Gnar.

It’s so strange when you cut yourself and don’t notice until you feel the skinny, dry, bloodless flaps of skin catch on fabric. As I was washing that large chopping knife I was amazed at my careless handling of it. I was handing it as if it were something that couldn’t hurt me, because it never had. Like how when I was little and thought bumble bees were for petting. I was a real charmer.
And now, like then, a warning. Silent slits connecting across my fingertips, leaving one line-I’m a wild object- for me to remember.

Everything smells like coffee, except the inside of my shirt near my armpit, where it smells like musky, sugary roses, the spraying on of which wakes Bob every dark morning. Even the office, where the smell from the shop downstairs makes its way over the bannisters, down the hallways, and up my nostrils. I want to enjoy it again.

Today half an earwig tumbled out of a bubble mailer that also contained a manuscript for young adults about time travel, or cross dimensional jumping or seeing ghosts of yourself and jamming up the whole continuum. Someone said that it might just be a seed, but she wasn’t looking closely. Its black scissors were snapped shut, forever, curving like praying hands against one another. No sense in harming anything when you’re dead I suppose. And its back half was a deep chestnut brown, the hard, shiny surface of it raised in tiny waves, like unhealthy nails. So crisp the parts that were once made of soft, white larvae flesh. So awful.

I remember lifting the metal flap covering our outdoor electrical outlet to reveal a swarming mass of earwigs.

Worse than spiders.
Maybe.