When I notice someone, Mr. Yoshiba in this case, from a distance, I do what I always do. I feign poor eyesight. I feign spacing out. I feign being too thoughtful to notice.
“Oh, Laura! How are you?” he asks.
“Hello,” I say. Not even a full word but disconnected two syllables glued together. Ants crawl out of my hair with cold tiny hooks. They grab the two corners of my mouth and pull upward, following a blueprint of a smile.
“I see, you are as jolly as ever!” Mr. Yoshiba says.
I pass by without looking at him.
He yells after me, “Tell your mom the rent is due this Sunday!”
Once I’m home, my sister, ever-proud of the stars she gets in her primary school, corners me. “What do they do when you bathe?”
Under my bangs, spiders pull the threads and one of my eyebrows arches up. “What?”
“It’s so… amazing!” She forces enthusiasm into her voice. “Do they also bathe with you?”
They do not but I don’t reveal this to her. I simply pass by to my room, and lock my door before she can stick a foot in.
She knocks gently. “I’m sorry, sis. I swear I won’t ask again. Sis, open the door.” Then she pounds on the door and tries the handle desperately. Resigned, she begs for forgiveness by shouting, then in whispers.
When I sleep, a centipede draws the curtains of my eyelids closed. At sunrise, fly-bites and buzzing wake me up. Each overslept minute marks one bite on my cheeks—I wasn’t born with freckles.
I work in a simple warehouse in a simple job: take a box from one place, put it onto another. Come to the work at the right time, leave the work at the wrong time. It means moving around a lot of workers in a consistent jostle of expressions. It means denizens of my face work full time, even if for the rest of me it’s a part-time job.
“Why don’t you get rid of them?” my co-worker, Sasha, asks with a face worthy of a painting and a frame. In my mind museum, I call it Sunflower Prematurely Shrivels When No One Is Looking.
“Them?” I ask, ladybugs on my eyelashes, wings folding, unfolding. I squint.
“Don’t play dumb with me.”
A couple of moths come out of my mouth and land on the bridge of my nose.
That sunflower expression again. “My god, I cannot believe they let you work here.” Sasha covers her mouth and runs to the bathroom.
I always leave my workplace an hour late to avoid the rush of familiar faces. Yet, the guard at the exit cannot be avoided. I have to hand in my permission card.
“Look,” he says and opens his hand, a smudge of red in the center. “Will you mourn for your cousin?” There is a dead mosquito on his palm and a piercing stare on his face.
From behind my ears, two beetles crawl to my eyes and lift the edges of my eyelids like the flap of a tent door. They slip under and start kneading my tear glands. Am I sad? I am sad.
“I knew it!” The guard finally takes my card from my outstretched hand. He cannot stop laughing. I try my fastest walking pace away from him and his bloody voice.
It’s hard to outpace a fresh memory.
On my way home, I stumble on a kid who always plays with bugs.
“Don’t feel bad,” he says. “There are millions of creatures in our bodies. We cannot see them, but they are there.”
I accelerate to my dead mosquito pace again. Two cicadas struggle out of my nose, ringing, trembling, making the meaty rims of my nostrils larger. Am I angry?
The kid keeps up the pace with me. “I saw them! My da bought me a mikrokopus.”
“Microscope.” I didn’t mean to say it. I try not to encourage conversations on the streets.
“Mikrokopus is so cool.” The kid is running alongside the sidewalk. “It’s like magic. Shows you gross things.”
I shut the door and hear his voice from the other side. “I want to look at your face with my mikrokopus!”
I learn what happens when you get stabbed eight times. You die.
It’s an old lady from the neighborhood and her veteran husband. They stab me, telling me I don’t belong. Do they mean in this neighborhood or among humans?
My death throes are a tug of war among the denizens of my face as they shape my skin into a vast array of expressions.
I also learn, after I’ve died, that the Spiritual Theory of Evaporation is true. At least, partially. Yes, you become part of the atmosphere. Yes, you move like invisible clouds. No, rain isn’t ghosts pissing down on the living.
The denizens of my face are gone or they too have become invisible?
The ghost traffic is cumbersome. Everyone finds their invisible place eventually. Mine is high enough to observe humans without giving them too much personality. Fat dots on the map. Tiny ink smudges moving.
I observe two new settlements. Two newly formed villages on opposite sides of a river. At one point, the villagers start building a bridge. With sunups, they crawl out of their small huts, cars, forests. With sundowns, they skitter under roofed buildings.
Week after week, over a blue vein of river the bridge emerges like a cut. Like a mistimed smile on the face of landscape. Inappropriate. Ugly. It certainly doesn’t belong.
I ask the Earth, “Why don’t you get rid of them?”
The Earth does what it always does. It feigns poor eyesight. Spacing out. Too thoughtful to notice.
Content warning: Insects, hate crime violence
