By Chris Murphy.
They come from the damp, the doorjamb’s rotten wood gone the color of old bread. They come from under the planter, the igneous rock in the front garden bed where the budding mouse ears hide wet soil that teems with them. They come from the eastern side of the house, from under the abandoned silver grill destined for Free Dump Day: from the lid and from the corroded wiring and from the slitted vents where fire once poured now come earwigs.
They crawl on the ceiling with their pincer ends bent towards the floor below. They run when the cutting board moves. They keep to the corners, the space between cabinet and door, the greasy strip under the oven’s drawer. Their heads are small and round, their thoraces short and dense. Their elongated lower bodies end in backwards claws, those menacing, useless weapons that scare children and grip in terror or in pain.
Yet they do not have the cunning of roaches, nor the slipperiness of house centipedes. They lack the malice and patience of spiders and the armaments of spider crickets. And if they don’t quite share the relatable anxiety of pillbugs or the charm of ladybugs or the fertile eeriness of earthworms or the rumpiness of the bumblebee, they are not malevolent. They are not vermin.
Still, unrelenting they come. On the windowsills, on the walls. On the couch cover and lay-z-boy. Under piles of clothes left in the office and dishrags on the kitchen counter. Like the sugar ants the year before, home invaders who climbed into a box of Honey Bunches of Oats. Flakes they could fit a cohort on. Granules of sugar they chipped to sweet dust between their mandibles. They were poured from the box in a glory. They were inundated with milk. Yes, some were eaten. They were only discovered when their popped bodies emitted the sweet herbal taste of their guts. Last year, in her home, it had been the sugar ants. This year, in his, where she spends afternoons and nights and mornings, it’s earwigs.
They don’t wait where her smell is most rich, the pillow where red-gold strands of her hair remain. They don’t wait for the beam of her eye to fall on them, unknowable like the goddess of the Egyptian sky. They are not motivated by scent or sight. Their faces are so tiny. They can see very little, very poorly. They move similar to birds. They follow the bends of magnetic fields across the face of the sea. They don’t know the birds but to fear them. They do know the pull, somewhere between a color beyond magenta and the way a pie makes a cartoon mouse float. It has drawn them from the mulch and the woodrot and the fallen sweetgum balls and the soft envelope of the fall’s liquid leaves.
They do not expect to be loved. If they could conceive of the future, they would be unmoved by their deaths.
If they could speak, they would say, “It is enough that she is here.” That is the power she commands over the earwigs, like the sugar ants, like the mourning doves who strike the living room’s window in a show of blind devotion, the window’s reflection an open sky they no longer desire. They desire to be near her. The beasts of the zoo in their lassitude notice her. The squirrels agitate. The chickadees fluster. The cardinal swoons. Like the radiating glow of the sun, like the tidal pull of the moon, they all sense her proximity, and the least of them know to be close to her.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Murphy teaches creative writing at Northeastern State in Tahlequah, OK. His collection of flash fiction, Burning All the Time, is published by Mongrel Empire Press, and his work has also appeared at Gulf Coast, The New Territory, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere.
