Bug

David Kamara

The washing machine loudly folded Ms. Cheddar’s clothes into fine knots, then free, flailing fabrics and back again, on a roundabout voyage bound for forever. The noise goaded the woman to look over her shoulder every five seconds, to not pop in a single one of her ears her favorite songs. It was a silent edge of town where she dwelled, greatly away from yet another festivity she cared too little to apply a name, and cops swarmed the haunt for easy scores at parking violations and on a mayoral order for crowd control. It was the perfect set up for whatever would surely come to her. Something would be stalking this place for an easy hit at a lone fool. No one ever missed a start toward easy decisions, Cheddar knew, because all feared to feel the change of the hard.

Soon, the dryer had finished her first round. Her new roommate’s undergarments were tossed in the mix without her knowledge, and Cheddar figured they’d been betrayed by the previous machine user and she simply hadn’t noticed them when tossing in her own. She took them and peered around the room, testing her memory of the land she rarely frequented, when finally she spotted the lost and found bin cradled on a shelf above the bill change machine.

She stretched herself, the bin just beyond reach, and as she felt her grasp become vaguely defined in the company of faint strands of webbing renting the ceiling, her mind went away. It cast the scene of the bin slipping and bursting the illusion of security, to then turn the slowly-dancing-down to the ground casket without a corpse into an urn spreading human remains, the bin literally casting her in a downpour of bite-sized spiders. They fell in her mouth, grabbed her dark flesh and bonded with her bones, trespassing their way through her, making it only inches away from her heart, when she forced it all to an end with a stomp reeling her backward. Looking ahead, the bin was as still and near as ever, though she sweat as if she’d ran from the opposite side of town to rescue it. Cheddar palmed her burning eyes with a forearm, snatched a nearby stool and peered inside. Nothing. The clothes went in and she returned to her station to begin the second load. Haste was subsiding and rising with every move after, the spiders’ touch all she could feel as she toyed with her clothes and the bonded memory of her wearing each one. She debated getting lost in them, if it were safe to let her guard down in order to squelch the coiling itch. She poked and turned many of them over; Abby’s ballet recital in a pink tank top, the band’s last concert and encore beckoning a curtsy in a pigeon gray gown, the dress impersonating a sinking olive enduring a date so suffocating the twins had to leave a wake to save her. She sank, and save for her hand, her tone was dry.

Hurriedly she pulled it back to find it disguised in a dirt like substance. The frailest reminiscence of a wing lodged in her chewed fingernail as well. Cheddar pushed her laundry apart and choked on the tight air as she stared back at the remnants of dead insects smeared all across. Her chest festered. Her eyes scattered. It took her minutes to understand, and still she could not. Murder written in chocolate guts and colorfully translucent, indescribable ink islanded by empty cases, eggs. Whatever happened, however painful or violent, little changed her rising anger from taking the entire bin and heaving it into the trash. There would be other clothes.

The third and final load was trapped in her car. After scrubbing some flesh from an intensive hand washing, the woman minded that she’d done enough. She took her keys and stammered out the bathroom spewing curses and dreaming of bandages before her eyes tore agape and her body lost all sensation. There was no questioning what was outside, what her car divided. Tears welled up in her eyes and stomach and ears and shoulders. Two ten feet tall bugs, something she’d describe as, if her mind ever again became right, hybrids of hornets, mosquitoes, butterflies and beetles hungrily bobbed their necks in a path aligned with her. They did not see her. As she kept her eyes trained on them and ceremoniously scooped her keys, they still hadn’t. Only when she fled screaming, smashing the back doors out of her way did reality finally render. Cheddar was cast in an overhead lamp and the moldy sewage terrain of the rear parking lot flecked with moths, without an answer to where she was headed. She sprinted and leapt over a metal fence bearing warning of a dog, thoughtless, though a plan was bulging into shape the further she paced; she would head into the neighborhood and circle back into the road leading to the laundromat’s parking lot and return to her car. She figured that they were following, and that to the surroundings they were blind, blinder than she was in those bands of night, and burdened with catching up to her, ultimately would fail in their pursuit. But by the first house she passed, a light switched on. Instinctively she redirected her weight and scorched the tar of the driveway, to ram against their mesh door, begging for a help to emerge like a sudden maelstrom. The flesh wound had reopened, drenching the door strike after stronger strike. The internal light finally answered her by shutting off soundlessly. No creaking floorboard of footsteps treading back to bed, no flickering blinds to peer upon the miserable stranger, probably assumed to be a drunkard or a murderer or a prankster. Maybe they saw the creature hovering from out of thin clouds, bathed in the white light of the stars–who then latched onto the roof with a massive thump–and scurried away for safety. Cheddar shouted for her life and ran into the black street again, only to collide into an invisible wall and fall with a crunch over her arm. Details of the brooding suburban path that had denied her began to gradually erase themselves and rearrange into revealing the second bug’s blackened frame. It tilted its head with precise curiosity, angling it so their hidden row of eyes had the perfect view of the trembling mass before it. The other fled the roof, descending as slowly as a helicopter until the warm, mucus-yellow underside of its body pressed gently atop her face. The shadow of something like a matured fetus probed in there from left to right, tickling pumping veins of an acorn hue before finally bursting into the world; a green chord ending in a dripping talon hissing as if the natural and unnatural light surveying them were too contradictory to withstand. The once hidden insect joined the other’s side, its mandible-like limbs fully protruded and its head spinning frantically like a loose doorknob. All this time the woman was screaming louder and louder; for help, for mercy, for freedom, for the strength to bear what soon would happen, she had lost the meaning she had never known, but it all continued into the night and ended into the night where nothing, even a lame whistle of the wind, would return.

The jagged arms pierced Ms. Cheddar with speed and delicate effort. She could not break free from the weight of the belly and the threat of the seemingly newborn weapon lost in its hypnotic side-to-side sway. A fuzz splintered her sight as they pulled more of her apart. Recollections of the skin being the largest organ of the human body randomly swept the corners of her brain dedicated to pain tolerance like needles doused in acids and streams of lava. They had her damaged arm opened into a mangled parachute. Lined in its ridges, rows of resting larva using clots of blood as blankets from the exposure of the air. The spinning head suddenly stopped as if a timer bellowed somewhere, while the talon curled inside the woman and, almost as if a magnet, retrieved their children in clusters, fetching some floating away in the splitting maple pools. Yes, the parents had come for their babies who had been kidnapped for food, hatched in the middle of their enemies’ digestion, and took shelter in Cheddar’s clothes, and eventually into her warmer body when she put them on.

The now still head of the bug unfolded itself as if a blooming flower, to then drip the concoction it prepared over the newly fainted woman’s exploded arm, and with the same blood-caked mandibles it repaired her as best as it could via suture and blood salvage. The parents then watched as the liquid dried over the course of a few hours before spreading their wings and fading into the dark. Cheddar hardly moved in the veins of that empty community, besides her failing heart and her hand clasped loosely about her ringing phone wedged in her pocket. Her roommate had hoped she’d want to appear at the party after all.