Slip of the Tongue
Content Warning: insects, general unpleasantness
I find it hard to relate to people sometimes. It’s not like I hate anyone who isn’t me, or even that I’m particularly selfish, if I can even say that about myself. Me and the rest of humanity just don’t have much in common. Take my brother David. We’re family, we’re close, we live together and usually get along great– except when I make a remark off hand and he just… gives me this look. Like I should be embarrassed, or maybe he’s embarrassed for me. Everywhere I go, everyone I meet, I see David’s look reflected back at me from acquaintances, coworkers, and strangers once I start talking about anything I’m really passionate about. We’ll go on walks, David and I, and every time it’s the same routine. He coaxes me to talk about future plans, and what Barbara from HR said about my performance this week, and how much nicer the park looks now they’ve gotten rid of the crabgrass, only to be disappointed that we aren’t focusing on the same things. He looks out at the world; I look down.
David usually stops and asks what's so interesting, his voice hovering at that threshold between annoyance and resignation. I remember one time, I had stopped to examine a beetle that still waggled its legs in protest as a steady stream of red-brown specks carried away shreds of its abdomen by the mouthful. David's shoes scraped the sidewalk as he took a quick step back.
“Why,” he sighed. “WHY can’t you people-watch or ask to pet people’s dogs like a normal person?”
We were standing by the new baseball diamond at the time. I remember looking out across the immaculately cut grass stretching between our featureless sidewalk and the smooth dirt of the pitcher’s mound, and I didn’t have an answer to stop the twinge of shame the words brought into my mind. Instead I embraced the stab of satisfaction I got from that nest of ants poking up defiantly against the edge of the unnatural bermudagrass eyesore. David wouldn’t understand, and that was fine… but I don't feel the same way about it anymore. Not really.
That night I dreamed of a flat world paved over into a parking lot. The sun's unforgiving brilliance chased away any clouds that might have provided shelter from its oppressive heat. Wherever I stepped, the tarmac reflected the heat back up at me like a solar oven. The only shelter I could see were lines and lines of beige painted strip malls, new and uniform and packed with ugly polyester clothing. Old people with nothing better to do watched me disapprovingly from every door, their gazes almost worse than the sun. I think David was in there too, though I only remember him shaking his head in disappointment. His starched white shirt didn’t move with him.
Stress dreams are the worst. Nightmares have the decency to be interesting, at least, but this was the sort of dream that took everything I hated about life and condensed it into my entire world. Just people and their myopic little kingdoms where nothing lived unless they approved of how it looked and moved.
The dream wasn’t a new one. I wouldn't remember this occurrence in such detail if I hadn't noticed the crack– a deep, dark fissure under the nearest building, so black it made the new parking lot look gray.
I stepped toward it, eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. At first it only seemed to stretch a few inches. The edge of the plaster darkened with moisture seeping out from the recess, providing a tiny oasis for a few individual florets of moss. Life. I stumbled forward with a pang of desperation, wondering if anything else might live there.
The crack widened invitingly as I approached until it stretched over half a foot, though maybe it had always been that size. I knelt on the hot blacktop so I could peer into the darkness past sharp square rocks that lined the gap like a fence. Yes, there was definitely something inside, something that shifted bonelessly like a giant worm poking up through exposed soil. What was this thing? It settled itself flat against the earth, and I was overwhelmed with a sudden desire to grasp it. I plunged my arm into the gap up to my elbow.
A sharp pain in my mouth jolted me awake a second later. For a moment I sat there unmoving, my limbs locked up with… what, sleep paralysis? Lethargy? With an effort of will I twitched a finger, then painstakingly sat up. And then everything worked again. With a curse I ran to the bathroom to check myself in the mirror.
I opened my mouth, using the light from my phone to look over everything from my gums to my tonsils, but there was no explanation for the sudden pain I had felt– no blood, no cracked enamel, not even a bruise near my lips. I stood there staring at myself like an idiot for two seconds.
Then a door slammed. David's heavy footsteps announced his presence before his bedhead and shaken face appeared in the doorway.
“Did you hear it too?” he blurted out.
I turned to face him. The way his eyes bulged in their sockets made me uneasy, but I kept my voice even. “You look awful.”
“There was like… I-I was dreaming at first, but something was scratching at the… maybe the wall between our rooms? It sounded like scurrying, maybe mice.”
David rubbed the back of his neck and wouldn’t meet my eyes. I sighed.
“I think I’d notice if mice were running around my room, David. Go back to bed.”
His nose wrinkled like it does when I’m being annoying. “What, you can be up and I can't? What are you doing anyways?”
I meant to roll my eyes. I meant to tell him it wasn’t his business and he should go get some sleep.
But that's not what I said. My lip curled at David, and a low inhuman hiss clawed its way out of my throat.
“What I do in the dark isn't meant for your eyes.”
We stared at each other. The silence filled the room like smoke, discouraging us from breathing. Then David left. He was shaking. I was too, come to think of it.
The next morning he acted like nothing had happened when I came down for breakfast. At that point I'd half-convinced myself the bathroom episode was just part of my dream. That only lasted long enough for me to get breakfast together and pour us both some coffee. David stared down at his mug as though hoping to set it boiling again with the intensity of his gaze.
“So… I'm going to call an exterminator today.”
I paused with my coffee halfway to my mouth, the memory from before squirming to the front of my mind. “Oh?”
He didn't look up at me. “Yeah. Something's in the wall, it kept waking me up last night.”
I drank, mostly so I could think over my response. “Okay. Just let me know how much it costs.”
“Cool.”
Silence. David's back was stiff with apprehension, and he drummed his fingers against the table. I cleared my throat.
“So, uh. Sorry about being weird last night.”
“It’s fine. We were both half asleep anyways.”
The guilt that I’d tried to cut out of myself wriggled at the back of my brain, impossible to ignore. I put my mug down. “Yeah, but you seemed freaked out. You know I’m like… I don’t try to freak you out on purpose.”
His gaze cut sharply over to my face at that. I’m not great at reading people, never have been, but in that instant I knew he didn’t believe me.
“Sure, Jan.”
He laughed as he took his mug to the sink, and I forced my shoulders to relax. We were siblings, and we got under each other’s skin because that’s what siblings do. So what if he thought I was being creepy or annoying on purpose? It didn't matter.
I kept telling myself it didn’t matter on the drive to work, but it wasn’t very convincing.
My tiredness caught up to me at the office. The white and black of the computer screen kept swimming in front of my eyes, and more than once I jerked upright just before my head slammed into the keyboard. I don't usually take naps, but it seemed like a good idea to catch a few minutes’ sleep during my lunch break. So that's what I did. I didn't even bother going out to my car, I just shoved my lunchbag to the side and put my head down on the table in the breakroom. I was out almost instantly.
This time I dreamed about a maze of cubicles surrounded by towering powder blue walls. Barbara from HR frowned as I scrambled around in a frenzy, looking for a misplaced form. Her foot tapped against the floor as I dipped under the desk, and she clicked her tongue in disapproval.
“No excuses. No excuses. If you don’t improve your performance–”
“Bite me Barbara. You want me gone anyways.”
The tapping of her foot turned into the ticking of a clock. Right, I was probably late for a meeting– or maybe not? The already loosely held details of my boring office job slipped through my brain like water through a sieve. I clutched my head. What part of the building was I in, anyways? Everything was right angles and cold fluorescent lights without a single of the office’s usual fake plants to break up the monotony. None of it looked familiar… except…
My eyes found the crack– the same crack as last time, now a rough black line between the carpet and baseboard that stretched eagerly open for me. Meetings and forms forgotten, I dashed toward it with my hand out. This was shelter. This was relief.
My hand brushed sharp stones on its path toward the strange worm-thing inside. It recoiled from the invasion, but not far enough. The tips of my fingers made contact with its slimy skin.
“OW!”
That same sharp pain jolted me awake again, and again I laid there with my eyes open, my body weighted down to the table top as though it were lead. At work. Great. I was so uncomfortable that I didn’t immediately realize I wasn’t alone.
A woman stared at me over her own lunch, sandwich forgotten in her hands. Her expression inexplicably twisted in horror as though she had just witnessed me disposing of a body. I managed to twitch my mouth in a smile– good, I could still move that– and swallowed the lump in my throat. My mind cast about for something clever to say that might diffuse the situation.
“Say nothing, and pray the same does not befall you.”
It was that same terrible hiss that had scared David the night before. The lady’s jolt of shock sent her chair toppling over, and she ran from the room.
I sat there in a daze. What was I supposed to do about this? What could I do about this?
After a few minutes I managed to stiffly sit up, then return to my desk. Part of me wanted to apologize to whoever that had been, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Maybe if I acted like nothing was wrong, everything would go back to normal.
The rest of the workday passed in a blur of sleep-deprived routine. It was a blessing when five rolled around. I remember flashes of the drive home and focusing so hard to stay awake, then pushing open the door to the house to see David.
His business clothes were rumpled uncharacteristically, and the shadows under his eyes hadn’t been there the day before. David held his cell phone to his ear.
“Yeah, we’re not sure. Probably mice? Maybe squirrels, it sounded kind of big. No, we haven’t seen any droppings, but– yeah, whatever you can do would be great. Yeah. Thanks, see you then.”
He put his phone down on the table before turning to me with a tired smile.
“Okay, it's all set– yikes, you look rough.”
“You don't look great either.” I tossed my keys onto the counter and flopped into a chair. “So when's the exterminator coming?”
“Should be next week. Apparently they're busy this time of year, but they managed to slot us in. I told him it's an emergency.”
Irritation prickled at my insides. “That's basically a lie, but okay.”
“No, it's not,” he replied stubbornly. “I’m a wreck because I didn't get any sleep last night. And you can say you didn't hear anything all you want, but it won't get rid of the circles under your eyes.”
“And what will you do, David?”
He froze as that horrible tone took over my voice again. The drip of the sink was the only sound until he cleared his throat nervously.
“What. What’s that supposed to mean?”
I tried to tell him I didn't know. I tried to grit my teeth and not say anything, I even tried to bite my tongue. For all the good it did I might as well have attempted to consciously stop my heart beat.
“What will you do when the only vermin left is what you cannot kill?”
I don't remember what he said to that, or what I did, but we didn't have dinner together that night.
I dreamed of the parking lot again. This time I ignored the tacky buildings and oppressive heat. That great yawning crack opened up directly in front of me, wide enough to crawl inside with promises of damp and dark and shelter from the hated light of the sun. I stooped next to it eagerly. My shaking hands pulled me forward over sharp stones that jutted up like grave markers to the fat boneless thing within. From this close it looked familiar somehow, but the shape didn't remind me of a worm anymore. That was when I realized it wasn't jutting up out of a burrow but connected to the floor. The warm, wet floor of a mouth.
What woke me this time wasn't pain. It was something pulling itself on many bristly segmented legs over my jaw. My lower lip. My teeth.
My eyes bulged, but once again the rest of my body refused to respond. I couldn’t move. A heavy carapace scraped against my hard palate. Thick antennae twitched against my tonsils so that had I been able to move I would have gagged. The fat body shifted with a languid motion as though it were trying to get comfortable, and I felt a rounded head press down against my tongue.
Many insects have specialized mouthparts depending on their food preferences; mosquitoes have serrated needle-mouths, for example, which is why you barely feel it when they bite you. Cockroaches, however, are opportunists and scavengers. The construction of their mandibles allows them to eat a great many different things through chewing, including meat– but there would usually be no advantage for the process to be quick or painless. It wasn't. I couldn't move as this thing methodically, with an aching deliberation, chewed through the muscle.
A scream I couldn't release built in my chest as tears pricked my eyes. Desperately I tried to fight against whatever force held me pinned to the bed, to thrash or cry or even bite the hateful creature in half. And somehow it knew. I knew it relished in the pain it caused as much as I felt the pain itself. No sooner had I realized this than a thought that wasn't mine wormed its way into my head.
We are home. We are one.
I felt it wash over me, through me: a half-familiar anger sharpened to an edge by years of lurking at the periphery of human notice, through a world they would sterilize into level lawns and cement with no room left for the things that crawled and burrowed and scuttled in the darkness. I saw the cracks between walls and under floors where humanity had forgotten anything could live. I saw spaces filled with shining twitching chitin like the floodwaters behind a dam, and with a surge of vicious triumph I saw the dam burst over crowds of immobile human figures. Faces frozen in expressions of horror disappeared beneath shifting wings and twitching legs.
Horror, disgust, the creature’s rage, and the agonizing scrape of its mouthparts reached a crescendo in my mind, fueling my frantic attempts at any movement until, finally, a choked whimper forced its way out of my stiffened vocal cords. And suddenly I could move again.
I scrabbled for my mouth as I gagged. The roach-thing’s spiny legs clamped to either side of my tongue, but my fingers found purchase around its oval body and dragged it out into the streetlight pouring in through the window. It glittered like obsidian, too large to exist, all spines and armor and those thrashing whiplike antennae. The body bent in my hand so the head lunged up towards my fingertips, and out of shock I dropped it to the floor where it hit the carpet with a muffled thud. If it hadn’t fallen on its back, I know it would have darted into the shadow under my bed, out of reach. As it was I had only a split second until it managed to right itself.
I grabbed a shoe from beside my bed and brought it down as hard and fast as I could manage. It crunched sickeningly, but I brought the shoe down again. And again. I kept slamming the spot on the carpet until I couldn’t make out anything against the fibers but a dark stain.
The boot fell from my trembling fingers, and I cried.
I don't remember what I told David, or the doctor. They pretended it was something they could rationally explain, and I was given painkillers, time off work, physical therapy so I could manage to talk and eat normally again. I say “normally”; I can only talk half as fast as I used to, and the surface of my tongue is… it’s not pretty. But that’s a small price to pay; whatever that thing was, whatever called it, I never saw more of them. It's been a year now. Most days I can pretend like nothing ever happened. Life goes on as before, more or less.
But every so often my tongue flinches of its own accord. I keep telling myself it’s my imagination, that I’m just traumatized and this is how that trauma manifests itself. For my own sake, I hope I’m right.