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CW: descriptions of insect-human parasitism.

The landlord requires proof of the infestation, and proof—per clause twelve, subsection three of the lease—must come in the form of a living specimen, safely contained. A dead specimen is insufficient, he has repeatedly explained, because anyone could find a husk of a years-dead bedbug in the corner of a closet, thereby forcing him to pay for an unnecessary extermination. When Nadia asked why anyone would request an extermination they didn’t need, especially with all of the mutual inconveniences that would entail, the landlord sighed mournfully into the receiver and said, “These are the protocols, Ms. Mohabir, and we must follow them for a reason.”

This reason continues to elude Nadia as she prepares herself for another night of trying to find proof of the infestation. Over these past months she has scoured the underside of her bed, the spaces between the floorboards, the interiors of her nightstand, even the gaps that have appeared between the wall and molding because her apartment building is over a century old and the landlord will not renovate until a tenant moves out (clause four, subsection one). She has taken a magnifying glass to her bedding in search of telltale blood smears and shit stains—any signs of the insects’ nocturnal feeding—but her sheets remain clean, her pillows unblemished. Nadia has even set up makeshift traps—soda bottles full of yeasty water that emit carbon dioxide and, supposedly, draw the bedbugs into talc-powdered Tupperware they can’t climb out of—but the insects seem to know the difference between dry active yeast and the heady emissions of her own body. Nadia can’t even find a bedbug’s carcass, though she knows they only live for a few months and this infestation has gone on so much longer than that.

The only proof she has are the bites. A topography of welts, always in clusters of three, that blister her brown skin. Bedbugs prefer the extremities—legs, arms, fingers—but they will also journey further up her body while she sleeps, under her nightclothes and to the fleshiness of her thighs, or the open plane of her back. Bedbugs will not feed from the skin of the face unless they have no other choice. Nadia has a single bite just under her jawline and she wonders what she did to drive that insect to such desperation.

Tonight, Nadia will not be searching for the bugs. She’s done with that. Tonight, Nadia will take more dire measures.

At half past two in the morning, she peels off her underwear, shoves it into a garbage bag, and ties the bag up tight. She lies naked on the mattress. Nadia has stripped the bedding because the wrinkling of the sheets creates small crevasses that might hide the bedbugs from her. She wants to see their appleseed-black bodies in relief against the white of the mattress.

Nadia has spent weeks researching the lives and habits of these loathsome creatures. Bedbugs are keenly attuned to their host’s sleep schedule; they know when their food source sleeps and wakes and they, in turn, adjust their own sleep cycles so they may feed undisturbed. This is the loophole Nadia has found. If she doesn’t sleep at all, the bedbugs will still come to feed. She will wait, using her bare body as bait, until they crawl from the unseen cracks in the walls and follow the scent of her breath and heat of her skin into the trap she has set.

She lays out the necessary equipment on the mattress: a mason jar with its screw-top lid; a pair of tweezers; topical lidocaine; a flashlight. The flashlight is a last resort. Ideally, she will keep all lights off because the insects fear direct lighting, vampires that they are. She worries, though, that the dim seep of the city lights through her bedroom’s only window may not be enough to illuminate their small bodies and quick legs. She will use the flashlight only when she is certain that they have come. Only when they have hooked their mouthparts inside her and are too engorged to escape.

Nadia sits cross-legged in the center of the bed. She doesn’t read while she waits; she doesn’t scroll on her phone. She keeps herself at attention by focusing on the ever-present itching. She hardly wears clothing at all anymore because the faintest brush of fabric sets the welts thrumming. The first day the bite forms, it is a raw pinkish bump, hard to the touch. With time, it spreads and swells, darkening to a bitter crimson. The intensity of the itch changes; it crescendos from the prickling aggravation of a spider bite to a constant, demanding sting that diverts all attention back to itself and frays the mind’s focus. These bites last a week, maybe more.

Nadia’s skin is a patchwork of welts at different stages of development. In her less rational moments, she thinks she can feel an itching even inside parts of her body that the insects would never feed from. Last night, she thought she felt one in her ear canal. Tonight, in the unfocused space between sleeping and waking, she thinks she might feel a bite so deep inside it doesn’t show on the surface of the skin.

Nadia stops these thoughts by pressing her thumbnail into the distended lump on the back of her right hand. She focuses on the throbbing to keep herself alert. If the landlord won’t accept the proof of her body, he will accept the Mason jar she’ll bring to his office and leave on his desk tomorrow morning, full to the lid with blood-fattened insects cowering in the daylight.

• • • •

When Nadia dreams, she dreams of a bedbug laid out before her like the Vitruvian Man. It is supine, inscribed into an inked circle, surrounded by the dream-artist’s cursive descriptions of its anatomy. It is a wonder, the dream-artist writes, of evolutionary advancement. Behold the vestigial wing pads. We didn’t escape them quickly enough so they gave up their wings. Gaze at those useless, truncated pads. We did that. We maimed them. We desecrated them. We deserve—

Nadia’s roving dream-eye swerves away from the scrawl and up to the showpiece of the insect: the proboscis. The dream-artist has spent the most time here, lovingly detailing the bedbug’s needle-snout. As Nadia draws closer, the proboscis tilts upward, its tip yearning for contact.

Consider the salivary miracle. When the bedbug inserts, it gifts us a wash of its spittle which is filled with anticoagulants and anesthetics both. These make the process easy, painless. But for that initial pinprick of the beak into skin, we feel nothing, know nothing. Our blood thins to an easy flow and fills the body-sac. We are joined in peaceful reciprocity.

The proboscis pierces her dream-eye; the dream ends. A stray desire accompanies Nadia as she wakes. She wishes the bedbug didn’t anesthetize her when it bit. She wishes she could feel each of those hooked legs making their pilgrimage across her skin. The slight tickling as the edges of its carapace brush her leg hairs aside. It takes nearly eight minutes for a bedbug to fill its body-sac and remove its mouth from under the skin. Nadia imagines the growing pressure of the insect’s swelling body weighing against her. The bedbug must feel drunken, delirious, when it is so full of a liquid hotter than its own body that it can barely move, can barely drag itself down from the mountaintop of her kneecap and stumble, full to bursting, toward the place where it is safe.

But it wouldn’t be safe. Nadia would take the bedbug in her tweezers and squeeze. She’d press its abdomen until her own blood beaded on the spindle of its proboscis and returned to her skin in a constant, merciless drip. This is all she wants to feel.

• • • •

Nadia doesn’t remember falling asleep but here she is in the hateful morning. The jar is empty, the tweezer untouched, the mattress as white as the day she bought it. Dreary sunlight films across the windowsill. She wants to throw the Mason jar against that window, but that would mean more cleaning, and she’s so very tired of cleaning. Instead, she digs her thumbnail into the sore on the back of her hand.

It’s the weekend, so Nadia doesn’t have to log into work. She’s a data entry clerk for a company that ships empty shipping containers. The position was always remote, so little changed in her life when the country went into lockdown. Her friends, if she could ever have called them that, shrunk to the size of their online avatars, vanished behind the logos of apps she doesn’t open anymore. Calls with her mother became briefer than ever before. When Nadia was in college, her mother at least maintained a persistent, if overbearing, interest in her studies. Then there were always the questions about boys; questions that became the impetus for Nadia’s awkward but uneventful coming out. But now that she lives alone, spending her hours entering numbers into spreadsheets, what is left to discuss? Nadia has tried to describe her forays into the world of dating women, but these anecdotes have only ever been met with waning interest—an interest that dissipated entirely when Sonia, her sister, became pregnant. After that, every conversation has revolved around infants and breastfeeding, doctors and onesies. When Nadia tried to helm Sonia’s virtual baby shower, her mother intervened, relegating Nadia to the task of finding a suitable web conferencing service. “Everything must be just so,” she’d explained, “everything must be perfect for the baby.”

Nadia sits up in bed. She does not allow her feet to touch the floor. She takes freshly laundered socks from the Ziploc she keeps on her nightstand and pulls these on. She will remove these socks before getting back into bed, thereby ensuring that no eggs or nymphs are brought from the floor to the mattress.

She checks her phone but there are no notifications, no missed calls. She considers that if she stopped paying her phone bill, nothing would change. If she destroyed her phone, with all its ports, it would be one less place for the insects to hide.

The routines of Nadia’s life have been subsumed by the infestation. Mornings are for laundry. Today, she has two garbage bags full of every piece of unwashed clothing, linen, and bedding in the apartment. She fumbles for the light switch at the top of her stairs to the basement, jamming at it with her elbow, then descends the stairs sideways so she doesn’t trip.

The basement is the one part of her duplex that’s shared with the tenant next door. It’s a narrow chamber with a single, exposed light bulb that dangles at the place where the apartments above meet. Panting through her N-95, Nadia heaves the garbage bags on top of the washing machine and takes a moment to catch her breath.

Mrs. Papadakis, the neighbor, is shuffling about upstairs. It’s eleven-thirty on a Saturday morning, which means it’s time for her weekly game of euchre. The old woman doesn’t trust the government and, as far as Nadia can tell, doesn’t believe in modern medicine, so she has no qualms about venturing out into the diseased world, risking lives so she can have her afternoon brandy and gossip with the other retired libertarians down the block. Nadia has always resented Papadakis for her sour glances and complaints to the landlord about Nadia’s half of the basement not being tidy enough, but the pandemic only calcified these resentments into loathing. She once caught the old woman going through her grocery delivery, and when Nadia, standing eight feet down the hallway, asked her to stop, Papadakis looked at her over the rims of her tortoiseshell glasses and said, “You’re wasting your money spending this much on chicken. I get mine for seventy-nine cents a pound.”

Above, a door slams; Papadakis is off, purse clutched to her bosom, infection concerns thrown to the wind. There’s a wash of light illuminating the stairs on the far side of the basement, which means that the old woman left her kitchen lights on and the door to her apartment ajar.

Nadia considers this.

She hasn’t told Papadakis about the bedbugs. She already knows how this would go—the accusations and apathetic judgment. She’s grinding her molars just thinking about it. The fact that she hasn’t told Papadakis, though, raises a significant and untested gap in her search for a living specimen. It is possible that the infestation didn’t originate on her side of the building. In fact, it’s possible that the infestation isn’t even based in her side of the building. The bloodsuckers are comfortable living in walls and emerging from unseen fissures; human demarcations of space are meaningless to the bedbug.

Nadia slips her house key in her pocket. She steps toward the other side of the basement.

She knows the old woman’s routine. Papadakis will be out until two-thirty with the euchre group. More than enough time to slip into the bedroom, check for signs of insect activity. Nadia remembers reading that the elderly are actually less likely to exhibit symptoms of bedbug bites, making it easier for an infestation to grow unnoticed. She’ll be doing the old woman a favor, and maybe, just maybe, she’ll finally put an end to this.

Papadakis’s apartment is an uncanny mirroring of her own. She enters through the kitchen. There are the twins of her gas stove and refrigerator, one on the wrong side of the other; there’s the kitchen counter attached to the opposite wall; there’s the door to the bedroom. She didn’t realize it until now, but when she sleeps, she’s only separated from her neighbor by a single, thin wall.

There are no signs that Papadakis is aware of an infestation. When Nadia eases open the bedroom door, she sees laundered clothing folded neatly on a bed whose headboard is flush with the wall. This is a room that has been undisturbed by attempts to thwart nightly feedings.

Nadia gets to her knees—biting her lip as she’s reminded, painfully, of the distinct patterns of welts on each—and peels the fitted sheet back from the mattress corner. The old woman’s mattress is free of any obvious signs, as are her pillows and sheets. Nadia pulls out her phone and turns on the flashlight. Time for the deep dive.

Getting on her back, she slides herself under the bed. Papadakis has stuffed dozens of plastic-wrapped gowns underneath. Nadia shoves aside a stack of pastel cocktail dresses and wiggles her way far enough beneath the bedframe so that she can turn the flashlight upward and make a full survey of the boxspring’s belly. The wooden slats are unmarked by the pinprick-bodies of nocturnal feeders, which means she’ll have to get closer. She shimmies herself in amongst the entombed gowns, deep enough that she can get at the center of the Hollywood frame, all the way to the screws and washers that hold it together. Bedbugs love a slight crevasse; the narrower it is, the safer they feel. She is buoyed by a single-minded certainty that if she gets close enough, she will find them here; she has spent these past months learning to think like a bedbug because being inside them is the only way to bring about their ruin. She is more like them now than she’s ever been before and, as she drags herself along just another inch along the floorboards, craning her neck, she tilts the light and sees—

A resounding crack of wood hitting wood sounds from deep in the apartment. Nadia flinches; she drops the phone and it falls on her face. She leaves it there, unwilling to move because the rustling of plastic will expose her.

She breathes in, deeply, then wills herself to remove the phone and turn off the flashlight. Papadakis is gone for the afternoon, this much she knows. She would have heard the old woman come back through the front door and this sound—whatever it was—came from the back half of the apartment. This is good. Just because there was a noise doesn’t mean that something—or someone—else caused it. It might have been a precariously perched cooking utensil finding its way to the floor. Or, perhaps, an ill-hung picture frame tipped from the wall by a rowdy air current.

Nadia shimmies herself out. She still steps tenderly, avoiding any creaking, as she nears the doorway and peers around the corner.

The kitchen is empty, as is the living room to her right and the adjoining hallway leading to the front door. To the left, though, there’s a narrow hall that heads back to a bathroom and dining room, same arrangement as Nadia’s half of the duplex.

The one difference is the ladder slid down from an opening in the hallway’s ceiling. Nadia doesn’t have an attic space above her apartment—at least, not one the landlord has mentioned before. The first thought she has is the image of the ladder descending from that hole and butting against the floor. She thinks it would look like a proboscis in the act of penetration.

Immediately above her, in the attic that exists only in this mirror-version of her apartment, a floorboard squeals. Nadia tilts her head back. She tracks the progress of footfalls moving through that unseen space, moving with such quick confidence toward the ladder.

Nadia glances across the kitchen, toward the door to the basement. She can still make it in enough time to lock that door and rush back to her side. She still has time, she promises herself, as she watches a pale foot begin to descend.

• • • •

In the first weeks of the infestation, Nadia wanted to unbody herself. She wanted to step out of her skin, or to drink whiskey laced with laudanum, like a nineteenth-century cholera patient, until her brain no longer connected to her nerve endings. She wanted to become a brain in a vat. She prayed to the God her mother believed in for a sudden, miraculous immunity to bedbug saliva, perhaps an immunity that would transform her, Spiderman-style, into a being whose blood was toxic to everything that dared ingest it.

But there was no deliverance, no merciful God. In fact, the universe saw fit to punish her even further: At some point during quarantine, her local drug store stopped getting lidocaine. She called, furious to the point of tears, for an explanation. The woman on the other end of the line said something about supply chains, something about Benadryl. She listened as Nadia explained, calmly as she could manage, that this was not a problem Benadryl could solve. The clerk suggested Nadia contact her doctor, and that was when Nadia finally hung up.

She’d already spoken to the doctor. Weeks before, she’d taken dozens of photos of her bites and sent them to his office. She’d received a polite email in response telling her that the lesions were not consistent with insect bites and were probably psychosomatic. He referred her to a therapist.

At some point during the lidocaine shortage, Nadia woke to find herself in the act of tearing at a bite with her fingernails. The welt was a scalded red, skin thinned to the point of rupture. She tried so hard while awake not to allow her skin to come into contact with anything at all—but what did it matter if she was only scouring herself while she slept? She’d barely been touched in months, even by her own hands—what was the point of it? What was the point of trying not to feel?

In a furious rush, she stripped her underwear down to her ankles and began to masturbate. She tried not to let the bites on her palms touch her vulva, but couldn’t quite manage it. One inflamed welt brushed her clitoris and she paused, letting herself feel the strange, twinned sensation. With her unbitten hand, Nadia pulled back the skin and pressed the bite more fully over her clitoris. Scratching the incipient itch was an unbearable, marvelous relief, so she began to make slow circles. She slid the unbitten hand down, pressing a finger into her cunt.

As she worked herself, the welt on her palm began to grow warm and radiate pain from somewhere deep under the skin, somewhere the insect’s beak had never touched. She fingered herself through the stinging, until the bite was throbbing along with her, until the heat of her climax was indistinguishable from the burn.

Nadia rolled over, buried her face in the sheets. She promised her mother’s God she would never let anything touch her skin again. She pulled her slick fingers free of herself and considered the heresy of a shower.

• • • •

Nadia does not make it to the basement door.

A woman in a ragged, pink bathrobe descends the ladder with frightful speed, hopping down while she still has a few steps left to go, her heels thudding to the floor. Unlike Nadia, she’s not wearing a face mask, so Nadia sees her fully when she turns toward the kitchen and stops dead in the hallway.

“Who are you?” the woman asks.

She’s young, Nadia thinks, or maybe she’s just someone who always looks younger than she really is. Her hair is up in a loose bun, and she’s tied the bathrobe at the waist with a lazy knot. The stranger pulls her robe fully closed as she stands there, and Nadia wonders if she’s been staring too long.

“I’m Nadia. The neighbor. I thought—you know, I thought I heard a sound up here like Mrs. Papadakis falling. Figured I should come check. I know it’s not safe at all, in times like these, to just barge in.” She points to her mask by way of explanation, feeling this lie thin to the point of idiocy with every added word. “But better safe than sorry, right?”

The young woman takes a moment to respond. She raises a hand to her mouth and presses the pads of her fingers to her lips as she thinks.

“You don’t belong here,” she says.

There’s something odd in the way the woman speaks—an accent Nadia can’t recognize. It’s as if her tongue never quite touches the roof of her mouth or the backs of her teeth; a vagueness in every consonant sound that makes Nadia want to lean in and ask her to repeat herself.

“You never said your name. I don’t remember Mrs. Papadakis saying she had anyone living with her.”

“I am Eleni.”

“That’s pretty. It’s Greek, right? You must be her granddaughter?”

“Yes.”

Maybe it’s that she hardly slept at all last night, or maybe it’s that this is the first human she’s spoken to face-to-face in over a year, but Nadia has the nagging sense that there’s something wrong with this conversation—something that should be said but has been misplaced.

Eleni, though, seems to feel no such qualms. She shuffles toward Nadia and turns into the kitchen, opens the refrigerator, and begins pulling out cheeses, cold cuts, milk, olives. She takes a few slices of ham and shoves them into her mouth; as she chews, she fishes with her bare fingers in the olive jar, wresting a few olives into her palm and throwing these back before she’s even swallowed.

The opened refrigerator door blocks the path back to the basement. Nadia edges forward, sidling herself along the kitchen island, trying to sneak past Eleni’s turned back and toward the relative safety of the basement door.

As Nadia stands on tiptoe, inching herself along, she sees the exposed nape of Eleni’s neck. It’s just a quick glance, with the young woman’s skin illuminated by the sickly refrigerator light, but it’s enough for Nadia to see the circular splotch on the back of her neck. Nadia would know that mark anywhere. That is a weeks-old bedbug bite, one that the body is preparing to reabsorb.

Without warning, Eleni straightens and turns. They stand only inches from one another, together shrouded in the chill of the open refrigerator. Eleni’s robe has fallen open just a bit, just enough for Nadia to see the pattern of bites moving from the hollow of her neck over her thick, protruding collarbones, and down further still, to the pale, freckled skin at the top of her breasts.

“You are touched,” Eleni says. Nadia has been so distracted that she hasn’t noticed Eleni watching her, making her own survey of Nadia’s body. The young woman reaches up a finger toward the bedbug bite on the underside of Nadia’s jaw, the one the mask doesn’t quite fully cover.

Nadia jerks away before Eleni can touch her, stepping back into the hallway.

“Touched?” Nadia repeats. “Bitten, you mean? Yes, I’ve been bitten.” She considers pulling her t-shirt up, exposing the checkering of welts over the rolls of her stomach. Thoughts are coming to her more quickly than she can articulate them. “You’ve been, too. I’m sorry I looked—I didn’t mean to, but I just happened to see the bite there, and the ones there, on your chest. I know this sounds mad but I’m so glad to see that there’s someone else who has them. Not that I’m happy you have them, of course. I just wasn’t sure that the bedbugs were there at all, you see, and now that I’m here, and I’ve seen you, I finally know that it’s not just all—in my head.”

Nadia stops herself from continuing because halfway through that monologue Eleni slapped the refrigerator closed and headed from the kitchen to the hutch in the dining room. She takes out two cut crystal goblets and a half-empty bottle of port. She sets the goblets on the countertop with enough force that the glass sings. She pours until they’re nearly three-quarters full and says, merrily, “Why didn’t you say this before?”

Nadia takes a glass as Eleni forces it into her hands. Eleni raises her glass and they give a little toast. Eleni takes a full-throated gulp. A drop of the wine runs from the brim, but Eleni catches it on her fingertip and that, too, goes to her lips.

Nadia is suddenly, deliriously giddy. Happier than she’s felt in so very long, happy enough that she might be able to justify drinking port before noon. She wants to know everything about Eleni. How long she’s been staying with Papadakis, when their infestation started, whether or not the old woman knows. She’s not even annoyed that Papadakis seems to have an illegal subletter living in her attic because this this odd, ravenous woman is her deliverance. No more itching, no more scabbing, no more jolting upright in the night convinced she’d felt searching legs and sucking mouths. Convinced but, again, mistaken.

“I’ve spoken to the landlord,” Nadia says, trying to tamp down the excitement hot in her voice, “and he says that all we need is proof. Just one damned body of one damned bedbug, alive, and he’ll send the exterminator.”

Eleni has finished her glass of wine. The port stains the skin around her lips. She looks away from Nadia as she speaks.

“You want to see the body?” she asks.

“Yes—yes, that’s all we need. Have you seen them? I’ve looked—Jesus Christ, I’ve looked—but I can’t find any on my side of the building. Not a single body. Not even an egg.”

Eleni takes the wine bottle in one hand and her glass in the other.

“They are upstairs. They are with me.”

“I just need one,” Nadia says. “It needs to be alive. I need a container of some kind.” She looks down. “Even this wine glass would work.”

Eleni looks Nadia full in the face, saying nothing, just studying Nadia’s features. It must be so strange, Nadia thinks, to hold a conversation with someone who is in a mask when you are not. But it would be more impolite to take her mask off, especially since she’s the intruder in Eleni’s space. She gives the young woman a small smile, hoping it will reach her eyes, and Eleni breaks her stare.

“When you climb the ladder,” she says, “do not spill the wine. Grandmother will know if you spill, and she will be very angry.”

Bottle in hand, Eleni starts down the long hallway. Nadia follows, imagining what it will look like to see the underbelly of a bedbug up close, behind glass, where it belongs.

• • • •

Nadia knows that Papadakis’s apartment, like her own, is only a one-bedroom, but it still seems cruel for the old woman to put her granddaughter up here. There’s not enough room for a proper mattress, so Eleni has a cot set up in one corner, draped in mismatched sheets. Books spiral in twisted stacks toward the low ceiling; so do dishes crusted with old food. There are no windows in this room—(is it even legal to allow someone to sleep in a room without windows? Nadia doesn’t think so, but the pandemic has changed so much)—so when Eleni heaves the drop-down ladder back up again, the room takes on a stale, hermetic quality.

“How long have you been up here?” Nadia asks. “The summer?”

She imagines that Eleni might be a graduate student, here on a visa that needed to be extended when the U.S. stopped flying planes to Europe. Maybe she had nowhere to go when the pandemic set in and the semester ended, so she found herself cooped up with her mean American grandmother, descending her ladder only in the times when her the old woman left so she could enjoy having the apartment’s quiet all to herself. Eleni’s bedbug-tainted isolation isn’t all that different from her own.

“Yes,” Eleni says, “I was here for the summer.”

Eleni sits cross-legged on the floor beside the cot and invites Nadia to do the same. She places the bottle of wine between them and cups the goblet in her palms. Nadia mirrors her.

Nadia never really had friends who were girls when she was young. Her classmates marked her early as gay—perceiving, as children sometimes do, hidden differences that never stay hidden—and so most of Nadia’s friends growing up were wordless, oafish boys. Never anyone as pretty as Eleni. The way they are sitting, facing one another in their nightclothes, sipping at rancid wine, feels like something she might have done in a parallel girlhood.

Eleni refills her goblet. She pours carelessly, like someone already at the end of a long, festive night, distracted by the revelry. Nadia is visited, unexpectedly, of the memory of a Christmas Eve some years back, before she knew what a bitter crone Papadakis could be, when the old woman knocked on her door with an identical bottle of port in her hand and offered Nadia a small glass. “I only drink on Christmas Eve,” she’d said, “and only a little. It’s better shared with a new neighbor. Wine is always better shared.”

Nadia puts her goblet down.

“Maybe we should slow down on the wine,” she says. “I think your grandmother’s been drinking from this one bottle for the past five years. At the rate we’re going, she won’t have any left for Christmas.”

Eleni takes a hefty swig. As she swallows, she smiles without showing her wine-stained teeth. “How long have you been touched?” she asks.

Nadia knows it’s just a language barrier, but she loathes Eleni’s use of that word. It sounds so intimate, so gentle. There’s not an atom of kindness inside of the bedbug.

“How long have I been getting bitten?” Nadia immediately winces at how corrective and condescending that question sounds. Inside her mask, sweat beads on her upper lip. “About four months now. Four months, three weeks. And they just keep getting worse, no matter how many traps I set or how much diatomaceous earth I sprinkle around the bed.” She pauses here but Eleni doesn’t respond. The younger woman has creased her black brows, and Nadia can’t tell if she’s offended. “The diatomaceous earth feels so silly,” Nadia hurries on. “I put it in rings around the bed, like I’m protecting myself from a demon.”

“Tell me,” Eleni says, almost cutting Nadia off before she’s done speaking, “why you want to see the body?”

“The landlord won’t send the exterminator without one. I don’t know if you’ve met him before, but he’s a real piece of—”

“And tell me,” she interrupts again, “why you want to destroy them?”

Eleni has an odd habit of not looking directly at Nadia when she speaks. She always tilts her head to the side, as if noticing something in the periphery that diverts her attention. Nadia has been trying to ignore it, but this time she follows Eleni’s gaze. There’s nothing there but the cot. It sits flush with the wall. The sheets are rumpled and lousy with stray hairs. This is not the room of someone dealing with an infestation.

“What? What else do you do with bedbugs?”

Eleni takes the bottle of wine by the neck and drains the remainder. Her slim neck contracts and relaxes as she swallows. Her skin is so smooth, blemished only by the bites as dark as clotted blood.

“What were you before they came?” Eleni asks.

Nadia doesn’t know what to say. She tries to keep herself from looking directly over to the hatchway they came through. The ladder has folded in on itself, assuming a dense, intricate geometry of hinges and rungs. She realizes she doesn’t understand the mechanics of how that trapdoor opened. She doesn’t know if she could open it quickly, if she had to.

“Before the bedbugs,” Nadia starts, searching for a memory of what her skin was like when it was smooth as Eleni’s, of what her mornings held when she didn’t take an immediate inventory of new welts upon waking. “I wasn’t in pain. I was happy.”

“You were not.” A strange emotion strains Eleni’s words. She sounds almost wounded by this reply, like Nadia was trying to lie to her and got caught in the act. “Before they came, you were afraid. Afraid of being alone. Afraid of not seeing Mummy again.”

Behind her mask, Nadia has stopped breathing. She doesn’t understand how Eleni could know that she calls her mother “Mummy.” She doesn’t understand how Eleni could know any of this. Her first thought is that this awful, cramped attic must extend across both sides of the duplex, and that Eleni must have listened to her have a phone call with her mother. But the room isn’t nearly long enough for that; it’s hardly the width of Papadakis’s kitchen.

Nadia stands. She spills her goblet of port, but she doesn’t care. Neither does Eleni. The wine rushes to fill the spaces between the floorboards.

“Tell me how to open the hatch. I want to go back now.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

Nadia goes the hatchway. There’s no handle, no latch. She steps on the coiled ladder and pushes. It doesn’t budge.

“Before you were touched you were sad and alone and stuck in your sweaty little bedroom leaving voicemails for your mother, asking whether or not she’d set up her grocery delivery. Whether or not she was washing the outsides of her grocery bags. You were so desperate to have your share of her life, you left a different voicemail every night.”

Nadia never touched the wine, but she feels that drunken flush of heat in her face. For some reason Eleni’s speech seems so much clearer to her now than it did before. She doesn’t have the same accent she did when they were standing in the kitchen.

“I just want to know that they’re safe,” Nadia says. “Half the time, I don’t even know why I’m calling. It’s not like my mother can hold a conversation that goes beyond the weather, my pregnant sister, or some morbid tallying of every sick person she knows. And the worst part of it is—I have nothing to say to her either.”

“You bore her,” Eleni says.

“No.”

Nadia feels dizzy. The attic smells of fetid wine and the air is so sodden with it she feels it on the skin. Every movement sets another welt thrumming, reminding her that yes, there is one there at her elbow and there in her armpit and a whole cluster ringing her ankle.

“I don’t bore her,” Nadia spits. “I frighten her. She looks at me and she searches for all of the futures she can imagine. A spouse. A home. A child—no, children. Happiness. But what futures does my life offer? When she looks at me, she sees a blankness. I worry about how scary it must feel for her—to think you understand your child and then watch as every choice she makes unspools the parts of her you thought you’d wound so tightly they’d hold fast forever.”

There is more to say, Nadia is sure of that, but she’s out of breath. She raises a hand to the back of her neck, where her thumbnail finds a welt. She wonders if Eleni will let her go if she makes herself bleed. She wonders what Eleni is afraid of.

Finally, Eleni says, “This person you describe. This sad woman wrapped up in your bed worrying about why Mummy isn’t returning your calls. You are not her anymore. Look at you—now you are the woman who breaks into other people’s apartments to get what she wants. You are strong now. You are beginning to understand what you need.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I’m not stronger now. I’m just more desperate. I itch every minute of the day. I can’t think right anymore. I’m just—I just want to end it.”

Nadia kicks the ladder again. Maybe if she understood how to extend it, she could figure out how to get back down. But the mechanics seem unknowably complicated.

She catches sight of Eleni moving in her periphery, a flash of pink. How is it possible that Eleni has worn that awful, ragged bathrobe all this time? It looks like it’s made of rough, pink towels, and thinking about what that must feel like on her skin sets Nadia’s own bites pricking all over again. She tells herself not to scratch them, to just ignore them, mind over matter, but there’s one under her left breast that’s screaming at her to itch it, to cut it off, to burn it out, and it’s taking every last shred of willpower not to rip off her t-shirt and give the bite what it asks for.

“I’ll give you a call later in the week, Mummy. Hope you’re staying safe. Let me know if you need help setting up a video call.”

Eleni has lowered the register of her voice and it takes Nadia a moment to understand that this beautiful woman, drunk on a Saturday morning, is imitating her. The mimicry grows closer to truth the longer Eleni goes on—she’s noticed not only the tenor of Nadia’s voice, but also her habit of pausing between sentences, letting the next full thought form before pressing on.

“I just want to help, Mummy. Get back to me when you can. Please, Mummy, I need to hear your—”

If Nadia were to close her eyes, she wouldn’t be sure which one of them was speaking. Can she remember the feeling of her own lips parting, of the tongue coming to touch the backs of her teeth, of her throat opening and constricting? Can she remember any sensation other than the obliterating burn as the insects’ saliva works beneath the skin?

“Stop,” Nadia says. “You’re right. I’m not that person anymore. I don’t miss them the way I used to. But I wish I did. I wish felt something other than all this goddamned—”

Nadia lifts the bottom of her shirt and shimmies a hand beneath her breast. When she itches the bite, she shudders with relief.

“You’ve made it this far, Nadia.” Eleni has stood up now. She’s untying the knot that holds her bathrobe closed. “Are you ready for them to show you what you can become?”

The bathrobe collapses to the floor.

“You wanted to see the body,” she says.

Nadia’s instinct is to look away, but she doesn’t. The swell of Eleni’s stomach is lovely, perfect in the way it hangs, creating a soft lip just above her pubic hair. Her legs are stocky and full, muscled at the calves but fleshy and robust through her thighs. Nadia can’t see her ass but she can imagine, from the shape of those thighs and the fat over those hips, how thick it must be.

Nadia can’t look away because she’s feeling herself go slick and she can’t stop looking at the welts that cover every inch of Eleni’s body. They show the spectrum of color, from that blossoming pink of an early bite to a deep, settled crimson; they cover her breasts so fully that Nadia can’t immediately tell what are Eleni’s nipples and what are bites; the white of her skin shows through only in slivered patches, like a network of pale stems connecting the bloom of welts.

“What does that feel like?” Nadia asks. Eleni steps closer to her, and closer still. “That kind of pain must be—”

“It is everything.”

Eleni takes Nadia’s hand and places it over the string of bites running along her collarbone. Nadia hasn’t touched someone else’s skin in years and the sensation surprises her. She starts to pull back but her fingertip moves over the mound of one of the welts and Eleni’s breath catches.

As Nadia struggles to pull her t-shirt off over her mask, Eleni gets on her knees and slips Nadia’s shorts down around her ankles. She brushes the three bites on Nadia’s left thigh and the familiar pain starts up again. With her shirt finally on the floor, Nadia lowers a hand to scratch one of them, but Eleni catches Nadia’s wrist as she stands back up again.

“You must wait for what will come.” With her fingers still pinching at Nadia’s wrist, she walks backward, leading Nadia to the unmade cot. Nadia lets herself fall into it. Eleni straddles her, settling her weight on top. Some of the bites coloring Eleni’s skin have returned to near-softness, others are fresh and hard and scrape at Nadia’s exposed stomach as Eleni shifts herself forward. The fat of her belly brushes against Nadia’s; the urge to itch is a ruthless, cresting fury.

Eleni leans down. She begins with the welts along Nadia’s neck, brushing her lips to them one by one. Her breath warms the skin like a sickness. Nadia feels each bite begin to itch in succession; each becomes needier as Eleni proceeds to her breasts and stomach. Her mouth doesn’t miss a single inflamed sore. By the time she reaches Nadia’s waist, there is no individual itch that Nadia can focus on; there is only a sensation that builds through her chest like the howl of a train racing closer in the night; just when she thinks it is all so loud that the train must be passing, another car barrels down the track, and another; no sound at all in the world but the dissonant keening; no feeling left but the anticipation of pressure from Eleni’s mouth.

Nadia lifts her hands. This time, Eleni doesn’t stop her. She unhooks the mask’s elastic bands from behind her ears and pulls the cloth away from her face. After Eleni has finished each of Nadia’s legs, she climbs onto the bed and sits astride Nadia once more. She wipes a wetness from Nadia’s cheeks. Eleni’s lips part as she leans down. The interior of her mouth is so dark from the wine that Nadia can’t tell her lips from her teeth.

A long muscle passes from Eleni’s lips into Nadia’s open mouth. For a moment, Nadia wonders at the alien pleasures that will come from Eleni’s tongue traveling her bite-marked body. But, as that tongue presses deeper and Nadia’s expectant throat eases open, she realizes they are both beyond that now. The pain of the itching is mounting, mounting, but it is not yet complete. There are still welts that must be attended, and Eleni will find them even in those caverns of the body that cannot be felt or seen.

• • • •

The bedbug digests the blood meal. This takes days, often a week. After, the female insect will lay eggs, expelling them in her shit. She leaves the young to perish or prosper as they will. She does not dream of lineage and inheritance. The bedbug does not even dream of the joy of feeding or horror of insemination. She savors, instead, a single moment—

The feeding has finished, the interiors of her proboscis slick with the sluice that her stomach is too full to hold. She is so ripe with the blood meal that she cannot move; she tumbles from the host’s skin, onto bed linens. No agency remains. She is as likely to digest in peaceful isolation as she is to be killed by the host’s ignorant mass rolling over her. She dreams of the moment in which the consequence of her gluttony, whatever it might be, becomes inevitable.

For this, the bedbug gave up her wings. To experience a single moment opened by the knowledge that her body was never meant to save her.