Crawling

That the bugs crawled out of her skin didn’t bother her. It was that they’d been there in the first place that unsettled her. Ten tiny insects with legs too quick to count as they crawled away to God knows where, the other thing that bothered her.

“Fuck,” she told her mother, and apologized. She was forgiven when she told her about the bugs.

“Fuck,” said her mother, and they went to see the doctor.

That the bugs ate the Doctor was besides the point. The question was why they didn’t turn on her mother. Some skittered her way hungrily, antennae and legs searching, but she and her mother were unharmed. The scientists thought it might be DNA or pheremones. One said scent recognition. But none of them lasted long enough to test their theories. The bugs were hungry.

“They came from you,” her mother said, “You came from me.”

As if children do not attack their parents. No, the bugs seemed to avoid those she loved. Those she truly cared for. She realized in horror the power she had. The bugs ate the faces first, the balls on the men, breasts on the women before their genitals, then their hearts. The bodies, they left behind. The streets were always crowded with corpses.

That the bugs ate an entire city didn’t matter so much. It was how they stayed so small that bothered everyone.

“Do they shit them out?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. I never see them go.” Her husband mentioned.

“So where does it all go?” said her father, on the phone. They kept their houses. People need stability in times like this.

“It must just pass on,” her mother said.

Mothers always say those kinds of things. They’re usually right, as she was.

The bugs ate and ate and fucked and grew, and devoured the world. And when they had finished eating up the world, they turned on the ones she loved, until only her mother was left.

“There’s nothing left for them to eat,” her mother said just before they reached her lips. And she was alone.

That the bugs didn’t eat her was unimportant. There was nothing to eat but rotting meat and spoiled vegetables. The water was off for a while now, and the last drop from the grocery store cartons ran out the day before. So it would be starvation. Her eyes grew bleary. Through the haze, she could make out the insects, eating one another, uncaring, unchanging, unsatisfied and she smiled for sweet death.