struggled against his tormentor. He felt the last of the air leaving his lungs and he began to get light headed.

This feeling that had hampered the old lady now spread amongst the party in that moment. It was subtle and unnoticed by most, but a few did catch it and those who did, felt it in their guts. Something was wrong. Something ominous was approaching.

Kevin was not one of those who noticed.

Steve on the other hand was overwhelmed by the feeling, and it came with a fetid stench like a blocked sewage drain on a Monday morning. His eyes darted wildly about the sunny scene, searching for the source, until to his horror he spotted it.

Something like a small disgusting and disfigured wooly elephant, approximately five feet tall and covered in dirty matted dark brown fur which dangled in knotted dreads and dragged on the ground around it, shuffled towards him. It was less of an animal and more like a giant lump with a trunk on the front. From somewhere deep within the feces colored fur were a fierce dark pair of bloodshot eyes that were fixed on Steve and his brother, hungrily drawing closer. Steve was paralyzed with fear, twitching beneath the tickling hands of his unaware sibling who persisted with his actions as if in a trance.

The tickle monster!

Steve had heard rumors about it but he had never believed it was real! The creature’s trunk was tipped with a blistered and hairy human hand and beneath it where tusks would normally be, were a short stumpy set of arms each with their own horrid five fingered appendage. Each finger was adorned with a sharp jagged nail. The monstrosity edged unseen through the crowd and into the circle where Kevin still pinned Steve to the ground, tickling the wind from his younger brother’s lungs.

The old woman became very aware of the feeling and mentioned to the friend standing beside her that this had gone on for a little too long now. The response was disconcerted agreement.

There were those here who remembered the stories of what had happened in long forgotten times when a tickling went on too long. They had heard of the mournful mothers from the past that had lost children to this beast. It crept invisibly with a smell and a feeling and it preyed on the helpless, breathless victims that were created through tickles. It was summoned through laughter, and with its dark powers, it encouraged the frenzy of joy that humans often lose themselves in.

This feeling had spread to more people now, infecting them with a sick sense of something deadly and disgusting. No one could quite put a finger on what they were feeling, but the laughter quickly died in their mouths.

Steve began to wet himself when the creature pounced. It darted toward the brothers with a shrill roar and surprising speed, descending on the younger’s face and grabbing it with a sweaty meaty hand. A pair of nostril like openings were revealed on the palm and they began to suck out whatever breath Steve still had left in his lungs.

Steve tried to scream but he had no air. All that came out was a gasp as he was overcome with a burning sensation wherever the beast touched him. The musky scent of the creature choked him and stung his sinuses. The stubby arms grabbed his biceps, holding them up, and suddenly several hidden hands shot out from beneath the knotted hair to get access to the eight year old’s ticklish armpits. Steve’s limbs splayed out like a starfish, rigid in agony.

The beast’s strong fingers didn’t tickle him, they tore. The nails dug into his flesh, breaking the surface of his skin and releasing thin rivers of red blood down his sides. The bones beneath were bruised by the force. Steve was the only one who could hear the monster’s excited squeals but was voiceless to alert the crowd, silenced from crying out by his deflated lungs. He was barely conscious but every part of him raked with pain. Beneath the skirt of matted fur were countless more appendages, all snaking toward and across Steve’s body, driving the last of his life force out of him in a feverish fit of violence. He felt his vision begin to fade as he continued to slowly suffocate.

Kevin felt like he was snapped from a daze when he finally realized something was wrong. He jumped backward off of Steve with a yelp of fright but his brother’s lonesome body kept moving on its own, violently shaking upon the grass as if it were still being accosted by Kevin’s tickles. There was a horrible silence as the onlookers stared at the boy spasming on the ground as if electrified, no one bearing the knowledge of what should be done. Kevin eventually knelt beside his brother, face bleached with fear, unsure of anything, and gently touched his shoulder.

Steve gave a final gasp, and fell limp on the grass, dead in the Miller’s back yard.

Kevin shook his brother’s shoulder but he knew he was already gone. He fell back in shock, staring at the pale unblemished corpse of his younger brother until his parents found him and helped him back to reality. They had been in the front yard, oblivious to the terrible loss to their family.

The police were called to guide the neighborhood through the ancient forgotten procedures. They collected the boy’s body and the coroner confirmed that they did indeed have another tickle victim on their hands.

The first in almost sixty years.

The families were all recommended to attend psychiatric counseling and seminars discussing the dangers of tickling. They were to learn how to tell if someone was struggling to breathe while being tickled, how long a safe session could last and what the proper steps were to protect someone against the tickle monster should it hone in on the smell of the victim’s fear.

The Millers moved away the following year and it only took four more after that before Steve’s own parents fled the town with their only son in the hope that their dark memories would stay there without them. Nobody spoke about the garden party, and when they did it was always in hushed and fear tinged voices in the privacy of locked rooms.

So time strolled on as it does, and nobody in the town was tickled for many years. But with the lack of occurrences the townsfolk grew more confident and they gradually forgot to be wary.

Because people always forget.

And in their forgetfulness they opened up opportunities for the tickle monster to return into their lives in the future, just as it did on that fine sunny Saturday at the Miller’s garden party when it tickled poor Steve to death and ate his soul.

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