You Swallow a Bug

One day you wake up and there’s a giant bug on your chest, like none you’ve ever seen before. You open your mouth to scream and that’s when it runs across your body and into your mouth before a single sound is uttered. You can feel it traveling down your throat. You try to swallow and you can feel its resistance.

It’s going down, down, down, down until you can feel it on the side of your stomach, fluttering back and forth. You go to the bathroom and try to throw up but nothing happens no matter what you try. It’s like your body’s forgotten how. So instead you can only sit and squirm as you feel the thing moving through your guts, almost as if exploring to assess its plans.

You try to get help. You go to a doctor. You point out areas where you can feel it moving, and the doctor puts the stethoscope to it, but doesn’t hear or feel anything. You beg them to take an x-ray, so they do–and it reveals nothing. But still, you can feel it, moving about. It’s somewhere in your small intestine now. Or at least that’s what it seems like. But maybe you’re going crazy? So you go home, still feeling it, but questioning it.

A few days later, you start feeling the bug less and less, like it’s grown sluggish. Then, one morning, you wake up and realize you don’t feel it crawling at all. It must have died. You don’t care for having a dead insect in you, but at least it’s stopped skittering about. You’re happy for a few days.

But then, across your entire body, starting in your stomach and moving out from there: more crawling. Something winds up in your lungs. You cough. A small bug, just like the one that crawled into your mouth, flies out and lands on the floor. It twitches a little bit. Then flutters away.