Dream of Truth

I have spent the last few years of my life watching generation after generation of palmetto bugs run up and down my walls.

 

I have even given them names, and when Charlotte laid her first egg sack, I was overjoyed. When she died a month later, I cried as her offspring devoured her corpse.

 

I now share my meals with the bugs. I don't remember having ate for quite awhile, but I am guessing I have, because I am still alive, and it is 2008, and my life should have ended seven years ago, when my pregnant wife's body was found in the rubble of Ground Zero. If she where here, I think I'd be sharing something much nicer with her. I don't think about that much, though; and I never remember the funeral for her and our daughter, Sarah. I don't remember anything. I sleep instead, so far from Home, the Home I can never return to. The Home that We had known.

 

But She had never liked cockroaches anyway; and now they're all I have. We depend on each other: I am constantly finding Ray or Reeda or Will in with the fritos I've survived on for quite a long time; Gilbert's been saved from drowning in my Coke more than once; Ella likes spaghetti-o's; Henry devours the Frosted Flakes I eat by the handful, straight from the box; and in return, they keep me company and allow me to watch them to pass the time.

 

Today, I am counting my family members, and I get to fourty-seven visible insects before I fall into sleep; as I sleep, I dream. I dream of Her, I smell her, she touches me, I feel her, and it all feels as if this where reality. But then she's falling, then being crushed, then burning; I smell her burn, I hear her scream, I even hear our daughter crying as Mommy suffers and dies. The rest of my dream is her looking from Heaven at me, but I am her, and someone else is me. I feel completely disappointed and saddened as I watch myself pick crumbles of bread off the floor surrounding my bed and eat then, half-heartedly; I see myself do nothing, as I always do. I begin to cry, and when I wake up, there is tears in my eyes, on my pillow, and staining my shirt.

 

Before I can slump off into indifference again, I am leaving. I am returning to the memory, painful and blessed, of her. I have not shaved in years, I have not bathed in months, I have not fully dressed in weeks. I have not seen the world outside of this wretched apartment building and the convience store next to it for almost a decade; and I am going, going back to New York, and the first thing I'll do is drop a note and flowers off at Their graves.

Author's Note

It sucks, I know.

Reviews

[Hedra Helix]

Ohhhh you're awesome. That first line is great and you never let up. The bugs as family is a gritty, real, interesting idea, forcing the reader there, makes us get in that grit with you and anchoring his thoughts into our understanding. Very effective;)

[T]

Actually, it doesn't suck. It's the best short I've read on Writers' Cafe thus far... It does have a Kafka feel to it, but I'm sure that's because of the roaches. You're a good writer.