The Bedbug
It starts like this: a pinprick of blood on a white sheet.
Caroline nearly misses it. She would’ve missed it if it weren’t for the snow-blind blankness of her new bed set. The spot is perfectly round and rust red, the planet Mars in miniature. “The god of war,” she thinks, a bad omen.
Her mother, from the old world, burdened her with all sorts of superstitions: don’t leave your purse on the floor or you’ll be poor, don’t whistle at night or mice will come into the house, spit three times when you mention something bad.
But Caroline’s an investment banker. She doesn’t believe in gods or omens, she doesn’t believe in anything without at least two decimal places of precision.
So, she checks herself for cuts or scrapes, double checks the date of her upcoming period, and dismisses the pinprick as an ink stain or a factory error or something from the wash. She files the information away, finishes making the bed, and feeds Gideon. By the time she walks into her office, she’s forgotten about the anomaly completely.
That afternoon, in an interminable status update meeting, a phantom itch blooms in that hard-to-reach spot between her shoulder blades. She cut the tag out when she bought the top, but it’s new, maybe she’s allergic to the polyester. The more she considers it, the harder it is to ignore the urge. Rubbing against the hard plastic chair back only makes it worse. More insistent; almost a burning.
In the office bathroom, bursting with the deep need to scratch, she lifts her blouse to reveal a red blotchy welt just above her bra line in the mirror. The skin is taut and raised with hives. She makes her manicured nails across it repeatedly.
It’s a mosquito bite. That’s all.
After a few days of peace, it repeats. Two pinpricks of blood join the first, which has faded brown. She spots treats the sheets and throws them in the washer. As she’s bending low ,she feels something ignite on her Achilles tendon.
There are three more mosquito bites, stacked in a neat vertical column. The need to itch is all consuming. She scratches until it bleeds.
As she cleans and bandages each bite, she remembers something her mother had told her, while treating a ballet blister in the exact spot.
“In my village, when I was very young,” she said, pressing a cotton ball soaked in vodka on the raw skin. “When someone died, they would cut this tendon on the back of the ankle.” She sliced her finger across the tendon, miming the action. “Men, women, children, even stillborn babies.”
“Why would they do that?” a nine-year-old Caroline asked, horrified.
“So, the dead couldn’t come back and feed on the living,” she said matter-of-factly, pressing a Hello Kitty Band-Aid onto the wound. It never occurred to her mother that this was an inappropriate anecdote to relay to a child—there were no children in the old world, only adults in miniature. “Of course, no one does that anymore.”
Laptop perched on her chest, whilst she lays on the white microfiber couch; Caroline takes a self-directed course in comparative dermatology. It’s not gluten—not that she eats bread anyways—and it’s not eczema; and it’s not dermatitis; and it’s, definitely, not her expensive, organic, laundry detergent.
With a knot of dread forming in her stomach, she moves on to insect bites: spiders, fleas, kissing bugs, mites, ticks, mosquitos. And bed bugs. The pattern of three in a row is so typical that it even has a cute nickname: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
As she combs through photos of infected bites and infested mattresses and nymphs and eggs and molted skins her alarm grows until she tosses the computer aside and runs to her bed.
Yanking off the sheets, she creeps her fingers along the seam of the mattress.
The eggs are soft, white/yellow, about 1millimeter, BuggedOut89 wrote on a forum post from ten years ago. That’s about the size of a pinhead (smaller than a grain of rice). Good luck finding those.
Next, she shines her phone light into the screw holes of her bed frame. At each stage in the lifecycle, the post continued, they must shed their skin to grow into the next stage. IMO, the shells look like the bottom crumbs in a bag of BBQ potato chips.
She heaves her mattress—not an easy feat, it’s a California king—and peers at the underside. Their shit is black and smudgy, kind of like clumped up mascara, BuggedOut89 wrote. Some people say it smells like rust, but to me it’s more of a sweet stink.
Nothing. No bugs. No smears. No more bloodstains. No eggs. No molted skins. It was nothing more than a few mosquito bites. She lets the mattress drop back onto the frame, lays back flat on it, and gazes up at her reflection with relief…
The previous owner of the condominium had installed a round mirror over the bed. It’s tacky, bordering on obscene—but she doesn’t take it down. If anyone asks, she claims laziness. In truth, there’s some narcissistic pleasure in seeing her own reflection first thing in the morning. She likes seeing her Pilates-toned limbs tangled up in her fair-trade cotton sheets. And when she isn’t alone, well, the mirror is fun then, too.
The king-sized bed is the centerpiece of the apartment. The tacky mirror is its sole quirk. She’s lived here for five years now, picked out every piece of furniture, and every picture that hangs on the wall. Somehow, it still manages to feel like corporate housing.
Yet, this is how she likes things. Her mother’s house had been cluttered. A mess of yogurt tubs and pickle jars that had been filled with buttons and rubber bands; scraps of clothing cut into rags; and stacks of old National Geographics tucked away, “just in case,” she’d said to her.
Nothing went to waste. Now, Caroline has a cleaner come twice a week and her glass coffee table is a clean slate, not a single fingerprint remaining after. The presence of a human being is nearly undetectable; she lives here almost as a ghost. When you walk in for the first time there’s a faint antiseptic scent, otherwise it smells like nothing. Only the shrewdest of noses can detect the cat, who blends in with the gray furniture. And the gray walls. And the gray laminate hardwood flooring.
The doorbell rings and she sits straight up. It’s Thursday night. Shit! She forgot!
There is no time to fix her makeup. She skates across the floor in her socks. Self-conscious of the bare mattress behind her, she opens the door only a few inches and peers out.
“Hi,” Roman says, smirking.
Her heart pounds in double time. Historically, she’s always gone for baby faces. after Roman moved into the building, she found herself drawn to the hard angles of him: his pointed nose, his sharp cheekbones, a jawline that could cut glass. To say nothing of the rest of him: the V flanking his abdomen and his jutting hip bones that bruised the insides of her thighs. Even his teeth have a carnivorous quality, and he liked to use them in such interesting ways.
He clears his throat, interrupting her daydream, and holds up a bottle of wine. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” he asks.
Oh God, she was supposed to cook him dinner tonight. She runs a hand through her bleached hair, racking her brain for the contents of her fridge and pantry—but there’s no way he can stay over tonight. She can’t even let him inside for a drink. Especially, not if she has an infestation.
“Do you mind if we reschedule? I’ve got something going on with work tonight, you know Singapore and the time difference…”
He rolls his eyes. “You’re always working.”
She opens her mouth to say something, but he stops her.
“Don’t you dare apologize.” His voice lowers. “I like powerful women.”
Her mouth goes dry. He hands her the bottle, and she listens regretfully to his footsteps marching up the stairs to his apartment. She sets the bottle on the glistening marble countertop and pours herself a glass. A bright, bloody red merlot. Metallic and fruity.
Some people say it smells like rust, but to me it’s more of a sweet stink.
Her stomach sours and she leaves the glass unfinished.
She listens to Roman cook dinner for himself upstairs. He’s got the TV on—local news maybe—and his footsteps dance around the kitchen in that familiar triangular waltz, sink-to-fridge-to-stove, stove-to-sink-to-fridge, the fridge door opening and closing, water running, something sizzling in the pan.
Below, she eats a dinner of romaine lettuce with a teaspoon of vinaigrette. A holdover meal from her ballerina days. She gave up dance when she started college, left behind the music and the creative expression but kept the discipline and body fascism.
She stares at the bed. BuggedOut89 warned readers at the start of every post: just because you can’t see them, doesn’t mean they’re not there. The bites might be her only proof, but the hum of their itch is a constant reminder. Even looking at the mattress makes her skin crawl.
At three in the morning, after Roman’s apartment has long gone silent and she’s sure most of the building is asleep, she heaves the mattress off its frame. It’s heavier than she expects, and when she props it against the wall, it nearly topples over on her. She slides it along the engineered hardwood towards the front door.
“I’ll order a new mattress tonight,” she thinks, as she pushes the thing down the first flight of stairs. “It’ll be over before he even realizes anything is going on.”
The bed is jammed in a tight corner of the stairwell, it takes a combination of pushing, pulling and cursing to get it unstuck. On the second flight, it seems to get caught on every step.
She props open the alley door with her foot. Sweating, panting, the summer smell of warm garbage assaulting her nostrils, she slides the mattress onto the asphalt. Struggling to balance it against the dumpster—there’s no hope of lifting it into the thing—she lets the door fall closed with a heavy thud, just as a voice behind her rasps, “Excuse me miss, do you have a dollar?”
A homeless woman shuffles towards her, a dirt-smudged beanie pulled down to her eyebrows and deep hollows under the cheekbones.
Caroline pats her pockets frantically—keys, where are the keys—and darts back to the door, mumbling her automatic response, she’s sorry, she doesn’t have anything.
But the woman stops, looking from the bare mattress against the dumpster to Caroline and back again. Her eyes grow wide. She steps back, repulsed.
“You got bed bugs.”
Caroline opens her mouth to protest, but the homeless woman is turning.
“Never mind lady, stay the hell away.”
The woman disappears into the night. Caroline stands, keys in her hands, eyes watering.
“Too bad, because I was going to give you a dollar,” she calls out into the empty alley. “Dumb bitch!”
Itchy humiliation follows her back up the stairs to her unit. She stands under the scalding shower for a long time, scratching the bites on her ankle and back. She tears at herself until the water at her feet is pink and blood cakes under her nails.
That night, she sleeps on the air mattress she keeps for guests. She tosses and turns, wakes at the slightest sensation. Gideon, usually so eager to curl up on her chest, is sullen, across the room in his own bed.
In her dream, Roman nuzzles at her neck. They’re wrapped up in red satin sheets, and the tickle of his stubble becomes a scrape as he drags his teeth across her skin. He bites down, hard, and—her eyes snap open.
She touches the scoop of her neck and finds something small and hard nestled there.
Screaming, she leaps out of bed and slaps herself.
Gideon arches his back, hisses. The bug squishes into a smear of blood across her sternum, like the jewel of some awful necklace. Heart hammering, she wrenches the blanket off to reveal half-a-dozen rust-colored stains dotting the guest sheets.
Four new bites: the one on her neck, and three on the inside of thigh.
She calls out of work. The vacuum hums for hours as she runs the suction hose along the baseboards, the crown molding, under couch cushions and inside cupboards. It was idiotic to think they’d be limited to just the bed. BuggedOut89 had made it clear, they could live in or on anything: in gaps in corrugated cardboard, behind light switch plates, even inside of televisions. She sucks at the keyboard of her computer, the USB ports, and in between the pages of books. She vacuums the dark interiors of expensive leather purses and rarely worn high-heeled shoes. When she’s done, there’s not a molecule of dust left in the apartment.
Sleep deprivation has her feeling burnt at the edges yet raw inside, like a chicken breast under a broiler on high. She washes sheets, couch covers, and clothes in hot water and then washes them again. And again, until she loses count.
For the grand finale, she buys two bug bombs from the corner store and sets them off on either end of the apartment.
This is ending tonight.
Her hands, under the fluorescent lights of the diner, look like her mother’s hands. Or how she remembers her mother’s hands. The skin is dry from soap and hot water and slightly irritated pink. They’re her mothers, save the chipping manicure. Her mother kept her nails short and neat and bare.
Her mother’s hands always were ten years older than her face because her mother cleaned houses for a living. In the summers, she’d take Caroline along and she’d help, pushing a towering broom around a house with a living room the size of their apartment, in awe of the one-hundred inch television sets and baby grand pianos.
She has no memories of her father. He was an old man her mother met online. He bought her a ticket from Bulgaria and then promptly died after their Las Vegas wedding. What good luck, the other girls said. But no, it wasn’t good luck at all, her mother was pregnant and the man that was her father wasn’t nearly as rich as he claimed, in fact he was in debt up to his eyeballs, personal loans, a reverse mortgage, even the Mercedes was a lease.
So her mother cleaned houses.
“Are you sure you don’t want to sleep over?” her friend Angeline asks for the third time on the phone.
Caroline hunches over a mug of black coffee, phone wedged between her shoulder and her ear, stirring in a packet of stevia with a wooden stirrer.
“I can’t,” she says. “I don’t want to give them to you.”
“Let me get you a hotel room at least? You can’t stay in a diner all night.”
She snaps the stirrer in half. “I can’t give them to anyone. Not to you. Not to the hot neighbor guy. Not even to a stranger at a hotel.”
“Hotels probably deal with it constantly, I’m sure they know how to manage it.”
“Besides, what hotel is going to let me bring a cat—oh no,” Caroline says, standing so abruptly she nearly knocks over the mug.
The cat.
“What’s wrong?”
“I forgot Gideon.” Nausea rises up in her throat.
She hangs up and dashes out of the diner, ignoring the shouts from the waitress.
When she reaches her building, her hands are shaking. Shit shit shit. It takes three attempts to enter the door code. The lock clicks and she bounds up the stairs two at a time.
The sickly sweetness of pesticides leaches into the hallway. She holds her breath as she enters the haze, eyes burning, preparing to find the worst.
He’s curled up in one of his favorite spots—on the windowsill, where during the days he watches pigeons land on the awning below. He looks like he’s napping, peaceful almost, but when she pulls him into her arms, there’s no resistance. He’s limp.
She whimpers, gathers him in her arms, and sprints out the door. She doesn’t even bother to lock up behind her.
“Everything okay?” Roman calls after her as she stumbles down the stairs, coughing, eyes blurry, cat clutched tight to her chest.
“Fine,” she says, heart catching in her throat.
Two days and one astronomical vet bill later, she sets Gideon’s carrier on Angeline’s porch, rings the doorbell, and then promptly leaves, still paranoid of passing the curse on to someone else.
For hours, Gideon seized and shook and puked. Gradually, he seemed to return to himself, although any time she’d move her hand towards him he’d shrink away, ears tight against his skull. The vet asked if he’d been treated for fleas, noting the red welts on his soft belly. Guilt rose up in her. They were biting him, too.
Back at the apartment, she gave him a scratch behind the ears, and he actually hissed at her. He wasn’t going to forgive her.
So, Gideon stays at Angeline’s. She returns to face the invisible menace at home, alone. The new mattress still hasn’t arrived. Apparently, there are supply chain issues and shipping delays. Only the air mattress greets her, half-deflated, just like Caroline.
She throws the windows open wide, but the poison smell sticks in the back of her throat.
Over the following weeks, a ritual emerges. Each morning, wake up and count the bites: four on Monday, six on Tuesday, none for three days, enough to make her almost hopeful. Then, Saturday, there are six.
The counting is followed by a scalding shower and scratching, sometimes lasting more than an hour, gouging until the water stings the deep craters in her skin. Next, a sleep-deprived shamble into the office. She returns home, and collapses onto the air mattress, just to do it all again.
The next weekend, she purges. She stuffs everything she owns into black contractor bags: books, clothes, wall hangings, the expensive purses and shoes. Anything she can live without. She will become a monk, leaving no place for evil to nest within her sanctuary.
She pauses when she finds the small cigar box in her underwear drawer. It contains the few sentimental keepsakes she indulges in a length of ribbon from her ballet days, a photo of her and her mother at her college graduation, her mother badly withered in the final stages of lung cancer; a ring that had been her grandmother’s and a red thread tied into a simple loop.
Her mother said it would protect her from the evil eye when she was gone. Caroline didn’t believe in the evil eye, or demons or angels or God for that matter, but what harm could it do now? She slips it on her wrist.
The box and rest of its contents go into a trash bag, and she drags the next load down the stairs to the dumpsters.
“You murder someone up there?” Roman jokes as he heads up the stairs, mail in hand, a particularly heavy bag of clothes and shoes thumping on each stair behind her.
She makes herself laugh, but it’s a strangled sound. She props open the back door with her foot.
“Do you need some help with that?”
“No.”
“Why haven’t you been returning my calls? Is it something I did—”
She jerks the bag over the last step and lets the heavy fire door to the alley slam shut.
Biting her lip, she lets tears run, thinking of the night they spent together tangled up in her sheets. It was only two months ago, but there is a falseness to the memory now, like it’s something conjured from a past life or misremembered from a movie. It couldn’t belong to the Caroline of the here and now, not the Caroline with her dishwater brown roots grown out two inches and the chipped manicure, not the Caroline who almost exclusively wears sweatpants and nearly killed her cat and has dozens of pockmarks and scars dotting her arms and legs and ass.
That night, when Roman’s footsteps start the familiar dinnertime waltz across her kitchen, the sound of a Mariners game on the television, she closes her eyes and touches herself. She imagines he’s in her kitchen; she’s sitting on the counter while he cooks, she’s wearing a slinky dress, the green silk one now in a bag by the dumpster, and she’s sipping a glass of wine.
Roman will never come over again.
The next morning, she wakes up to a bite on her eyelid. It gives her face an asymmetrical slump, like she’s the subject of a Picasso painting. There are eleven of them today, as they enter double digits. It feels significant, a new record. There are more of them. They’re breeding.
BuggedOut89 explains on a forum post, bed bugs mate via traumatic insemination. The male looks for a freshly fed mate and pierces the female’s abdomen with his hypodermic penis (yes, it’s really called that) and ejaculates into the body cavity. The female lays hundreds of fertilized eggs until she runs out of juice. The eggs hatch in a week, and then the new batch joins the feeding frenzy. Isn’t the circle of life beautiful?
She shudders and closes out the page. It’s time to call the exterminator. She should’ve called weeks ago, but she finds it difficult to surrender control. Other girls in ballet would talk about a moment of the world disappearing when they danced, when they lost themselves to the music. That never happened for Caroline. She was always counting in her head. She’s never been drunk, never been on a rollercoaster, and the one time she came close to falling in love, she cut off all contact: the out of control feeling terrified her.
But now she is out of control. She is spiraling, spinning faster than her best pirouette. Her performance at work is suffering, she is being tormented by invisible monsters, and she is wearing a red thread around her wrist to protect her from evil like some Bulgarian peasant. She’s embarrassed that she’s let it get this bad.
The consult fee alone puts a significant dent in her savings account, but the woman on the phone assures her it’s worth it. They’re the best in the city.
A squat man with red hair and freckles knocks on her door, holding a shepherd dog on a leash. “We use dogs to detect bed bugs,” the woman on the phone explained; something to do with pheromones.
The dog sniffs around the apartment, pausing an extra moment at the sunny spot on the windowsill where Gideon used to sit and watch pigeons. She wonders if he can still smell him.
“Any pets?”
“No,” she says, avoiding eye contact.
“Did you just move in?” the exterminator asks, his voice echoing on the bare walls.
She shakes her head and doesn’t bother explaining further. The exterminator’s gaze then lands on the ceiling mirror and lingers. She feels his silent judgment and pulls down the sleeve of her sweatshirt.
After half an hour of the exterminator shining flashlights into cupboards and vents, and his dog nosing around what little possessions she has left, he declares the apartment clear.
“It’s good news,” he explains, when he sees her expression. “It means you don’t have bed bugs.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Sometimes folks will think it’s bed bugs, but it turns out to be a skin allergy or eczema—”
She rolls up her sleeves, displaying the collection of bites in various states of healing, some red and angry welts, others puckered white scars. “Look at all of these and tell me I don’t have bed bugs.”
He winces. “Well—”
“Look at them.” She steps out of her sweatpants, feeling not even the slightest shame, showing the scabs and sores dotting her legs. “There’s new ones almost every night.”
He takes a step back. The dog looks up at the man expectantly, ears cocked back.
“Explain it to me,” she demands, an edge of hysteria creeping into her voice now. “How is it possible?! Is this eczema?!”
“They could be coming in from another unit,” the exterminator offers, looking up at the ceiling and taking another discreet step towards the door. “There’s not much you can do in that case. Besides move.”
Something inside her splinters and cracks. “I own this place.”
He shrugs, grabs the front door from behind him, and walks out backwards with the dog in tow. She pulls on her sweatpants and follows him and the dog out into the hall.
As the exterminator rushes down, Roman passes him on the stairwell, heading up.
In an instant, the friendly shepherd dog turns feral, lunging and snapping at Roman. He presses himself up against the wall.
“Sorry,” the exterminator mumbles, tugging on the leash and sprinting down the stairs as Caroline calls after him. The front door slams shut. By the time she reaches the street, he’s gone.
Roman waits for her, leaning against the wall, arms crossed.
“Is there anything I can do?”
He used to look at her with an intensity in his gaze. A smoldering look. A hungry look. Now, his red-brown eyes are soft, kind. Pitying.
“I’m worried about you,” he says.
She stares at him blankly for a moment, hatred bubbling under the blank mask of her face. It’s him, she thinks. He gave them to her; he brought them over the night she let him stay over. That, or they’re coming in from his place. It must be him. But she shakes her head and climbs up the stairs, feeling again itchy humiliation, ignoring her clothes rubbing against her bites and impulse to scratch, her constant companion, always lurking under her current train of thought.
In her sleep deprived state, the days drip painfully slow, as if passing through an IV, and the weeks vanish in a blur. One day she is nodding off in an important client meeting, and, the next day, she’s going over a performance improvement plan with her boss. When people speak to her, they sound underwater. Everything feels far away, as if she is observing her own life through a telescope.
In her daydreams, she is always naked, but they run more violent than sexual these days. She no longer fantasizes about the hot upstairs neighbor. Instead, she splashes the gray walls of her condo with a gas canister and lights a match. She walks out into the street, pure, unburdened by earthly possessions except the red thread around her wrist.
Even outside of the condo, the bugs are always with her. The tickle of insect limbs on her ankle during lunch—real or imagined—is enough to make her shriek. Her coworkers look at each other with concern, some snicker, but no one says anything to her. It doesn’t matter. She knows she’s about to be fired.
On one of the rare occasions Angeline picks up the phone, she tells her to sell the place. “Get the hell out of there,” she says. Even being underwater on the mortgage, she’s considered it. But it’s more than the money she owes. Passing the condo on to someone else would incur some kind of major karmic debt she’d spend the rest of her life making up.
“There must be something. Maybe you can get some kind of trap? You can’t just lie there and let them suck you dry.”
Those words stick and she turns them over in her sleep-starved brain. A trap! She searches, how to trap bed bugs.
BuggedOut89 suggests silica dust: the fine dust sticks to their joints and gets inside their shells. It’s death by a thousand cuts. They bleed out. A fitting end, if you ask me.
At the hardware store, she buys two big bags of dust. At home, she takes a makeup brush, and, feeling like a pastry chef, she brushes a barely perceptible perimeter around the air mattress. The trap is laid. Now, she just needs bait.
Bed bugs are attracted to exhalations. Carbon dioxide. Heat. Blood. She visits the butcher down the street and buys a pint of pig’s blood. It sloshes heavily in her New Yorker tote bag all the way back to her building. She’s considering putting in the microwave to reach a simulated body temperature, the question is for how long—then it strikes her this is exactly the sort of superstitious peasant behavior her mother would indulge in.
She pours the blood down the drain. The bugs aren’t attracted to a microwaved bowl of pig’s blood. They’re attracted to her.
She will be the bait.
At nine o’clock, Caroline makes a cup of coffee, gulps it down while she starts another. Soon, she’s vibrating. She lays out a crisp white sheet on the air mattress. Something about the formaldehyde smell or the creased blankness reminds her of a sheet draped over a body at the morgue.
When someone died, they would cut this tendon on the back of the ankle, her mother’s voice says, so the dead couldn’t come back and feed on the living—she pushes the memory out of her head.
One by one, she flicks on every light—hallway, desk lamp, overhead. Naked, she lays down and stares up at her reflection on the ceiling. It seems insane she ever enjoyed this. Her limbs have lost the tautness earned from years of Pilates and they’re battered with scars. Her hair is dull, roots grown out three inches and dull as dishwater, completely lifeless. Her eyes are sunken deep into her skull.
In a summer, she’s aged ten years. “I’ve died,” she thinks as she waits, staring up at the stranger in the mirror. “I’m dead, and, in hell.”
“Come out you guys,” she says to the empty room. “It’s an all-you-can-eat-buffet.”
(New paragraph, after her dialogue)
There are no clocks in her apartment, but she can hear the minutes ticking by. Her heart races from the caffeine. There’s a growing pressure in her bladder. She fights off the urge to get up and relieve herself. The scene is set. She must wait.
For a very long time, nothing happens. Upstairs, the heavy plod of footsteps back and forth make a steady rhythm. Roman is pacing. She used to puzzle over this sound—was he troubled, what kept him up at night, was he thinking about her—now it’s just irritating. Outside, there’s a car alarm. The pneumatic wheeze of a bus stopping on the street below. A dog barking. Familiar sounds, the sounds of a world she once lived in, but now it feels like a different planet.
As the night grows later, the noises change. The pacing stops. He must have gone to bed. Stilettos on the sidewalk. Police sirens. A drunk couple arguing on the street. Her stomach clenches. She’s really got to pee now. The caffeine buzz has all but worn off, it’s only her bladder keeping her awake at this point.
She almost misses it, the flash of movement in her hair. She holds her breath, hoping she’s wrong, but no, it’s unmistakable, the red-brown bug in her bleached hair. Keeping still is the hardest thing she’s ever done.
Her breath is frozen in her chest. It will be dead soon, is the only thought that keeps her grounded, she imagines it crawling through the circle of protection and the dust now inside of it, scraping at its insides with every movement. She didn’t see which direction it came from. It seems to have almost spontaneously generated in her hair or—could it have been there the whole time?
There’s no time to consider the implications of that disturbing thought—a second bug creeps over her toes, over the chipped burgundy of her last pedicure and between her big and second toe. It tickles. She squirms.
To calm herself, she starts counting. She’s always found respite in numbers. She starts over repeatedly as more appear, seemingly from every direction at once. Soon they’re uncountable, their paths crossing, bugs appearing and vanishing behind the small of her back or under the backs of her thighs.
There’s so many. Just a minute more, she tells herself. The bites are painless, anesthetized, she only knows they’re happening when the bugs pause suddenly. Tomorrow they’ll burn and itch but now, she feels only the creep of their limbs and probosces on her skin, the weight of them light enough to be a lover’s touch.
She closes her eyes against the rising nausea in her throat. There’s a gentle pattering, rain against her window maybe, marking the beginning of the end of summer. Her bladder throbs.
Peeking open one eye, she peers over her toes. The windows are dry. It’s not rain. Heart knocking against her ribcage, she slowly looks up.
At first, she’s not sure what she’s seeing. A red-brown stain oozing out from behind the mirror. Spreading, then dripping on to the floor below.
It’s not a gentle rain she’s hearing. It’s a liquid mass of insects gushing from above.
It’s the sound of hundreds of bugs dropping from the ceiling.
She screams, a bug falling into her mouth. She spits and jumps to her feet, slapping at her arms and legs with both hands. There are so many now. Hundreds. Thousands. More than she ever imagined. She can smell them, an acrid copper stench. The stench of her blood.
They are going to drain her alive.
She brushes them off, shakes her head like a wet dog, scattering bugs onto the floor, now swarming with them. She leaps over the bugs and shoulders open the bathroom door, closes it tight behind her and locks it—as if that will do anything.
She checks herself in the mirror, picking off the bugs hiding on the small of her back, in her hair, and inside of her ear. She drops them in the toilet, pisses, and flushes it.
She’s lighter. She can think now. She takes a breath.
The rain has become a downpour. Caroline cracks open the door, and looks out at the air mattress, which has disappeared under the swarm. The bugs climb on top of each other, forming an amorphous blob.
She wants to look away. She wants to run out the front door screaming. But she’s frozen, watching them assemble.
The writhing mass of bed bugs grows to two feet in height, then three, then four, then six, towering over her bed. They darken, condense, the shape becoming familiar with dark hair and dark clothes and a razor-edged jawline.
It ends like this; the bed bugs solidifying into the familiar, hard-edged form of your hot upstairs neighbor.
He turns, his red-brown eyes meeting hers. Hungry.
“I thought we had plans for dinner,” Roman says, wiping red from his mouth on the back of his hand.
About the Author
Sierra Bibi writes fiction. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she is currently hard at work on her debut novel. Her short fiction can be found at sierrabibi.com