The cockroach wore a wedding dress when it crawled into my ear. Silk train dragging like a tongue across concrete, antennae twitching in Morse code—”help me, help me, help me”—until my skull hummed with the arrhythmia of its tiny legs. I tried to shake it loose, but the dress got caught on my eardrum, hooks of lace snagging the wet pink flesh. That’s when the chanting started, with a rhythm of cyanide and honey dripping down the walls like Niagara falling sideways.
My therapist said the cockroach wasn’t real, but she didn’t understand the way its vows tasted when it whispered them—like gasoline and sugar cubes dissolving under my tongue. The dress was vintage, she insisted, a figment, a fever-slick hallucination. But I could feel the stitching where it unraveled inside me, threads of my sanity pulled taut until they snapped one by one. Lost is Lodi again, sings the cockroach between my teeth, and suddenly my reflection in the bathroom mirror isn’t mine anymore—it’s hers, antennae twitching in time with the drip-drip-drip of the faucet’s confession.
They pumped me full of lithium like filling a sinkhole with glitter, but the cockroach just laughed—a sound like a thousand tiny mandibles chewing through piano wire. She danced on the backs of my eyelids every night, her gown trailing behind her like a funeral shroud made of bubblegum wrappers and old lottery tickets. The nurses said I was improving when I stopped screaming, but really, I’d just learned to hum along to her hymns instead. The walls still melt when she wants them, Code Red, perhaps stirred fried dead.
My mother visits on Sundays with lavender-scented tissues and a mouth full of apologies that taste like mothballs. She doesn’t see the cockroach perched on her shoulder, knitting my childhood scars into a lace doily with her spindly legs. I tried to warn her once, but she just tightened her pearl necklace and said the dress was lovely, dear, just like Grandma’s. Now I let the cockroach feed her lies through my lips—yes, the medication’s working, no, I don’t hear the ceiling fan reciting my obituary anymore. RSVP.
The cockroach throws me a anniversary party in the dayroom, with streamers made of peeled-off skin and a cake that throbs like a exposed heart. The other patients clap politely while she feeds them crumbs of my memories—here’s the time Dad left, here’s the night the house burned down, here’s the smell of my dog’s fur as the vet injected him with forever. They chew thoughtfully, their jaws moving in unison like wind-up teeth. The cake bleeds raspberry jam and lithium sweat. Left at the altar of the Roach Motel.
Oh my goodness this is a twisted tale. very interesting.
Thank you, Kia. I had to use the “Help Line,” for color assistance.