This a rough draft of a story never before published, part of a work-in-progress.

It started small, as these things often do. One day in midsummer, dishes crowded on the counter next to the sink. They would build up and build up, because I was good at loading the dishwasher, but not so good at unloading. I noticed one or two, and then I slammed my hand down to swat them. They were quiet, small, nothing much to notice. I couldn’t tell the difference between a gnat and a fruit fly. I just thought they were gnats, which we’d seen before, and we’d easily rid ourselves.

I unloaded the dishwasher quickly, everything in its place. Utensils in drawers, plates in the cabinet above, glasses and cups in another. Run water, scrub the dirty ones down before lining them in the racks. The whole process would take me twenty minutes to a half an hour at most. 

I would see one of them land on the window above the sink. I swatted quickly, leaving a small blood smear on the glass. The palm of my hand showed the thing’s desiccated corpse, a little dot just above my wrist. Nothing to worry about; certainly that would be the end of it. 

Go about your day-to-day life. Wake up and get ready. Kiss your wife. Hug your son. Drive to the office. Sit in your cubicle and interface with the great machine, its wires extending to invisible cogs out in the inscrutable world amid all the communications and transactions. Drive home. Stare at screens. Hug your son. Kiss your wife. Go back to sleep. 

Notice them buzzing around the living room. I would clap my hands together, attempting to catch one in mid-air. Rarely did I connect, if only because the spatial awareness wasn’t as easy to manage when the thing wasn’t stationary on a kitchen counter. 

We had a front door with an ovular window, something we wanted to replace because people could so easily see inside. It was inherited from the previous owners of the house. We received an estimate that it would cost $10,000 to replace the door and the panels flanking it. That became another thing we had to put off in fixing up the place. But these things, for some reason, they loved to bounce around the bottom of that ovular window. I would see them dancing there, so I assumed it was because of the porch light that shone in through the window at night. I slapped my hand against the glass, popping the damn things as though they were infinitesimal bags of blood exploding on the clear surface. I would hit two or three at a time.

I would find them inside my son’s juice cups, writhing in what little liquid was left within. I would find them in the bathroom near the front door, congregating on the mirror above the vanity. I would find them in the dining room, dancing on the picture window beneath the curtains. I would kill them and kill them, and it seemed like three or four more would take the place of the departed. 

It wasn’t long before I decided to search solutions online to see what might work in eliminating the apparent infestation. There were descriptions of homemade traps using a bowl of apple cider vinegar mixed with sugar and dish liquid. This included using plastic wrap over the bowls, then poking the wrap with a pencil so they could enter the trap. Unable to find a pencil, I used a toothpick to poke the holes. The vinegar had a strong, tangy smell that would attract them, and then the dish liquid would thicken the mixture so they couldn’t escape. I found immediately that the plastic covering was no help, and I needed to leave the bowls open.

Soon I’d look in those bowls and there’d be tens of them — floating, drowning, disintegrating. But still they danced at the window of the door and above the sink. 

Next I tried a store-bought trap by a company called Anpin, which was suggested by someone else online. After a little research, I found they produced traps and sprays that were supposed to handle these things without harm to you, your family, or your pets. At the grocery store, they sold both the fruit fly spray and a trap that consisted of a blue light flanked by two sticky strips of plastic—the light should attract them and then catch them on the strips. I bought this and set it on the kitchen counter to the right of the sink, next to one of the apple cider vinegar bowls. 

I slapped my hand down so fast and so hard, smashing three of them at once. It left a bruise on my palm, lined along the thumb. I sprayed them with the fruit fly spray to watch them fade to nothingness immediately. They stopped moving, and I’d wipe down the surface covered in the insecticide, then spray it with cleaner. I wanted to make sure nothing in it would hurt my wife or my son.

During the day, it seemed like the sticky strips weren’t catching anything. But a flurry of them appeared overnight so that when I observed the trap the next morning, there they were. Stuck. Little dots, twitching against the glue.

And still they danced. 

At the window of the door. 

Above the sink.

The first exterminator to arrive said that he would set out a few traps that were supposed to attack a colony. He left one on the table beside the front door, another at the kitchen window, and another at the dining room window. He said he’d also spray the infested areas, which meant he would line the edges of the rooms with some nondescript insecticide.

We’d almost completely given up using the bathroom on the first floor, and so their presence there dried up. But how do you stop using the kitchen? How do you stop washing dishes? I had taken to emptying the dishwasher immediately so that I could put dirty dishes in there right after use. I would leave nothing on the counter that they would get to, nothing in the sink. I kept the vacuum cleaner plugged in and close so that I could catch them en masse, sucking them up with the hand-held attachment. I even bought a smaller vacuum that I didn’t have to plug in so I could catch them faster, then discarded that one when I saw them dancing around inside. At least with the heavy duty vacuum, I knew they wouldn’t survive. 

The second exterminator said the first one must’ve been an idiot, because those traps were meant for ants. He used the words “drain flies” to describe the things infesting our house. My wife responded dubiously afterward, noting that they didn’t look like the pictures of drain flies she found online. Even so, this exterminator told us to clean out our garbage disposal and poured something down the drain that was supposed to help. He also set out three new traps at each of the noted locations, shaped like little red apples.

Admittedly, I wasn’t the most handy person. I could use a screwdriver and I owned a toolbox, but anything more complicated usually required hiring someone. The garbage disposal was a bulky thing, secured and bolted by what seemed like ancient screws. First, I had to figure out what fuse to shut off, as the fusebox wasn’t properly labeled—this involved testing a fuse, running upstairs to verify if the disposal still worked, then running back downstairs to check the next fuse. Eventually, I figured out which one controlled the disposal, then cleared out under the sink. Once I’d disconnected it, I couldn’t actually take the thing apart. So ultimately, this was a dead end.

Turning the vacuum on.

Turning the vacuum off.

I researched what I could pour down the sink. I ordered commercial grade pesticide, the kind of thing that restaurants and hotels would use. The directions were to pour eight ounces down the drain of affected areas at night time, when the faucets would not be in use. Our kitchen sink was a double, with one side for the disposal. I poured eight ounces down both drains every night until the bottle was gone.

It did nothing.

And still they danced.

I saw them beneath my eyelids as I tried to sleep. I saw them as flecks on the television screen as I tried to unwind. I saw them on the frayed edges of reality wherever I passed through the house. I slapped the countertops and windows, I clapped my hands together mid-air. I would kill one and two more would appear. Their corpses filled the fetid bowls of apple cider vinegar, lined the sticky sheets of the Anpin light trap, overflowed the little plastic apples left behind by the exterminator. But they would keep coming, more and more every day, spawning in their wet graveyards and charnel pits.

My son would cover his ears each time the vacuum would turn on, the tube attachment drawn to this dot or that fleck. I would turn my head, and by the time I looked back, there they were again. My mind drifted to the biblical plagues beset upon the pharaoh, Old Testament wrath cast upon a powerful sinner. What had I done, O Lord, to spite thee? There would be no answer but the silent dancing of the fruit flies. Perhaps by the winter, I thought, they would finally recede, the change of weather being too much for their habitat. 

How many generations had I decimated? How many thousands had I snuffed from existence? Mothers, fathers, the young, the old. What did they see when they looked up at the gargantuan behemoth with his vacuum tube extending toward them? How did they feel as the giant hand clapped down from above?

And after all this time, I had no answer as to where they were hiding, where they were breeding. What was the reason that they terrorized me so? Perhaps they were in the pipes, or in the light fixtures, or in the walls or beneath the floorboards. But there didn’t seem to be any entrance for them, no cracks in the flooring where they might congregate. They simple were.

It grew darker in the mornings as the days progressed, as summer faded to autumn. Maybe leaving the windows open, allowing the larger predators to feed on their tiny bodies. Maybe the spiders would find their way toward their dank caverns and trap them naturally.

But there was always another maybe, another what if, another perhaps. And still they danced.

And then there was a black morning where I woke and descended the stairs. My wife was still asleep, as was my son, each of them angelic in their slumber. I would let them sleep while I performed the morning culling. I passed the front door where I saw the small specks jumping against the ovular window. Down the hall was the eery blue light from the kitchen emanating from the Anpin trap. I heard something, the shift of a footstep, the settling of the house. Was someone there?

No, the sound was like writhing, like feelers intertwined, like legs clawing and scratching against one another, wings beating and clashing. I sensed them crawling over one another, a combination of feeding, itching, and breeding. The black source of their infestation.

But there it was again. The sound of another footstep.

Someone was in the house. 

I rounded the corner into the kitchen and saw it. Like staring into the starless void beyond all things. It blotted out the blue light of the trap, its shadow shifting in the gloom. I can’t describe in words, but it was a person. It looked like the shape of a man, a shade animated by tiny spindled legs, bodies, and wings writhing together. The thing had no face, no definite characteristics beyond the shape. 

“Who are you? What are you doing in my house?” my voice rasped.

There was no answer but that of the writhing. Feelers intertwined. Clawing. Scratching. Beating. Clashing. They moved in one motion, the motion of a man unsure of his footing, an explorer trying to steady himself against uncertain gravity. 

It was my rational mind asking the question, “What do you want?” It thought of the thing as a conscious being, as a person to be reasoned with. It didn’t want to consider the horrible reality of what faced me, that they had coalesced into this shape standing before me. He was made of them. 

I took one step toward the thing, and it took the same step toward me, as if it were my own shadow. But are you so frightened of your own shadow? A shadow is empty, devoid of light that you yourself blot out. It is simply the shape of you.

A hum rose from the faceless mass, as if it were trying to answer, as if it wanted nothing more than to provide me an answer, but that answer would be in a language I could never comprehend. I was their destroyer, their gargantuan behemoth, presiding over the decimation of their generations for time untold. 

And I felt them dancing.

Now they danced on my skin.

Prickling along my arms, a sudden itch here, a barely noticed fleck there. 

The mass stepped toward me again, and I found my own foot drawn forward as well, as though it acted on its own, as though I had no control over my own limbs. The hand that had once obliterated their kind en masse now held aloft to resist the dark gravity of the thing before me. A shadow of shifting dark matter. The black hole in the shape of a person. 

The prickling turned into gnawing. The mass before me looked hungry. Drops of blood appeared on my skin, so like the smears that once stained my window or my countertop. It leaned forward, faceless, a head extending from a neck, tilted from the body. It smelled of vinegar, the acrid stench of survival, of overcoming my every attempt at its annihilation. We would live together.

I slapped at my arms, at my legs, at my face and head. I smashed them into soft mush, but it did nothing. And the thing drew forward interested in its prey. 

I was enveloped in its mass, overcome by its darkness. The fruit flies collapsed upon me, needling their way into my skin, chewing into my eyes, flooding my nostrils and ear canals, wading into my mouth. I was overtaken by them, their clawing and scratching and beating, climbing over one another to get inside. I felt them burrowing through the muscles and sinew, hollowing me out beneath the skin. 

Now they danced within.

We stumble together on new legs, a step here and a step there. They hum together in the meat, writhing in the blood and laying their maggots. They feed on the tissue as if it were blighted fruit. My flesh is not my own, as it now belongs to us. Dancing and singing in joyous unison, we speak with a collective voice where my larynx had been. 

Now we inhabit this skin together. Now we are inside. We will feed and itch and breed. We are here to stay.