Bitten

- Bitten -
ali shaw

I was searching for a tape that had slipped down the back of my desk
and drawers, and I came upon something very strange.

I had been forced to drag all of the furniture in my room away from
that one wall, piling it onto and against my bed like scrap heaps in a
junkyard. Eventually, I had cleared the space I needed to retrieve my
cassette, but my mind had been absorbed (as ever) by the singular task,
in this case of furniture relocation, so that until the precise moment
when I slapped my hands together to brush off the dust, I did not
notice the colony of alien bugs that swarmed in the space where my
drawers had been.

They were all roughly the same size, that of my thumbnail, but they
came in an assortment of dazzling colours; glossy greens, shimmering
blues, and the occasional shine of sparkling gold. I watched them for
some time, as they crawled in and out of their hive. It was a nest that
reminded me, in some funny way, of a mammoth's skull; a huge mound of
dirt with the hint of blubber beneath it, covered in a dank hair like
the stuff that grew on my own head. I felt like Gulliver. I was
enthralled.

It was at this point that a fat little alien bug with grey whiskers
stopped, and looked up at me. I could see his knowledgeable eyes
sparkling as they strained to take in my immense size, wobbling on
tiny, wire-thin antennae.

I wasn't surprised to find this tiny fellow communicating with me
telepathically. Unable to reply likewise, I was forced to return speech
with my mouth, a device that his unearthly civilisation had long ago as
a tool of verbal exchange. It made kissing so much more sensual, and
the breath that was saved by eliminating those words that had never
quite been able to convey the sentiments that they had felt enabled
each and every bug to live for many years longer. Indeed, everything
had been replaced by this incredible language of vivid pictures and
naked emotion that was projected from mind to mind. As the silver bug
communicated, I felt an overwhelming sense of joy at having found such
a people. I was sure that their advanced abilities would result in
their understanding of all of the things I had always meant to express,
but fumbled and ruined in the process. There was a peace in knowing
that here was a society that even I could be at one with, who
understood and did not condemn my every motivation, because their
opinions of me were not shackled merely by the things that came from my
clumsy hands, or out of my feral mouth.

Then, in a phenomenal vision of smiles so wide I am unable to describe
them, in a display of thoughts of salmon pink palaces, tinted warm by
the settings of double suns, of new worlds intertwined by happiness and
tranquillity, in a sudden feeling of love that was so overpoweringly
sweet that it crushed my heart, I realised that the tiny grey bug was
offering me a chance to join him somehow, far away in his alien heaven
for the rest of my days!
I shook myself, and took a step backwards. I had forgotten one or two
things. First and foremost was the obvious fact that, in a world where
nobody reads the crusts of the human surface, but looks far and deep
beneath it, I would be an invisible man.