A la maison

The house is big and beautiful and old, with real marble floors in the foyer and a wood floor in the dining room so warped by time that each footstep falls at different intervals, either sooner or later than one would expect, but never arriving exactly on time.

The house is big and beautiful and old, and it's also cold and damp, with plaster walls that seem to trap the moisture, especially these days, when the sky sporadically spits rain and the sun shows its face for less than half an hour at a time.

And I've started finding the little bugs. Tiny black things with long bodies that wander independently, one on the pages of my journal today, another swimming in my water glass last night. I wonder where they come from and what they are. I wonder how many are crawling on my body, unseen, at this very moment. 

Will they burrow beneath my skin and lay their eggs? Did the one in my water glass lay eggs there that are even now gestating in my abdomen? Will I awake one morning to find myself covered in little black bugs that pour out of the open wounds covering my body? Or will the larvae, once hatched, burrow deeper still into my body, preferring first to feast on moist entrails, consuming my flesh from the inside out?

Only time will tell.