Insecticide (inspired by Kafka)

Article Contributed by Anonymous (not verified) | Published on Thursday, June 17, 2004

There is a place I remember as being the last place I remember. I'll ask you kindly not to judge me too strongly as I recall the details of the onset of my present condition. There were situations there....Living creatures wore the skin of dead ones. I saw things moving in unnatural ways.  Things happening, things deliberately good, things like red traffic lights always being green and hash browns always properly browned on their tops.  Other things extreme and far more to the sinister side of things I felt were near.

How could I justify this life of solitude and self-imposed exile that I was captain of? I couldn't, not in any regular sense. Nor in any irregular sense, try as I did. And so I submitted and let night after night bring with it its gallery of silence and revulsion. I proceeded to be a lone construct, an abstraction such that I required no reaction. No movement whatsoever...ever. I would live a life of eating live, small animals. At first, little bugs that fed on the dead skin by my bedside. Then onto the moths that nested in my old clothes. The walls of my apartment continually receded and shrunk. I admitted, out loud, to the things around me that I was not at all at ease with any of this. This behavior and perception was all new and very different but I accepted it as part of my metamorphosis. The things I wore soon began to wear me and this frightened me to shaking. I rustled my roach-body comfortable. The world looks bizarre, tall and skewed. I remember what it was to be up there in the place of living, but only in the vaguest of ways. It's an itch on my leg. One of them, I can't tell which.

My landlord has given up on any hope of payment from me but I don't think I care about such things any longer. The head on my new body is occupied with thoughts of a very different nature now indeed. My inability to preen my antennae is really wearing me thin. I ate a piece of doormat today. I realize I can't die.