The young visitor sat with her food, obviously homeless, and she sat with her arms under the table for as long as possible to hide the bruises and needle marks. You were puzzled a moment longer until the girl let out a fleshy sneeze across a wide radius of plate and table, and you lept up from you seat "Of course," you said, "I'll warm that up for you."
As the timer counted down, you heard the phone ring in the other room and excused yourself from the stilted conversation of what Good Bacteria was really all about. Not even the miracle of microwave technology could save your shriveled peas and dehydrated pork chops, and the girl, whose stomach was quite possibly in the stages of eating itself by now, had no further interest in your kindness. She grabbed your kettle (though foolishly leaving the power-supply base component), left the Yakult, and made a run for it.
* * *
The plate stayed next to the sink all the next day, with soggy lumps of mashed potato attracting those huge roaches you never really had that much of a problem with. The way they talked about germs on the television these days, it seemed as though you couldn't win anyway. Feces on your toothbrush. Menstrual blood on the remote control. How were a few supposedly filthy insects anything to worry about?
You were never a tidy wife, and in your husband's absence there grew a notciable regression to a state of slothful disregard you had not known since your undateable years in college. You were thirty-two years old, playing WoW and having all your meals at the computer. Those stains, those green splotches appearing all around the kitchen walls, were completely transparant to you.
It wasn't until these markings had spread into the bathroom, that you noticed them one night whilst showering, strewn across the ceiling like hand-drawn fractals, imperfect in their detail, though at the same time following some kind of organic logic. Even if you had the foresight to remind yourself to pick up some Exit Mould the next time you were out shopping, there was no way you were actually going to get up on chair and attempt to use it.
You were never a tidy wife, and in your husband's absence there grew a notciable regression to a state of slothful disregard you had not known since your undateable years in college. You were thirty-two years old, playing WoW and having all your meals at the computer. Those stains, those green splotches appearing all around the kitchen walls, were completely transparant to you.
It wasn't until these markings had spread into the bathroom, that you noticed them one night whilst showering, strewn across the ceiling like hand-drawn fractals, imperfect in their detail, though at the same time following some kind of organic logic. Even if you had the foresight to remind yourself to pick up some Exit Mould the next time you were out shopping, there was no way you were actually going to get up on chair and attempt to use it.
* * *
Your weekly self-improvement came in the form of practicing the cello, which you had shown such potential for throughout high school; WoW server maintenance affording you this liberty. You were lost somewhere in that final note of Chopin's Cello Sonata in G Minor, when you felt the firmness of the instrument wane, allowing your legs to close together pushing against what felt like soft clay.
The cello, which at that point was harbouring a number of... affected cochroaches, began to take on a new form. After all these years it was no longer your instrument. It now wanted you as a part of it. The bow tangling itself around your arm, extending with vine-like tendrils at either end. Connecting itself to its accomplice. Snaking around the neck, around the base. Your legs trapped within its silky smooth curves. The strings freeing themselves at the pegs, only to be reattached under the skin of your slender pale hands. Flowing into your bloodstream.
The cello, which at that point was harbouring a number of... affected cochroaches, began to take on a new form. After all these years it was no longer your instrument. It now wanted you as a part of it. The bow tangling itself around your arm, extending with vine-like tendrils at either end. Connecting itself to its accomplice. Snaking around the neck, around the base. Your legs trapped within its silky smooth curves. The strings freeing themselves at the pegs, only to be reattached under the skin of your slender pale hands. Flowing into your bloodstream.
* * *
It was nausea coupled with a release of endorphins indescribable if you had survived long enough to remember it. It filled your body with its babies; every inch of your skin bulging with thousands of tiny green bumps of calcium carbonate. The incubation was fast; a few hours and they were free to leave, and off they went, abandoning their short lived mother in pieces on her livingroom floor; seeping through walls, eager to be part of our Last Terrified Days.
