It all started with textured welts, thatches of reddened polyps gathered in fields across my belly—bulbous nodules, rotund knobs—larger nodes surrounded by diminutive nipple like pustules with pus frothing from scabbed gullets. I began having nightmares. It felt like déjà vu. I wanted to leave that old house but momma wouldn’t let me. Her voice bellowed through the halls, her breath vile, a wind of sickness whispering in my left ear and my right dead, packed with wax, my equilibrium distorted and confusion my normalcy.

Friday Morning

I awakened covered in erupting lesions. Momma said they were summer sores, but this is February. The tissue contained cores of necrotic yellow and black, my entire back pelted in a lattice of knurled cankers. And the itching unbearable. Maybe I had ringworm from walking barefoot through the dew drenched swamp grass. Maybe it was tetter, psoraisis or infatigo. I began investigating my bedding. Betwixt a ridged fold in the seam, I discovered a small deposit of dead lice-like insects. So I hopped on the web and looked it up. I was infested with bed bugs (a wingless odorous insect (Cimex lectularius) with a flat reddish body that infests dwellings and bedding and feeds on human blood. Also called chinch or chinch bug).

The Video Camera

I decided to place a digital camera on my night-stand to film myself sleeping. I adjusted the view to wide angle to catch every inch of my body. I removed the sheets and blanket, revealing the filth crusted vintage 1931 Sears & Roebuck mattress. Dead center were years of urine stains, mostly from my cancer ridden grandmother. The very bed she died on. The bed she and my grandfather made love on. The bed she gave birth to my mother on. The bed I was born on—and thus passed on to each new generation. It was now mine. A family tradition.

Upon waking up, I could barely fold my body to sit up as my stomach and back was so riddled with mountainous sores. The stench of wilted cilantro (the odor produced by blood filled bedbugs) poured like lava, filling my nostrils with repugnance. My belly quivered while chills of nausea crawled my skin. I forced my weakened self up and connected the camera to my television and began watching. I had set the video camera to motion sensing mode.

Around 12:37 AM, three corpulent thick-bodied mice began creeping around me . . . testing to see if I was asleep with their tiny paws, scratching and sniffing. Within 30 seconds they climbed on me and began licking the inside of my mouth. One held my lips open with nimble hands while the others cleaned my gums with disease infected tongues. Why did I do this? How could I not have noticed? Disgusting rodents foraging for juices in my mouth. I repeatedly gagged until finally puking on my own legs as I watched this nightmarish ordeal unfold. Why did I sleep naked? I remembered dreaming that I was eight years old and four little girls tickled me with scarlet feathers.

At approximately 2:33 AM the bed bugs began gathering on me. It started with small ones (the nymphs I think) who congregated in my belly button and the tender tissue beneath my eyes, which were currently paved in shaggy folds and capped with reddened pimples. I could barely watch the video and stood up, checking my naked body in the mirror with a flashlight. I could feel billions of tiny spiny legs dancing across my flesh. I checked every crevice, furrow, crack and crease. I grabbed a razor and shaved my armpits. I could feel microscopic mites all over me, in every pore, hiding behind every hair . . . tickling, slithering and feeding.

Bed bugs: Cimex Lectularius

Bed bugs: Cimex Lectularius

And I looked back at the TV screen. I lay there snoring, my entire body sheathed in thickened layers of bed bugs . . . thousands of them. At 3:17 my penis became erect, a normal male function. As it became fully stiff, the larger insects (measuring 7mm) amassed my blood filled member—the most gargantuan clustering on the purplish head—the thin tissue easily pierced by needle-sharp feeding tubes. Their haustellums sucking blood so quickly, I could see their bodies swell like jungle ticks. I cried, “momma . . . please help me.”

She crawled into my bedroom on her belly; legs shrunken—atrophied from muscular dystrophy—skin draped loose like sun rotted curtains. Shellacked hair ropes splattered from her lice infested scalp like limp spaghetti strewn from the ass end of a pasta maker. Gigantic body lice crawling across her chest, laying eggs in the unwashed moats beneath crack ravaged breasts—hanging like deflated footballs, flat and wrinkled—pigmented brown from morbid liver spots.

“Don’t cry son. This is your rite of passage. You are the caretaker of this home. These bed bugs were nurtured by your great grandfather. He worked like a fucking dog out in those fields eighteen hours a day for you. You are the chosen one. Let them feed. Let them crawl your skin. And don’t be afraid . . . I love you.”

“I don’t want to live like this. I want a normal life momma. What woman would sleep with me in that nasty bed. What woman would want lice, bed bugs, mice, spiders and cockroaches slithering across her flesh?”

“A woman that loves you that’s who. I love you.”

“I don’t love you momma. I hate you. I hate what daddy did to to you and my little brother. The way he touched you and little Timmy with his crusty fingers . . . and made me watch. I don’t want bugs on me.”

“You shut yer little trap boy. If I was able to walk, I would whip you good like daddy used to.”

“Oh yeah? Well you can’t. You weak vulgar old hag. You decrepit old sack of disgusting lard. I’ve been watching Dr. Phil and that show America’s Most Wanted and I want change. Dr. Phil says doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. If you want change, you gotta take action. Destiny is not a chance rather a decision fulfilled in action.”

I placed a mammoth pot on the stove and turned it on high, blue flames lapping on steel. I filled it with seven liters of vegetable oil and let it heat. Momma crawled in the kitchen and gave me that puppy dog stare trying to change my mind, but enough is enough.

“Son . . . what are you doing? I’m your mother goddammit! Answer me boy.”

I took a ball-peen hammer and walked behind her, kneeling down at her feet.

“Do the nerves still work in your feet?”

I struck her heel sharply and heard bone crackle.

“OWWWW! PLEASE GOD NO!”

I began chopping her feet . . . smashing and crushing. With each mighty blow, I hoisted the hammer high and pounded her weak bones with tempered steel—the screams unbearable. But I kept hitting like a roofer embedding nails in plywood. I sliced her swollen calf with my straight razor and necrotic muscle plopped like mucous shrouded snails on the kitchen tile.

“Looks like your legs are dead momma. I recommend amputation.”

Oh god I felt alive. Tentacles of vibrancy seethed up my spine as I peeled the skin from her leg—muscle and ligament black from infection—the putrid fetor gagged me as I retched on her back. I cloaked my hands in rubber gloves and dragged her in my bedroom, her frail old body unable to fight. Yellowish saliva gurgled through her decayed teeth, the two in front missing, the rest galvanized in fetid rot.

“Please don’t kill me son . . . I love you.”

“You have gingivitis momma. And guess what?”

“What?”

“Everybody thought daddy sunk in quicksand while hunting alligators, but that never happened. I bashed his fucking skull in with a sledge hammer, soaked him kerosene and burned him to a crisp. I fed his sorry ass to the gators. And now momma . . . I’m going to kill you.”

I pulled her atop that old mattress and let her lay in piss and insects. Bed bugs normally come out at night but they could smell the blood and arrived early. The bloodthirsty horde glazed her stomach-wrenching-wart-infected flesh. I ran to the kitchen, lifted the pot of boiling grease using a large heat resistant towel and stood above her. I watched as thousands of bedbugs engorged on her fluids. A thickened plume of black smoke arose from the searing oil as I let a little trickle on her belly.”

“OUCH! PLEASE DON’T—”

“You deserve this momma. You deserve to die in pain.”

I dumped the blistering hot canola oil across her, splashing droplets on my feet. It burned like a million fire ants. But I remember when daddy tossed me on a fire ant nest as a four year old child while momma watched; chugging Budweiser on the front porch and laughing. And now she lay as boiling magma. Her membranes sloughing free from white bone as she cooked. The wretched stink clubbing my senses, a fearsome dank of grisly-sweet fry.

She was bubbling juices . . . her body melting like crimson marmalade. But I felt happy. I felt like a virgin touched for the very first time, Madonna’s song reverberating through my head. It was daddy’s song, but I love it for another reason.

  • These days I sleep in a hammock suspended by chain from the ceiling. I am afraid of beds and shall never again sleep in one. I refuse to sleep in hotels as more than 40% of them—even upscale hotels—are infested with these morbidly disgusting bugs.
  • Before you sleep tonight, check your mattress for holes. Look for signs of bed bug excrement. Check your pillows, sheets and quilts. By all means protect your innocent children.
  • If you awaken covered in reddened protuberances along the tender areas of your flesh . . . be warned and call an exterminator.
  • Really worried? Call in the K-9 unit: bedbug sniffing dogs can easily detect them in beds, under baseboards and even behind walls.
  • I now live alone in an apartment. I burned our old house to the ground and it sunk in the swamps of Louisiana. I was never questioned by police and no investigation was ever incited.
  • I will never again eat Mexican food seasoned by cilantro as it wreaks exactly like bedbugs.
  • The bedbug picture from wikipedia.
  • This story is fiction by Bobby Revell.
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