"Bedbugs" by Kyra Baldwin
This is a selection from our Winter 2022 Issue, guest edited by Raad Rahman. Click here to purchase the print edition and click here to purchase the digital version.
When he told her about the bugs, she was not angry, but she was disturbed, more disturbed than he had been. He felt like this was a bad response, a hypochondriac’s response, and indicative of the larger world’s violent denial of insects and lepers and plagues. However, her anxiety was also helpful, because she would be cautious and thorough, which is the only way to get rid of an infestation. And she would let him come over and sleep in her uninhabited bed, provided he took off all his clothes outside so she could immediately dry them on high heat. This is what her mother had said to do, and Natalie had recently started listening to her mother.
That night, Natalie woke up at 3 a.m. with a bite on her inner thigh. She went to the bathroom to examine it, where she discovered she’d started her period. She began to cry. Were the bugs here? Were they that determined to riddle her body? Why did she have to bleed every month if she didn’t even want children? She hoped that her crying would wake Tom up so he could comfort her, and she also prayed it didn’t, knowing how bad he could be at comforting her.
But Tom didn’t wake up and she got what she wanted and she didn’t.
Natalie crawled back to bed. She tried to fall asleep but couldn’t. Every time she closed her eyes, she felt hordes of little legs tracing her body, colonizing her skin, making it their own. She was shocked how similar this feeling was to being raped. Thousands of punctures all over her body, thousands of syringe-shaped penetrations, just so she couldn’t isolate one. Why was she thinking about that? She’d been so good at not thinking about that. Or actually, she always thought about it, but she’d been so good at not getting submerged in it. She thought about taking a sleeping pill and forcing a reboot, but she had to be up at seven. There was no way she’d be able to get up in three hours if she took a trazodone. Before she realized it, she had put her hand on Tom’s shoulder and shook him awake.
“Natalie?” He had saliva dried in the left corner of his mouth. “What?”
“I can’t sleep.” Now that she said it out loud, it didn’t seem like a crisis.
“Why? What is it?”
“I can’t sleep.”
The moon was very bright through the un-curtained window and Tom used it to examine his girlfriend. Girlfriend never seemed like the right word. In his head, he always thought wife, which felt truer, more ancient and therefore exact. But did he think of himself as her husband? No, he didn’t. Tom wasn’t sure you could have a wife unless you were a husband too, but who cares. He could. If he really wanted, he could.
The moonlight made her look angry until he realized she was sad.
Kyra Baldwin was a New York-based writer whose work appeared in McSweeney’s, Reductress, X-R AY, Wigleaf, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Hobart. She was a reader for Ploughshares and an MFA fiction candidate at Columbia University. She died in 2021.
