(
flash fiction) 470 words
Tiny Black Roommates
based on a true story
I
feel them on my
feet sometimes, or on my
arms. When they fly, it’s a
blurred,
loud affair, a
low buzz that sometimes
grazes my ears, but they seem to prefer
crawling. They crawl around on the
window, on the
walls, on
everything, like quiet, six-legged
nightmares. Little
black spots on the
window, puttering along in a
mad choreography. A single line, a
flash of
orange runs across the sides, deadly fire hiding beneath the
wing covers.
They gather wherever light
shines, meeting for a slow dance on the
window, in the sun. Or, at night, they’ll gather beneath the harsh,
fluorescent glow of the
kitchen light, in the
sink, on the wall. Sometimes, when I sit
alone, in the
dark,
suffused in the hard light from the
monitor, I hear that
seething buzz, and a little
silhouette appears on the screen.
Yesterday, I took a drink of soda, and felt tiny legs titter on my tongue. I spat, a
violent burst of
green liquid pelting the
floor, and one of them, thrashing around in the middle of the puddle.
I used to see them, crawling, slowly and
unyielding, around on my desk. One of them would come close, and I’d
flick it. They’d land on my arms and the powerful uncoiling of a giant’s finger sent them tumbling. They landed on the floor, or the wall, and continued moving. Some of them were
smarter. They’d fly right back to their point of departure and begin the meandering, ceaseless
journey anew.
“Box elder
bugs,” my
coworker informed me.
“Oh? Didn’t know that’s what they’re called.”
She nodded and took bite of a
cucumber, pilfered from the
salad station. “They’re
everywhere around this time of year, like the falling leaves, like those damned
Asian beetles.”
I wondered
what they ate, since they usually left
my food alone, and my food, as far as my reasoning went, was the
only food in the apartment. Maybe they ate
each other. A
tantalizing thought, although I’d seen no evidence of even mild
discord between them, let alone a fight to the death, to determine who would live and who would become
food.
A couple times I’d become
annoyed with them. I declared
war on them. I sought out every one with a pure, simple
motive,
insecticide. Each time I crushed one, the
carapace would pop, and I felt it in my
spine. Or they would simply turn over and
flail as I dropped blow after blow, waiting for that haunting
crunch.
They
weren’t hard to find.
Black, slow moving spots in
lit areas on white walls, or on the
windows. They weren’t hard to
crush, either, not so
paranoid and
quick as
houseflies. I could
destroy them with
such ease that it only added to the
guilt.
But they
always came back.
It’s their
apartment. I’m merely a tolerated
guest.