Palmetto

Ania Ahlborn
Copyright © 2021 by Ania Ahlborn
All rights reserved.
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The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No
identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or
should be inferred.

Book Cover by Jeroen Ten Berge

ISBN: 9798321106891
One

KIM GASPED WHEN, FROM around a gentle bend in the road, the house
came into view. It was the very reaction Eddie had asked her not to have,
but Kim remembered his request a half-second too late. All that was left to
do was allow the fingers of her right hand to flutter against the hollow of
her neck in unspoken apology—body language that, after seven lucky years
of marriage, she knew Eddie would undoubtedly read.
“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Josephine asked.
Kim had been surprised when Eddie reached out to Josephine. Sure, she’d
spent an entire evening swooning over the exterior elevation, over the
forest-like neighborhood, insisting Eddie peruse the listing photos with her
four times, insisting he check out the surrounding area with her via Google
Maps. Forget that the place was completely out of their league by a good
seventy-five grand. Calling Josephine Klein was Eddie’s way of indulging
his pregnant wife, and an in-person walk-through was Kim’s idea of
window shopping. Perhaps, she thought, it would spark some creative
interior decorating ideas she could later use in the less-than-perfect house
she was sure they’d end up living in.
Despite their lack of budget, there was no arguing that Josephine was
right. Gorgeous. Stunning. Breathtaking. There was, however, only one
word that came to Kim’s mind as Josephine guided her sleek black SUV
around the bend and turned up the steep driveway.
Perfect.
 From the thick white façade surrounding the front door of the traditional
brick colonial to the dormer windows peeking out from the roofline, the
place was beyond what the listing photos had shown. Idyllic, its
symmetrical windows and ink black shutters; regal, perched far above the
level of the road; glowing upon a sun-dappled lawn. She imagined her
unborn child frolicking upon the grassy hill, hunting Easter eggs in the
spring, building wonky snowmen after a rare South Carolina snowfall.
Jason or Celine. Or maybe Charlie or Scarlet. She was still picking out
names between shopping for houses and imagining herself front and center
in Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want.
“Just wait until you see the inside,” Josephine said, giving Kim a
knowing smile. “This place has got it all. Amazing kitchen. Formal dining
room. Built-ins all throughout the house. All custom, of course.” Josephine
shot a look at Eddie via the rearview mirror. He was unbuckling his seatbelt
directly behind Kim. “Just wait,” she said, as if preparing for a grand reveal.
“It’s incredible. This place is going to blow your mind.”
And it did. While Josephine talked a mile a minute about the house’s
features, Kim broke off from both her husband and their agent and stepped
into a room she imagined would have been the baby’s nursery. She paused
at the window, the tips of her fingers drifting across the sun-warmed glass.
The sashes were outdated, painted shut and in need of replacing. With the
place having been built in the early 80s, there was no doubt there were
hidden problems—blemishes beneath what seemed like perfection. Kim
tried to remind herself that no house came without faults, but she was
almost immediately distracted by the view before her. The backyard was
bigger than anything she’d grown up with, bigger than anything she could
have dreamed. Mature oaks shaded a lawn so lush, the bits that did catch
sunshine looked almost electric green.
It’s too good, she thought. Too good. And as she stood there, gazing out to
the far side of the lawn, her heart ached for the fact that there was no way
the place could be theirs.
“Pretty snazzy,” Eddie said, and Kim jumped, her heart leaping into her
throat. “And pretty expensive.”
Kim scowled, equally annoyed by his startling her as by his realism.
Swatting her husband’s arm before turning back to the view, she exhaled a
sigh. “Look at this yard,” she said. “Can you imagine…?”
 “Imagine what?” Eddie asked, his hands sliding to rest atop Kim’s
shoulders. “How much time I’d have to spend mowing it? How much water
it would take to keep it alive? Look at these windows. They all need
replacing. A fortune on top of a fortune.”
Kim clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “The trees,” she
said softly, ignoring him. “Imagine how gorgeous they’ll be in the fall. The
colors…”
“Sweet Jesus.” Eddie breathed out in realization. “Fall. You know why
they call it that, Kim?”
She shook her head and smirked, turning away from the window to face
him. “It means you’d actually have to do some yardwork, Mr. Devland,”
she said. “But don’t worry…” She squeezed his forearm and sidestepped
her way back toward the hallway. “I’m sure we’ll end up in some generic
pre-planned neighborhood with zero trees and fifty square feet of crab
grass.”
“They call it fall because the leaves fall off the trees, Kim,” Eddie
continued, undeterred. “You’d never see me again.”
“Boohoo,” she singsonged, holding back a chuckle while stepping out of
the room.
“Cold!” Eddie whined. “I’d die with a leaf blower strapped to my back!
My coffin would have to be a weird shape! Imagine how expensive that
would be…”
Kim wandered further down the hall, pausing at a closed bedroom door at
the hallway’s end. She furrowed her eyebrows at the door handle moments
before her fingers grazed its curve. She was no stranger to open houses and
showings. All doors were supposed to be open, all lights blazing even in the
middle of the day. She felt as though she were trespassing when she pushed
down on the handle and pushed against the door.
As strange as it was to see the door shut, it was even weirder to peer into
an unfamiliar room, blackout curtains drawn. The only source of light was
the sunshine that poured in from around the curtains’ edge, giving the walls
and floor directly beneath the glass an eerie glow. It was the master
bedroom, at least twice the size of the room she’d been standing in a
moment before. Kim opened her mouth and drew in a breath, ready to call
out to Josephine, to ask why the door was closed and the curtains were
pulled shut—was she not supposed to be in here? But before any words
escaped her throat, she found herself choking on the bedroom’s stale-
smelling air because there, in the darkest corner of the room, was a woman
seated in a wicker rocking chair.
Staggering backward, one of Kim’s hands flew to her chest. The other
clutched her swollen stomach in defense.
“Oh my god,” she gasped, “I’m so sorry, I—” She began to back out of
the room, ready to flee, only hesitating when the woman held up a gnarled
root of a hand.
“Please,” the woman said, “it’s my fault. I should have warned the girl…”
The girl, Kim assumed, was Josephine. “I know how much those sales folks
hate owners being on the premises, but I haven’t been feeling well, you
see,” the woman continued, hacking out a cough to punctuate her point.
“And what’s an old woman to do if some high-and-mighty real estate agent
wants to kick her out on the street just so strangers can snoop through her
cabinets and drawers?”
Kim shifted her weight uncomfortably, still lingering just inside the
room’s threshold, her eyes slowly adjusting to the din. It was a big room.
Much bigger than she and Eddie would ever need. Big enough to put a
mini-crib next to her side of the bed when the baby was born, and wouldn’t
that be nice, not having to get up every hour to do a feeding or change a
diaper or attend to a crying infant?
“Not that you’d be snooping, dear. I’m not saying that.”
Kim’s attention snapped back to the woman, suddenly disoriented,
wondering how—just a moment before—she’d brought herself to dismiss
this strange woman’s presence, how she’d made the leap from disturbed and
wanting to run to mentally decorating her future bedroom.
“I understand,” Kim said softly. “Really, but—” She motioned toward her
shoulder. I should go. Yet, not a second later, her gaze was wandering again,
considering how pretty the room could be with the light of day pouring in
through the two large windows that were currently shaded. Airy, she
thought. Lovely. With bouquets of fresh hydrangeas cut from the massive
bushes just shy of the garage.
“When are you due, dear?” the woman asked, drawing Kim back from
her thoughts.
“Um. Four months, give or take,” Kim said.
“And do you like the house?” the woman asked, her wrinkled face
obscured by the shadows just enough to not allow Kim to get a good look.
But Kim knew the woman could see it in her body language, in the way her
eyes kept drifting across the walls.
“Oh, the house…” Kim hesitated. “It’s amazing.” She exhaled a soft
breath.
“What’s wrong, then?” the woman asked, picking up on the wisp of
disappointment that was already tightly coiled within Kim’s chest. “Too
expensive?”
Kim gave the old woman a bashful sort of smile, then raised a shoulder in
a half-hearted shrug. C’est la vie, the gesture said. It is what it is.
The woman murmured to herself—words Kim couldn’t make out. She
rocked in her chair, wringing her hands, then nodded. “I see,” she said, “I
see. Babies are expensive as well, it’s true.” Her eyes glinted, flashing as
she gave Kim a knowing smile. “But so well worth it. Nothing like a tiny
baby running about the house, ensuring the survival of yet another
generation. But also, nothing like the child having a perfect home to grow
up in. Boy or girl, dear?”
Kim shook her head. “We decided to wait.”
The woman nodded sagely, and for a flicker of a moment Kim was
certain that, while she and Eddie didn’t know the sex of their first born, the
woman before her absolutely did.
“This is the ideal house to raise a baby,” the woman said. “It just depends
on what you want for the child, you understand. It depends on what you’re
willing to sacrifice.”
Kim furrowed her eyebrows at that. Just the night before, Kim had been
chewing her fingernails, pacing their tiny kitchen while going on endlessly
about how if she and Eddie overspent on a new home, they’d have no
money for anything else. Is that what the woman meant by sacrifice?
“It’s just a suggested retail price, dear,” the woman said, then flashed a
wide smile. Kim nearly winced at the sight of the woman’s crooked, dark-
stained teeth. She couldn’t, however, look away from that grin, both
disgusted and fascinated by how long her teeth seemed to be—impossibly
long, no doubt a trick of the shadows. “Make an offer,” the woman
suggested. “You never know what will happen. A miracle, perhaps.” She
opened her craggy hands, her movement suggestive of something blooming,
of presenting an invisible orb of hope. “If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.
Sacrifice one thing, gain something in return.”
 “Kim?” Eddie called toward her from down the hall. “Where the heck are
you?”
“Um, I…” Kim looked back to the woman, both apologetic and relieved
that she was finally being saved. “I have to run. Thank you for letting us see
your home.” Before the woman could say anything more, Kim took a quick
backward step and pulled the bedroom door closed.
“What’s with the closed door?” Eddie asked, now directly behind her. “Is
that the master?”
“Yes,” she said, placing a hand against his chest. “I’m getting tired. Let’s
go, okay?”
“Okay,” Eddie said, but rather than compliantly turning away from his
piqued curiosity, he sidestepped his pregnant wife and pushed it open,
ducking his head in. “Why’s it dark?” he asked no one in particular. “Jesus,
did you see how big this is?”
“Eddie,” Kim insisted.
“Alright, alright,” Eddie said, then shrugged and shut the door again. And
as they drove away from the house in Josephine’s SUV, Kim couldn’t help
but wonder how it was possible that Eddie hadn’t noticed the strange
woman sitting in the corner of the room.
Two

THEY MADE AN OFFER, one that Josephine bluntly deemed as

“insulting.” It was forty-five thousand under asking, but thirty grand over
Kim and Eddie’s budget. The seller accepted without negotiation. On
speaker phone, Josephine sounded both incredulous and amazed.
“Splurge on some champagne,” she suggested, “because this is a deal of a
lifetime.”
Kim had expected to feel exuberant. She had pictured herself rushing out
for moving boxes, bubble wrap, and spools of packaging tape. But rather
than getting a jumpstart on packing, she found herself in the throes of
insomnia, her laptop screen illuminating her face while Eddie lied two feet
away, sleeping like the dead. Kim spent the night clicking through the
house’s listing photos—pictures she’d studied dozens of times before—
while chewing her nails to the quick. Maybe it was the money that made her
nervous. Josephine was right, it was an unheard of opportunity, but it was
also well beyond their budget. Perhaps they should have aimed lower,
should have settled for less house. Or maybe it was that woman, sitting
silent in a darkened room as though she’d been waiting for Kim to open the
door. Whatever the reason, Kim’s stomach was left roiling, and when she
did finally snap her laptop shut, she couldn’t sleep. The baby was flipping
around like an Olympic gymnast during a floor routine, as if anticipating
their upcoming move.
“Are you nervous?” Kim whispered toward Michael or Madison, toward
Dane or Heidi, her hands pressing firm against her torso, the baby twirling
beneath her palms. Eventually Kim decided that, no, the baby wasn’t
nervous, it was excited, which was what she should have been.
But days passed and Kim’s anxiety only grew worse.
“Eddie,” she said, grabbing his hand before he had a chance to push open
the driver’s side door, their front bumper only a few yards from the new
house’s garage. “Maybe this is a mistake. It’s an amazing deal, but it’s still
too expensive. Maybe we’re rushing.” She felt instantly guilty for divulging
her doubts. This was her idea, after all. Her insistence that they needed to
get out of their rental home, which was cramped and in an iffy
neighborhood. That, and Eddie would lose his home office when they baby
was born. The kitchen was as big as a postage stamp. The neighbor across
the street blared talk radio out of his open garage ten hours a day, and the
neighbor to their left threw parties every Friday night; ones that forced Kim
and Eddie to feel every bass beat, to hear every uproarious bout of laughter
through their home’s cardboard-thin walls. Those parties would
undoubtedly wake the baby, and with her infant’s cry, Kim would rage night
after miserable night.
“You’re right,” Eddie said. “We’re rushing.”
Kim looked away from him and covered her mouth, suddenly struck with
the need to cry.
“Kim.” He squeezed her knee. “We’re rushing because we have four
months, okay? Maybe less. That isn’t a long time.”
How could she forget? She was ticking off the days to her due date on the
calendar that had hijacked her every waking thought. Four months left to
pick out the nursery furniture. Four months left to buy diapers and clothes
and burp cloths and a tiny, redundant bathtub that fit inside a regular
bathtub. Four months left to find a home. Soon, it would be three months,
two month, one month left until, one day, she’d wake up and she’d no
longer be Kim Devland, the girl who still felt seventeen and listened to the
same bands she’d loved in high school. Soon, she’d be Mama. A person she
had yet to meet.
“You’re right about the house,” Eddie assured her. “About the one we’re
in, about the one we’re about to buy.” He looked forward, nodded toward
the garage door ahead of them. “It’s expensive, yeah, but it’s also perfect,
right? We need to get out of there and get into here.”
“What if it’s just an illusion?” Kim whispered.
“An illusion?” Eddie raised an eyebrow.
 “A trick,” she said into her coiled fingers, then looked away. She hadn’t
told Eddie about the woman. Just as she had been compelled to daydream
about the master bedroom despite the desire to flee, something unspoken
and invisible had kept her from talking about the strange experience. “What
if there are major issues, things we can’t afford to fix?” Kim asked, fishing
for things that might push Eddie to reconsider.
“That’s what inspections are for.” He sounded certain. Resolute.
“What if—”
“Kim.” He cut her off. “What if the sky falls tomorrow? What if the place
catches fire? What if, what if, what if…?”
She closed her eyes and exhaled a breath. He was right, of course. There
would always be uncertainty. There had been a million ‘what ifs’ with the
baby up until the day Kim thought to herself, what the hell am I waiting for
and told Eddie it was finally time to try. Now, she couldn’t imagine herself
not pregnant, not planning for this new little person to be part of their lives.
Thomas or Noel. It would be the same with the house. As soon as they were
moved in, she wouldn’t be able to recall a time when they hadn’t lived
there.
“You’re right,” she said softly.
“As always.” Eddie flashed her his trademark smile, fit for a toothpaste
commercial. “Besides, can you imagine backing out with Josephine as an
agent?” He widened his eyes in horror, and Kim exhaled a strained sort of
laugh while wiping tears from her eyes.
“I can imagine her losing it, if that’s what you mean,” she said.
“I bet she has an axe in the back of that fancy SUV for just such an
occasion,” Eddie said, nodding toward Josephine’s spotless Mercedes
parked beside them.
“Or a chainsaw,” Kim murmured.
“Like Patrick Bateman,” Eddie said, perking at the suggestion.
“Are you seriously giddy at the idea of being murdered by our real estate
agent?” Kim asked. Her husband, the horror junkie. The true crime devotee.
“Do you think she likes Huey Lewis?” Eddie asked. “Oh, I bet she loves
The Hue. Who doesn’t, am I right? Or am I right? Or am I right? I’m going
to ask her.”
Kim shook her head at him, trying not to encourage him with another
chuckle, and pushed open the passenger door. “She’s waiting,” she said,
sliding out of the car. “Let’s go before I chicken out.”
 And while Eddie had mostly put Kim’s nerves at ease, something
continued to linger beneath her skin. Something that felt portentous. A
warning.
Don’t buy this house. It’s too good to be true.
And then, in a near simultaneous thought from somewhere unknown:
This is the ideal house to raise a baby. It just depends on what you want
for the child.
Sacrifice.
Sacrifice.
Sacrifice for the child.
Three

IT TOOK A MONTH to close on the house and a week to move in. It was a
nine-mile drive each way, and Kim had driven it alone at least two dozen
times by the time the weekend rolled in. On their final moving day, she
crammed the last of the boxes full of kitchen essentials into their SUV and
watched Eddie and his brother, James, play furniture Tetris within the
confines of a medium-sized U-Haul.
Kim decided to press on without them, arriving at the empty house with
the last of the boxes she could handle on her own. She took her time
unloading the car, her headphones securely tucked into her ears. Gingerly
ascending the garage steps into the kitchen hallway time and time again, she
stacked boxes marked KITCHEN in the corner of the breakfast nook. Once
the final box was put into place, she took a backward step and blinked. Did
they really own this much crap? And that’s just the kitchen, she thought.
Blowing a strand of hair from her eyes, she pivoted on the soles of her Keds
to face the cabinets, suddenly nervous that the most important room of the
house was smaller than she thought. Not that there was anything she could
do about it now. She exhaled a steady, dismissive breath and shrugged.
“Too late now, right?” she murmured toward Kegan or Sarah. “Whatever.
We’ll make it work.”
She filled her insulated tumbler with water from the fridge—constantly
thirsty since hitting her third trimester—and began to scrub the counters and
cabinet interiors, shocked at how filthy the once clean-looking kitchen
actually was. She scrubbed and drank, eventually breaking open a box
marked PANTRY and fishing out a pack of Oreos, a bag of pretzel chips,
and whatever else caught her eye during such a rarely unimpeded snacking
opportunity. After inhaling four Oreos in a row, she crouched and the baby
rolled. She stretched and the baby kicked. She reached high and the baby
shifted, mercilessly pressing on her bladder. Kim winced but tried to work
through the urge to pee, so tired of the relentless cycle of bathroom visits.
All those pregnancy websites and messaging boards were full of crap. Get
all the good sleep you can before the baby comes! Kim wondered how she
was supposed to get any good sleep when she was getting up to sit on the
toilet six times a night. Just think, Eddie had teased. Our new house has a
big master bathroom. We can set up a cot. Or you can curl up in the shower.
Or maybe she could sleep sitting up in the corner of the bedroom, poised
in a wicker rocking chair.
Yanking her earbuds out of her ears, she blinked at the memory. As
ridiculous as it was, she snapped her head away from the kitchen cabinets
and toward the long hall that dead-ended at the master bedroom, suddenly
convinced that the woman was there now, waiting to be discovered just as
she had waited during the showing six weeks before.
“Don’t be dumb,” she whispered to herself, then took a step away from
the kitchen counter to inspect her work. And that’s when she paused,
catching her breath and furrowing her eyebrows, because there was a sound.
A peculiar sound she hadn’t heard until just then.
It was a sporadic droning, simultaneously quiet enough to miss yet too
loud to overlook. Kim stood frozen in place, her hands held out in front of
her as if preparing to conduct a phantom orchestra. The noise came, then
went. Came, then went, reminding her of a joy buzzer—the clacks sharp
and quick, somehow frenzied before going silent. It was an unnerving
sound, one that made her skin prickle. But what bothered her most was that
sometimes it came in a short burst. Other times it was longer, drawn out. It
wasn’t mechanical; not a joy buzzer at all. It was natural. Alive. It’s her,
inside the house—a possibility that made Kim recoil from her own
thoughts.
Except, that was ridiculous. She was alone, and that sound? It sounded
like a rodent or an insect; two possibilities that made her wince with
revulsion.
“Get it together,” she told herself, then shoved her hair behind her ears.
With her need to pee momentarily forgotten, she pushed against the urge to
flee and forced herself to seek out the noise. It was coming from down the
short hall that connected the breakfast nook to the powder room. Had
anyone seen her, they likely would have laughed. Her steps were comically
slow—a heavily pregnant cop sneaking up on an armed intruder. She held
her breath. Buzz. Clenched her fists. Buzz. Grit her teeth. Buzzzzz. Peeked
her head past the powder room’s doorjamb and scanned the place.
Nothing.
Kim blinked at her own reflection in the bathroom mirror, then shook her
head at herself. The baby performed an enthusiastic twirl and the urge to
urinate returned, more pressing than before.
“Woah, kid…” she said, taking a further step into the bathroom when
BUZZ.
Eddie would have been impressed by the scream that tore out of Kim’s
throat—a five-star Jamie Lee Curtis shriek. She staggered back until she
crashed against the open door, the door handle jamming hard against her
spine. She rolled her shoulder blades against the wood and practically fell
out of the room.
“Oh my god!” she yelled, her hands pressed hard against her mouth. A
moment later, the buzz was back, inexorable. Kim bolted down the hall
back into the kitchen, her face flush, her entire body hot. She shook her
hands out in front of her, as though trying to extinguish tiny fires burning at
the ends of her fingertips. Saline ignited her sinuses. And yet, not a minute
later she was squaring her shoulders, desperately trying to compose herself,
tiptoeing her way back toward the bathroom, determined to make sure that
she’d actually seen what she thought she’d seen. Peeking around the
doorframe, she yelped and dodged away again, trying to scrub the image of
a massive, inverted cockroach writhing upon the powder room floor from
her brain. She squeezed her eyes shut as a shudder ran up the length of each
arm, collecting behind her breastplate, metastasizing into an involuntary,
uncontrollable tremor of disgust. Meanwhile, Henry or Lenore spun and
kicked, almost as if delighted.
“Fuck!” Not typically one for profanity, the curse shot out of her like a
stray bullet, ricocheting against the house’s bare walls, bouncing around its
empty rooms. “Fucking fuck!” A dead roach was one thing, but this thing
was writhing, its segmented legs kicking at the air. It was at least an inch
and a half long. Huge and glossy reddish-brown, making that hideous
buzzing sound that—now that Kim knew its origin—was enough to make
her retch, because if there was anyone who couldn’t stand bugs, it was her.
She stepped into the kitchen and steadied herself in front of the sink,
trying not to cry. “It’s fine,” she whispered. “Just shut the door and wait for
Eddie and it’ll be fine.” She didn’t have to go back into there, right? There
were other bathrooms she could use. She’d just avoid the powder room until
Eddie arrived and vanquished that godforsaken thing from their home.
Except that buzz seemed to grow louder the longer she stood there,
gripping the counter in front of the sink. It sounded more determined now,
more frantic, like the baby’s movements. Go back, the kid seemed to say. I
want to see the bug, Mama! She was struck with a vision that made her skin
ripple with disgust: that goddamn bug kicking hard enough to flip itself
over. That son of a bitch squeezing its greasy body beneath the door and
crawling into the kitchen while she organized pot lids and dishes. Or
skirting the floorboards until it reached the master bedroom, where it would
lie in wait until the lights went out, anticipating its midnight crawl onto the
mattress where it would lay eggs in her hair.
The baby rolled.
A mew of distress slipped past Kim’s lips—a desperate sound suggestive
of inarguable obligation. She had to kill it. It was either that or run away
like one of Eddie’s damsels, chased into an early grave by a psychopath, a
serial killer, or, in her case, Kafka’s massive, twitching cockroach.
“This is stupid,” she whispered. “You’re being so stupid.” Because really,
it was just a bug. She opened and closed her fists—two pumping hearts
poised against her belly—psyching herself up with that age-old adage: it’s
more afraid of you than you can possibly be of it. She scanned the kitchen
for options. She sure as hell wasn’t going to stomp on it. Maybe she could
knock the goddamn thing out with a frying pan. Her gaze pausing upon the
box of bubble-wrapped drinking glasses on the floor next to the stove, she
considered putting a glass over it. At least that way if it did flip over, it
would be trapped. Sure, the glass would be run through the dishwasher a
half dozen times before she ever let it touch her lips again, but it was the
principle of the thing. The idea of that thing crawling around the inside of a
glass that she would inevitably one day drink out of made her want to
heave.
The buzzing continued. The baby spun.
 Kim left the kitchen and passed through the living room, boxes of books
stacked three tall and two deep next to the bare built-in shelves. She walked
down the hall, passed the nursery and Eddie’s soon-to-be home office,
hesitated at the master bedroom door—is she, maybe?—then continued
through the thankfully empty room. Entering the walk-in closet, her hands
continued to clench and release. She stared at her own handwriting, the
letters seeming to wink at her in a dare: EDDIE’S SHOES. Tearing open the
flaps, she was greeted by a pair of heavy-soled hiking boots. At least they
weren’t Keds, and at least they weren’t hers.
“Goddamnit,” she said, then grabbed the right boot, leaving its mate
where she’d found it.
Stopping just shy of the short hall leading to the powder room to steel her
nerves, the incessant buzzing made it hard to feel anything but a twisting
sense of repugnance. And yet, the longer she stood there, the more her
disgust began to shift toward incredulity. Because how dare this nasty thing
invite itself into her house? Who the fuck did it think it was?
Kim stood there, her fingers increasing their grip on Eddie’s boot. The
bug kept buzzing, challenging her to do her worst. There’s no way you’re
going to come in here, it seemed to say. No way you’ve got the guts. And
then, after what felt like an hour of stillness, Kim was overcome with a
sudden need to move. She rushed down the hall, wielded the boot over her
head, and with a garbled scream she let it slam down on top of the massive
cockroach.
As soon as she felt its body give way beneath the vulcanized rubber of
Eddie’s boot, she was blasting down the hall and back toward the kitchen in
near tears. She may as well have been crawling with ants. Every inch of her
prickled with disgust. The baby was furiously pirouetting, agitated. But
she’d smashed that bastard, thank god. That son of a bitch was dead—a
warning to any of his roach buddies. Come in here again and die.
It took Kim a half hour to talk herself into cleaning the roach carcass off
the floor, but she eventually managed to pull herself together and continued
to sort dishes and wooden spoons. Eventually, Eddie and James arrived with
the moving van. When Eddie slid up behind her and gave her a tight
squeeze, she considered relaying her harrowing tale but decided against it.
After managing to vanquish that nasty thing herself, she felt a little foolish
for having made such a big deal over such a small thing. She and Eddie
were about to have a baby, and babies could be impressively gross. Was she
going to flip out if she got peed on or had to change a blown-out onesie?
Would she scream and cry if Finn or Adeline threw up in her hair or retched
on the carpet? Of course not. Maybe, she thought, that nasty roach was a
test. Maybe, she thought, it’s just priming me for things to come.
Four

WHEN KIM AND EDDIE were mostly moved in, Eddie suggested they
have James and his wife over for dinner. Kim objected at first, but Eddie’s
words circled her head like a wake of vultures. We should try to squeeze in
as much childless couple stuff as we can... It had taken them a month to
close on the house, two weeks to unpack most of the boxes and arrange the
furniture. There were only two months until Kim’s due date, and from what
she had read on countless pregnancy sites, the final month was a toss-up.
For all she knew, she’d be rocking her baby to sleep in six weeks rather
than ten.
Kim spent all day making Coq au Vin out of a sauce-splattered copy of
The Art of French Cooking, then set the table as pretty as a picture,
complete with napkins and carefully placed silverware. She filled a glass
carafe with wine—nothing but a glass of water for herself—and arranged a
bouquet of just-bloomed branches cut from the gardenia bushes that skirted
the property for the centerpiece.
Eddie and James caught up in the kitchen over a couple of beers while
Kim showed Heather the progress she’d made on the baby’s accent wall.
They ate heartily, chatted and told jokes, mused over what kind of an uncle
James would make, and eventually picked at a store-bought red velvet cake
over tea. After dinner, they moved into the living room where Eddie turned
on the television and the boys argued over what movie to watch on Netflix.
Meanwhile, Kim caught Heather eyeing her belly with a quiet sort of
longing, and it was then that Kim realized just how lucky she was. A new
house. A baby on the way. A husband that loved her. She smiled to herself,
momentarily studying her fingernails, which were in dire need of a proper
manicure. But when she looked back up, Heather’s countenance had shifted
from wistful to disturbed.
Heather’s eyes were fixed just beyond Kim’s shoulder, and Kim was
quick to turn, catching sight of a massive cockroach sitting on top of the
fireplace mantle like some sort of trinket from a Lovecraftian antique shop.
Kim wasn’t able to stop the yelp that leaped from her throat, up and on
her feet within an instant. She moved fast for a woman who was nearly
eight months pregnant, practically tripping over the coffee table as she
scrambled to put distance between herself and the insect above the
fireplace. She was saved by James, who caught her by the elbow with a
“woah, hey!” but paid no mind to her brother-in-law’s look of concern.
“Eddie!” The dual syllables were less a name than a shriek. Before Kim
could start throwing out frantic demands to kill it, Eddie was rolling up one
of Kim’s home decorator magazines into a makeshift billy club. He
launched himself over their sectional chaise with a single leap and smacked
the magazine against the edge of the mantel. He missed.
The bug took off across the room, except it didn’t skitter. It flew. The
moment Kim saw it take off she cupped her hands over her mouth and
screamed. Heather joined in the cacophony while grabbing hold of Kim’s
arm as if for shelter. Even James groaned. The baby twisted and flipped.
“Oh, you son of a—” Eddie hissed the words as they all watched the bug
settle on the high shelf of the living room built-in—too high up reach
without a step stool, plenty of breakable knickknacks in the way.
“Get it!” Kim cried out to her husband, oblivious to their guests as she
clutched at her belly. “Just get it!”
“I’m trying!” Eddie shouted toward the bookshelf, giving the bottom of
the top shelf a good knock in an attempt to scare the thing down. The roach
took flight again, zeroing in on the two women in the room, sending both
Kim and Heather into a bout of hysterics. The girls battled each other as
they both rushed away from the couch, their escape slowed by the U-shaped
configuration of the sectional, the coffee table blocking a direct route. Kim
felt something hit her arm and flutter. The baby lurched, and Kim screamed
bloody murder as she crawled over the side of the couch, bolting for the
safety of the kitchen. A moment later, the yelling ceased. There was silence.
And finally, Eddie yelled from the living room, matter of fact.
 “Dead!”

“It’s not that big of a deal,” Eddie said later that night, trying to assure his
traumatized wife that the roach in the living room was nothing to be upset
about. “If anything, it’s kind of funny. We’ll never forget the first dinner
party at our new house, and neither will Heather and James.”
With a toothbrush jammed between her molars and cheek, Kim glared at
Eddie’s stupid smile from the master bathroom door. She kept replaying
how fast James and Heather had left after the roach incident, how disgusted
they had both seemed. Kim had been mortified. Hell, she still was. Only
dirty houses had cockroaches. Dirty houses, and theirs.
“Hey.” Eddie held his hands up, reacting to his wife’s dagger stare. “I’m
just saying, who cares? It’s just James. Besides, everyone has an occasional
bug, right? We’ll call an exterminator. Done and done.”
Kim jerked the toothbrush out of her mouth and pointed it at Eddie
accusingly, as though he was the reason for their bug problem. “And until
then, I’ll lie awake imagining those fuckers crawling all over our bed.”
Eddie raised an eyebrow at Kim’s colorful language, and she understood
the look. Once upon a time, she was a golly-gosh shucky-darn kind of girl.
Now, she was dropping f-bombs without a second thought.
It was the house.
It was getting under her skin.
Burrowing beneath it.
“Or I’ll just picture our baby lying in its crib, and…” She turned away
from him, suddenly sickened by her own thoughts. Patrick or Kelsey didn’t
like it either. The baby squirmed, as if knowing it was being talked about.
“I’ll call tomorrow,” Eddie promised. “First thing.”
“You swear?” she asked.
“On my left pinkie,” he told her.
“Fine,” she said. Taking a steadying breath, she tried to ignore the
uneasiness that came with a restless child living inside her abdomen.
“But I gotta say,” he continued, “that scream was top notch. Like, Janet
Leigh in the iconic shower scene.”
Kim rolled her eyes and disregarded him continuing to scrub her teeth.
Leave it to Eddie to try to lighten the mood with a horror reference.
Meanwhile, she’d be dreaming of being trapped in a coffin full of bugs,
their baby rolling and twisting atop her grave.
Five

THE GUY WHO RANG the doorbell two days later was the opposite of the
clean-cut and uniformed Orkin Man Kim had been expecting. Instead, she
greeted a man in stained orange coveralls and paint-splattered work boots.
His greasy mullet matched his southern twang and rusty red pickup. The
logo on the side of the truck gave Kim pause; the silhouette of a dead roach
on its back, legs pointing toward heaven with BIG CHIEF PEST
CONTROL written beneath. Kim gave the guy a wide berth. Meanwhile,
the guy didn’t bother to use paper booties over his dirty boots to keep the
carpet clean, or even ask if Kim would like him to remove his shoes.
Watching him wander around the baby’s room, she nearly said something
when he stopped by the crib and stared down at the various stuffed animals
it housed. But he beat her to the punch.
“Babies ain’t supposed to sleep with toys,” he said, shooting both her and
her belly a stern look. “They can suffocate. Cousin of mine lost a kid like
that. Nearly made her lose her mind finding the kid that way, all blue and
frozen stiff. Rigor mortis, you know? It was bad is all I’m sayin. Not
something you’d want to live through. At least not if you ask me.”
For a moment, Kim was convinced that she was suffocating, overcome by
a shudder that wracked her from deep within her core. Yet, somehow, she
managed to respond, and not with the words poised at the tip of her tongue.
I’m not asking you. “That’s good to know, thank you,” she whispered, then
quickly followed it up with, “That’s awful. I’m sorry about your cousin.”
She waited for him to dole out some additional child-rearing advice, but he
sniffed and shrugged his shoulders as though talking about dead infants was
no big deal, then walked past her as he exited the room.
Kim texted Eddie.
IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO ME, THE EXTERMINATOR DID IT.
She then reluctantly followed the man out into the hall.
“So, what you’ve got is called a Palmetto bug. They’re big-ass bastards,
but they aren’t gonna bite. I can spray outside, lay down some poison, but
them bugs are gonna get in one way or another, especially since you folks
have a fireplace.”
“I’m sorry, a fireplace?” Kim shook her head, not understanding what
their fireplace had anything to do with insects.
“Palmettos love crawling in through the flue,” he told her. “For all you
know, it’s a roach motel up on top of your smoke shelf. Open the damper
and down they come.”
Kim didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it made her blood curdle
anyway.
“If I had my way, I’d spray inside, leave baits and the like, but I’m not
doing that around a pregnant lady,” he said. “And I’m sure not gonna do it
in anywhere near a baby’s room, my cousin going through what she’s going
through and all.”
“Well, will the stuff you do outside keep them out?” Kim asked, suddenly
alarmed by what the man was suggesting. So, he was just going to do the
bare minimum and leave? And then what?
“Sure, it’ll do some,” the guy nodded, “but some of them are tougher than
others. They’ll get in regardless.” Kim blanched, and the guy seemed to
notice. “Oh, they’ll die all right, but you’re gonna find them bodies lying
belly up on the floor. They haven’t invented a magic potion for
disappearing dead roaches yet.” Kim jumped at the guffaw that escaped the
man’s throat—a loud, nerve-jarring laugh that felt so out-of-place it could
have come from a person who was only pretending to be human.
Kim shook her head, not about to argue, not wanting to think about bugs
for a second longer. “Fine,” she said. “Okay. Just…whatever you can do
outside, please. Right away.”
The guy stood motionless for a moment, as if in thought. Then he turned
to look at her, giving her a dark sort of smile. “Some people keep them
Palmettos as pets, you know. Put them in a terrarium. Feed and water them.
A lot cheaper than poisoning them every few months, if you ask me. You
might grow to like them. Might think of them as family, given the chance.”
Kim sucked in her bottom lip and bit down hard to keep herself from
hissing I didn’t ask, you fucking lunatic. Instead, she forced a smile. “You
can start in the back,” she said, then moved past him and opened the door
leading onto the deck.

“You should have seen him,” Kim told Eddie while scrubbing her teeth. It
seemed like, these days, they only ever talked during their nighttime
routine. “He was like something out of Deliverance. Or, no…” She shook
her head, pointed her toothbrush at him. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I
wouldn’t have been half-surprised if he had a dead body stashed in his
truck. God knows you would have loved him.” She shuddered and spit foam
into the sink.
“You should have gotten a picture,” Eddie mused from the bed, propped
up by a pillow with his phone glowing in his hand.
“Yeah, and been murdered.” She rolled her eyes at the suggestion.
“Just have been, like, hey, think I can get a selfie for my Instagram
account?”
“I mean, the thing he said in the nursery?” Kim shuddered at the memory
of it.
“Yeah, that was pretty screwed up,” Eddie agreed, though he looked more
concerned about what was on his screen than about the terrifying stranger
that had helped himself to a self-guided tour of their home. “But what are
you going to do? Guy sounds like he crawled out of a South Carolina
swamp.”
Kim turned back to the mirror and thrust her toothbrush back into her
mouth. “Probably lives in some broken down house in the middle of
nowhere. With his cannibalistic family.” Another quake of repugnance.
Another awful image flashing in her mind like a dusty daguerreotype.
The bug guy had seen their house.
He knew the layout, knew how to move around the space, how to get in
and out.
She’d left him in the garage on his own for a long while—the only
interior space he agreed to spray. What if he’d somehow gotten their garage
door code? Sure, he seemed like a backwoods cretin, but there was just as
much chance of him being a genius murderer as there was of him being a
hapless bug man, right?
“What are you thinking about in there?” Eddie asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Forget it.” She reached for the faucet’s hot water
handle, twisted it, and spit out another mouthful of froth. Flicking her eyes
up to her own mirrored reflection, she smirked, because she was just as bad
as Eddie. People-killing exterminators. Fireplaces full of bugs. Babies
suffocating in cribs. Roaches nesting in her hair. “Jesus,” she whispered,
rinsing her toothbrush beneath the hot water stream, idly wondering if
Eddie’s horror addiction would taper off when the baby came. But then she
caught movement in the mirror, reigniting her own penchant for blowing
things out of proportion. She blinked down at the sink basin, seeing nothing
but water and a few remaining dregs of toothpaste. But then she spotted the
glint again. Glossy. Reddish-brown.
A single, long antennae poked out of the sink’s overflow directly opposite
of the faucet in an almost coquettish greeting. A moment later, a second
antennae appeared, throwing Kim’s hope of optical illusion out the window.
Before Kim could react, a roach longer than her thumb skittered out of the
overflow drain and into the sink.
She reeled back and screamed, rushing into the bedroom as Eddie shoved
the bedsheets aside and leapt off the mattress as quick as Clark Kent
speeding out of a phone booth. Kim couldn’t watch, imagining that
disgusting creature taking flight, buzzing into the bedroom, pursuing her
like a prowler on the hunt. She crawled into bed and pulled the blankets
over her head, trying not to cry while listening to Eddie curse and hiss
through his teeth, while the baby coiled itself up like a snail in its shell.
Eddie returned to bed a few minutes later, placing a steady hand on her
back. She jerked and rolled over with a harried glare. “If that guy thinks I’m
letting him back in here, that we’d pay him to come out here twice—”
“That thing was already in the drain when he came,” Eddie assured her,
which she found aggravating, because was he actually defending that creep?
“It bypassed the poison,” he said. “It got lucky.”
She winced, uncomfortable as Jack or Penelope continued to twist and
spin and kick. He noticed and frowned, placing his hand gingerly on her
stomach.
“You okay?”
 “Yeah,” she murmured. “The baby just doesn’t like it when I get worked
up.”
“The kid isn’t the only one,” Eddie told her. “I know you’re upset, but I
wish you’d relax.”
“And what about the thousands of roaches living in the fireplace?” she
asked, circling back to the topic at hand. “Should they relax, too?”
“There aren’t thousands of roaches in the fireplace,” he told her. “That
dude was just being an asshole.”
She stared at him, half-pacified by Eddie’s name-calling, but still waiting
for him to convince her about the bugs. “You swear?” she whispered.
“On my left pinkie,” he promised.
And for some reason, she took his word on it. Despite knowing he was
wrong, she chose to believe.
Six

THE NEXT ROACH THAT came at her scurried out of their dishwasher,
which she’d forgotten to run overnight—the thing fat and slimy after having
feasted on smears of pasta sauce and ranch dressing. That time, rather than
screaming, Kim jumped back, slapped her hands over her mouth, and
pressed her shoulder blades against the fridge. The dizzying sensation of the
baby’s acrobatics was becoming commonplace, and the bugs were starting
to wear thin, like a repetitive jump scare an aficionado of fear can easily
predict. Now, rather than screeching and running for cover, Kim was
holding her breath and trying not to spit fire. Her fear was shifting,
developing into something new, slowly fading and being replaced by an
indignant sort of rage.
A week after the Deliverance guy’s visit, the Palmetto bugs seemed even
more plentiful than before. Complaining became Kim’s default form of
communication. She couldn’t help herself, immediately recalling to Eddie
her latest run-in with either a dead or live bug in corners of various rooms.
The one she found on the kitchen counter near the stove was a new low,
because it was assurance that they were there, scurrying across their plates
and silverware, hiding among their food. She pictured the kitchen teeming,
practically alive as soon as the lights went out. Eddie agreed to call another
exterminator—this one licensed, certified, and far more expensive than the
first—but it would be another week before their appointment, and Eddie
appeared far too casual for her liking. It was almost as though he hadn’t
seen any cockroaches since the one that had jumped into her sink; as if he
hadn’t found a single carcass since he’d convinced her their walls weren’t
overflowing with them like some maggot-filled Easter egg.
A day before Orkin was due to baptize their home with toxic chemicals,
Kim noticed something in the dishwasher again. Unloading a freshly
washed load first thing in the morning, she spotted something poking out of
one of the holes of the rotating spray arm attached to the underside of the
top dishwasher rack. At first it looked like a hair, which left Kim
confounded. Unable to squat down or lean forward for any length of time,
she kneeled next to the open dishwasher door and craned her neck to peer
up at the spinning mechanism. And it was there, under closer inspection,
that it became clear that the hair wasn’t a hair at all. It was far too thick and
stiff—more like a whisker than anything. Snatching up her yellow rubber
gloves from the sink, Kim suited up before reluctantly grabbing hold of the
protruding strand. She pulled, but it held firm. When she yanked harder, it
began to uproot itself from something far bigger, something hidden within
the grey plastic propeller that was meant to rinse their dishes to a sparkling
shine.
Her fear of insects was starting to dissipate, but her disgust was stronger
than ever, and as she pulled that whisker free, she came to realize exactly
what she was seeing. She nearly retched into the beveled bay of the
dishwasher’s open door.
It was an antenna.
A fucking antenna.
An antenna that had very clearly been attached to a body until she had
wrenched it free.
“Eddie!” She cried out as she lurched away from the dishwasher, the
sudden wave of queasiness a bitter reminder of how hard her first three
months of pregnancy had been; even harder than the most recent weeks.
“Eddie!” she yelled again, her voice weaker this time. She slouched into a
chair at their breakfast table and put her head in her hands, then focused on
taking deep, centering breaths exactly how she used to half a year before.
Rushing into the kitchen, Eddie squatted next to her. “Shit, Kim. Is it
happening? Do we need to go?”
Kim shook her head. “No,” she murmured, her mouth so full of nausea-
induced saliva she felt as though she were drowning.
“Then what?” he asked. “Is the baby freaking out again? What? What’s
happening?”
 She took a moment, fighting against a hot-flash that felt like fire at her
back, knowing Eddie would think she was losing her damn mind as soon as
she told him, but it wasn’t like she could keep it a secret. Not after crying
out for him to save her.
“There’s a dead roach in the dishwasher.” She croaked out the words, her
forehead pressed into the palm of her hand.
“Oh.” Eddie straightened up, then shot a suspicious glance toward the
appliance in question. “I’ll get it.”
“No,” she said, grabbing hold of his wrist to keep him in place. “There’s a
dead roach in the arm thing,” she said. “Inside the thing that spins.”
“What?” Kim didn’t have to look up to hear the subtlest shift in his
expression. Only moments before, Eddie had been concerned. But now he
sounded dubious, almost amused, as though what Kim had just told him
was the punchline to a tediously drawn-out joke.
“I’m serious,” she whispered, swallowing hard. “God, I’m going to throw
up.”
“Kim.” Eddie left her sitting there as he approached the dishwasher.
“That’s impossible.”
“Why?” she asked him, genuinely wanting him to explain just how
implausible it was after she’d been finding roaches nearly every day since
they’d moved into their so-called dream home. She would have loved to
stop thinking about how their freshly cleaned dishes had been rinsed with
roach water, yet she couldn’t shake it. So, he’d have to spell out every
single unlikelihood of their situation. Perhaps then she’d feel less like she
was losing her mind a little more each day; so she could keep herself from
grabbing him by the shoulders and screaming until she split in two; so she
could keep from slamming her fists against the sides of her stomach to quiet
the relentless movement that refused to let her rest, to let her breathe, to let
her sleep.
“It just is,” Eddie responded.
Not good enough, Kim thought, but she said nothing. She simply sat
there, swallowing down bile, trying not to whimper as Landon or Marlo
continued to dance inside her.
“I don’t see anything,” he said after a moment more. “There’s no way
they could get inside there, Kim.”
“I pulled its antenna off,” she told him.
“It was probably just a piece of food,” he assured her.
 “It was a goddamn antenna, Eddie.” She already felt awful. Now she had
to deal with her husband gaslighting her into thinking she was
hallucinating. Or maybe he thought she was so stupid that she didn’t
recognize an insect antenna when she saw one. Maybe she was living in an
alternate universe where up was down, where husbands were always right,
where unborn babies knew the choreography to The Rite of Spring.
“Kim, I—”
“It’s there!” she suddenly roared, jumping up from her seat despite how
awful she felt. “Goddamnit! I’m not crazy, Eddie! You’ve seen them as
much as I have, haven’t you? They’re fucking everywhere! Why is the
dishwasher off limits? What makes it so fucking special?”
Before Eddie could respond, Kim stormed out of the kitchen, hating
herself for losing her cool, hating Eddie for making her feel so off-center,
hating Stephen or Annie for not keeping still for once. But mostly, she just
hated that fucking house and every bug that skittered within its walls.
Seven

THE BABY ARRIVED TWO weeks early, as though unable to stand the
horrors that were crossing the blood-placenta barrier, transferred to it by its
fitful mother. The moment Kim saw her little girl’s face, the name came
clear: Sophie. She was flawless. Breathtaking. A paragon. Within the span
of a moment, Kim could no longer remember who she’d been before Sophie
was placed in her arms. Now, Kim was transformed into a defender. A
guardian. A mom.
The hospital discharged them two days later. On the way home, Kim sat
in the backseat next to Sophie’s car seat, stared into her baby’s slumbering
face, and tried not to cry at the thought of what awaited them, hidden
behind the walls.
That evening, Kim stood exhausted at the kitchen sink, the tap running
red hot, sending steam up in tendrils from the stainless-steel basin. Eddie
had insisted she leave the dirty dishes for him—he’d take care of them in
the morning—but Kim couldn’t allow it. Not after what had happened when
she’d forgot to run the dishwasher. Not with what she knew she’d find
among their dishes the moment she stepped foot in the kitchen again.
Shoving her hands into her yellow kitchen gloves, she scrubbed dishes
beneath scorching water, letting the heat cook her hands within a thin layer
of latex, trying to ignore the permanent ache between her legs.
When she saw the Palmetto bug peek out from around the garbage
disposal’s rubber splash guard, she could hardly muster a sense of surprise.
Drained, she simply stared at it while it squeezed its long rust-colored body
out of the disposal and poised itself just shy of the drain, as if waiting to see
how she would react. Revulsion bubbled in her stomach. She could taste the
bile making its way up her windpipe. Yet, this time the sensation was shot
through with a curious sense of fascination—surprised that, while the
disgust was still very much there, the need to scream, to flee…was gone.
The roach sat there, unmoving much like her. Kim hardly blinked when it
was joined by an even longer companion. She did note, however, the new
stillness deep within her belly. No twisting. No pirouettes. Taking a single
backward step away from the counter, Kim saw movement behind the black
rubber flaps of the sink drain. There were more in there. Maybe two.
Perhaps ten. Probably two dozen. An intrusion poised to invade.
She imagined the pipes full of them, stuffed so tight that water could
hardly pass between thoraxes and wings. She pictured insects rushing
forward, the sink backing up with bugs and black water, both rising until
water and insects overflowed onto the counter and poured down the kitchen
cabinets. A deluge of roaches surging across the kitchen floor and across her
feet. Crawling up her pajama bottoms. Reaching her arms. Swarming up her
neck. Pushing into her nostrils and past her lips until they rushed down her
throat.
She flinched, neurons firing, muscles suddenly reminded to move. The
baby bottle she was holding dropped into the sink with a bang, sending both
roaches into a panic. Before she could think, she brought her gloved hand
down hard against the drain. One of the roaches was long gone, having run
up the side of the sink and out of view, but she trapped the other. It batted
beneath her glove in a frenzy while Kim shot her right hand out toward a
switch just shy of the sink, then flipped on the garbage disposal with
assurance as dark as an electric chair executioner. The disposal roared to
life under her hand, vibration zigzagging up her arm and settling into the
ball and socket of her shoulder. There was an awful grinding sound of solids
being chopped up by the mechanism’s cutter disk. For a moment, Kim
swore she could hear a muted squeal—bugs screaming as their bodies were
ripped apart, ground to paste.
She let the disposal run, her palm serving as a stopper for the hot water
that continued to flow from the tap, Sophie’s empty bottle bobbed atop the
water—a bottle with a missing message: You shouldn’t have bought this
house. Shouldn’t have bought this. Shouldn’t have…
 When the steaming tap filled up the sink, it began to fill up her glove,
pouring over the edge of the latex. Kim jerked her hand back and out of the
basin, the scorching water biting at her skin. The moment she moved, water
rushed down the drain, expressing a revolting belch as the garbage disposal
struggled to adjust to the sudden surge. Her waterlogged glove plopped to
the floor, splashing the bottom of the cabinets, the appliances, her feet. She
held her arm against her chest, her eyes fixed on the sink, waiting for the
Palmettos to come despite the water, despite the fact that the garbage
disposal continued to growl.
Eddie stepped into the kitchen in time to see Kim hugging her scalded
arm.
“Kim,” he said, almost immediately distracted by the steam rising from
the sink, the screaming disposal. He flipped the switch on the wall and
jammed the heel of his free hand against the faucet to kill the tap. The
kitchen became deafeningly silent. “Jesus. Did you burn yourself?” When
she didn’t acknowledge him, he gingerly caught her arm to see. “Are you
okay?”
She considered telling him about the roaches in the drain, about the
swarm she’d seen in the belly of the disposal, but what good would it do?
Two exterminators later, and here they were. Eddie had made it clear that he
couldn’t fix the problem; that, perhaps, he didn’t see it as much of a
problem anymore at all. The only thing to do was to conquer her long-
standing fear. Old Kim was gone. New Kim would destroy them herself.
“Kim?” Eddie shook his head at her, confused by her lack of response.
“What were you doing?”
Finally, she looked away from the sink and met his gaze.
“Dishes,” she told him, then gently pulled her arm out of his grip and
walked out of the room.
Eight

IN THE SHOWER, RINSING conditioner from her hair and straining to

listen for Sophie’s cry, Kim came face-to-face with a house visitor. Her
upper lip turned up in disgust, quivering before her arm shot out, snatched
the shampoo bottle from the small shelf at her left, and crushed it beneath
the bottle’s edge.
Hours later, when she caught another one skittering along the baseboard
in the breakfast nook, she terminated it with a rolled up Southern Living
magazine. She’d been saving that magazine for a few interior decorating
ideas that had sparked her fancy, but now, decorating was the furthest thing
from her mind. She tossed the magazine into the garbage, a roach body
glued to the back of it by way of its own viscera; tossed out her dream of a
perfect home along with it, because who was she kidding? They were
legion. She was only one.
The next evening, she nearly screamed when a roach flew at her from
inside the spice cabinet while she was throwing together a halfhearted
dinner. It buzzed the palm of her hand before rocketing up the side of the
cabinet and settling into a high corner of the kitchen. She threw a plastic
thyme container at it, hissed beneath her breath, and yelled for Eddie, but
by the time he slid into the kitchen in his stocking feet, the thing was gone.
Gone or hiding, because the more time that passed, the more Kim was sure
that Eddie couldn’t see the bugs anymore. She tried to wrestle reason from
that possibility despite it not making sense, because cockroaches weren’t
crows. They didn’t harbor higher intelligence, couldn’t recognize faces,
didn’t have the capacity to hold a grudge. They certainly weren’t avoiding
Eddie on purpose, right? Not while they were pursuing her with relentless
determination. No, of course he saw them. He was simply choosing to
ignore them. It pissed her off that Eddie wasn’t as vexed by those goddamn
roaches the way she was, but she reminded herself this madness wasn’t his
fault. He’d called out two exterminators and killed every bug he did choose
to see. Sometimes, she’d catch him walking the house on silent feet,
searching for them; a cat looking for offerings to place at her feet. Offerings
that would somehow quell his own regret, lamenting that he could do
nothing but wait for those disgusting insects to show themselves. Dismay
that there was no way to escape the house, no way out of their loan, no way
to run from the bleak situation they had found themselves in. Regret,
perhaps, in the change he inevitably noticed in his wife, because Kim was
no longer the shrieking, cowering girl she’d once been. She was growing
angrier by the day, holding her hands in fists at her side when she wasn’t
holding Sophie against her beating heart.
But Kim did scream when, while reaching into Sophie’s dresser drawers
for a fresh diaper and onesie, she found a trio of Palmetto bugs among an
organizer full of baby socks. Sophie startled at her mother’s cry, her tiny
limbs going rigid, her eyes like saucers set into her cherubic face. Kim
watched her infant struggle for breath before taking in a gulping mouthful
of air, then releasing a blood-curdling wail. Part of Kim screamed right
along with her, the other half narrowed its eyes and bared its teeth. Because
it was one thing for her to be terrorized, but altogether another to make her
look terrifying to her newborn child.
Pressing Sophie tight to her chest, Kim squeezed her eyes shut as she
took steadying breaths, trying to hold on.
Nine

WITH SOPHIE SLEEPING SOUNDLY in her car seat, Kim faced a wall of
household pesticides. Eddie would flip if he knew she was thinking of
spraying anything inside the house. She’d have to hide the evidence, but
there was no way around it.
There were too many of them.
They were in Sophie’s room.
She bought a half gallon jug of poison; a spray nozzle attached to the cap
by a thin plastic tube that reminded her of an IV. She used it during one of
Sophie’s naps, spraying every baseboard, creating a thick boundary just
outside Sophie’s door. She buried the bottle beneath a couple of full trash
bags in the outdoor bin. Eddie wouldn’t see it unless he went digging
through the garbage. And if he did end up doing a deep dive into their trash,
she’d have just as many questions for him as he’d have for her.
For the first few days, she was hopeful. The roaches she found were
upside down, legs in the air, long-dead by the time she came across their
corpses in the early hours of the morning. She vacuumed up the bodies and
tried not to imagine them reanimating inside the dust canister, crawling out
of the machine, strengthened by insecticide, tougher than ever. She counted
the days on her fingers as they passed in a whirlwind of bottle feedings and
diaper changes. One day. Two days. Three. By the fourth day of not seeing
a single live Palmetto bug, she breathed out an overconfident scoff.
Goddamn exterminators, she thought. Charging a fortune for nothing when
we could have spent thirty bucks and done the job ourselves.
 Five minutes after that cocksure thought spiraled through her head, a
cockroach twitched its antennae at her from atop the fireplace mantle. Kim
stopped dead at the sight of it, not because she was startled, but because of
the lick of fury crackling at the pit of her stomach. Because how?
“Maybe it wears off,” she whispered to herself from behind gritted teeth,
her hands held fast in tight fists. “I just need to spray again,” she said.
Perhaps once more around the house would do it. After all, she couldn’t
expect an entire infestation to be knocked out by one bottle of Ortho, could
she?
The next morning, less than ten minutes after Eddie left for work, Kim
had Sophie snug in her car seat and was on her way to the home
improvement store. This time, the poison only held them off for two days
instead of four.
Kim found herself driving around town, dragging her baby to shops full
of poisons and insecticides, shops where creepy men worked the counters,
hardened by what she imagined to be a lifetime of breathing boric acid. It
was what one of the men tried to sell her, insisting that it worked better than
the sprays for the very reason Kim feared—sprays wore off, but the
powdered acid created a physical barrier. But Kim couldn’t very well
decorate their hardwood floors with ancient powder-drawn runes to ward
off the bugs. Disheartened, she turned to leave only to be stopped by an idea
she hadn’t yet considered.
“Worst case scenarios,” the guy said, “you could get a cat.”
She spent all night mulling it over, nearly bringing it up with Eddie a half
dozen times, stopping herself before the words could slip past her lips.
Eddie would shoot down the idea; not only refuse but get pissed at the
suggestion. Kim wouldn’t say Eddie hated cats, but he harbored a deep
distrust of them after a friend’s feline had buried its claws into the meat of
his thigh during high school. He had the scars to prove it—four raised tick
marks looking as though it was where he’d once checked off individual
fears with the tip of a knife.
Kim said nothing. She let him fall asleep in the shadowed glow of her
phone screen, a dormant game of Sudoku sitting unplayed, her thoughts
distant despite listening for the skittering of segmented legs, listening for
the dry leaf-like rustle of unfurling wings, always listening. A Sentry.
The next morning, while feeding Sophie on the couch, a cockroach
skittered across the cushion next to her, nonchalant. Kim shot up from the
sofa, inadvertently yanking the bottle from Sophie’s mouth as she stood.
She nearly dropped the baby as she put room between them and the insect,
not repulsed so much by it as the thought of it being anywhere near her
child.
Kim began to spray down the house with a full gallon of insecticide every
week, her heart nearly stopping when Eddie began to murmur about a
strange smell.
“Do you smell it?” he asked. “I’ve been picking up on it for a while now.
It’s driving me nuts.”
“I don’t smell anything,” she told him, turning her attention back to the
television. Except, now that he’d mentioned it aloud, she could practically
hear the gears turning inside his head, which was why Kim had never been
more thankful to see one of those nasty bastards. She was sure Eddie was
about to ask if she’d sprayed anything inside the house, but just then, a
Palmetto bug flew across the room and landed in the center of their TV
screen. If Eddie had suspected anything, his hunch was derailed by the all-
too-familiar task of murdering bugs without breaking vases or knocking
knickknacks off shelves.
Kim knew it was only a matter of time before Eddie put together what
she was up to while he was at work. Buying a house that was well out of
their budget meant watching their pennies, and the bug spray came at a
premium. There was no doubt he’d soon notice her spending spree on their
credit card statements. That, and there were only so many bottles of poison
she could flood their house with, only so many of those fumes they could
breathe in before someone—please, God, not Sophie—became severely ill.
And yet, she couldn’t help herself; could feel it in her bones the way some
people could feel rain or snow. It was coming. Her breaking point.
That crucial moment came less than two days later.
Stumbling to the coffee maker at a few minutes past five in the morning,
Kim poured herself a cup of coffee and came nose-to-nose with a drowned
Palmetto floating in her cup. A moment later, her mug shattered against the
base of the sink. She bent over the basin and retched. Staring into her own
sick as it oozed down the drain, she saw movement again. They were in
there, swarming, feeding on last night’s regurgitated dinner. The mere sight
of them skittering toward her vomit made her want to throw up again. Kim
slammed the heel of her palm against the sink handle and flipped the
disposal switch. The garbage disposal roared to life, and beneath its angry
growl, she began to sob.
Ten

THE ANIMAL SHELTER WAS florescent-lit, reeking of ammonia and

bleach. Kim wanted to leave as soon as she stepped inside the cinderblock
walled building, but a single downward glance at Sophie’s sleeping face
propelled her forward despite her qualms. Eddie would hate her for it, but
he’d forgive her in time. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Honestly, at that very
moment, she didn’t care.
“Oh, isn’t she precious?” The woman working the shelter’s counter
resembled a more homely, bookish Judy Dench. Judy leaned over the
counter to get an eyeful of Sophie the moment they stepped inside.
“They’re so gorgeous at that age, aren’t they? I bet you’re in heaven.”
Kim gave Judy a weary smile, the comment reminding her that yes, she
should have been over the moon, that these fleeting moments would be ones
she’d one day wish to relive. But instead, she was preoccupied with those
creeping marauders. Those disgusting arthropods. Those fucking roaches.
“We’re looking for a cat,” she told Judy, watching the woman’s
expression grow solemn the moment the words tumbled past Kim’s lips.
“Oh dear, well…” Judy mustered up an apologetic smile. “I’m afraid we
don’t have any kittens right now. They come in every now and again, but
when they do, they get snatched up in a flash.”
“We’re looking for an adult cat,” Kim explained.
“One that’s good with children,” Judy assumed.
“A hunter,” Kim clarified. “It needs to know how to kill.”
The cat’s name was Louis—a name that reminded Kim of Anne Rice’s
Louis de Pointe du Lac, that oh-so-romantic vampire she’d once been
obsessed with when she’d been fourteen. Judy had described Louis the cat
as a domestic shorthair, which Kim assumed was a nice way of saying he
was an off-the-streets mixed breed with no family tree. A prowler. A tramp.
If Kim was completely honest, Eddie wasn’t the only one nervous around
felines. She’d watched far too many horror movies where cats came flying
out of the darkness, claws drawn and fangs flashing in the moonlight. Pet
Semetery—one of Eddie’s favorites—hadn’t done that cliché any favors,
but she forced herself to look past that now. Crouching next to Louis’s
cardboard carrier, she peered at the orange-and-brown creature through the
front vent holes, imagining herself trying to catch him after having a change
of heart.
“Don’t make me regret this, Lou,” she told him. “This an all-you-can-eat
buffet, so don’t be a bastard. Stay away from the kid and we’ll be good.”
And with that, she pulled open the flaps of the shelter carrier and tipped it
forward. Louis took off like a shot through the living room, disappearing
deep inside the house, setting Eddie’s inevitable outrage in stone.

“Jesus Christ, Kim!” Eddie hissed beneath his breath, trying not to wake
Sophie despite his shock. “I nearly had a heart attack!”
Kim stood beside the bed with her arms crossed over her chest, the
fingers of her right hand pressed hard against her mouth. She was upset
with herself for violating Eddie’s trust, but also trying not to laugh at the
yowl both he and the cat had expelled when the two had made each other’s
acquaintance in a dark walk-in closet.
“His name is Louis,” she said, trying to diffuse the situation with an
irrefutable fact. “He’s, like, eight years old and completely house trained,
and he seems sweet enough…”
“Seems!” Eddie snorted, incredulous. “Until he sneaks into Sophie’s
room and, what, scratches her eyes out? Steals her breath?”
Kim looked away from him, not wanting to take the conversation in that
direction. “He won’t touch Sophie,” she said after a long moment,
defending a cat she had only met a few hours before, allowing it to roam the
rooms of their home, hoping Louis had a soft spot for humans while having
no mercy for the Palmettos that thought this house was their own. “I won’t
let him get close to her.”
 “It’s just a few bugs, Kim,” Eddie muttered, rubbing his face with his
hands, still flabbergasted by the situation he’d suddenly found himself in.
“God, I can’t believe you went off and—”
“A few bugs?” She cut him off, blinking. “I’m sorry, but are we living in
alternate realities these days? I’m finding bugs inside Sophie’s drawers,
Eddie. In her clothes.”
“They’ve tapered off,” he insisted. “We can call another exterminator.
We’ll have one come out every month until they’re completely gone.”
Kim shook her head, not sure what to say. Finally, she spoke. “I can’t
with this anymore,” she told him. “Eddie, I can’t. I’ll pack a bag and leave
if this doesn’t stop. I’ll take Sophie to a hotel—”
“A hotel!” Eddie scoffed. “Who the hell can afford a hotel, Kim?”
“A motel, then.” She glared at him, hating it when he argued semantics.
“It doesn’t matter where the hell we’d go, Eddie. I’ll sleep in the fucking
car if I have to. We can get rid of the cat later. Just give it a few days.”
His expression softened, but she knew he didn’t understand. He hadn’t
seen the worst of it, hadn’t heard about half of her encounters. She hadn’t
even told him about the one she’d found drowned in her coffee cup, the one
that had pushed her over the edge. She stood there watching him,
wondering why she hadn’t brought it up, wondering why she was protecting
him from the brunt of their situation. But as she stood silent, following his
movements with her gaze, she narrowed her eyes at the way his body
language had shifted from insolence to resignation.
“Okay,” he said, finally acknowledging her need. “A few days.”
Watching him right then, she realized Eddie was at the end of his own
rope, same as her. Except, for him, the end of that rope was looped around
an unhinged wife’s neck. The way he was looking at her, she suddenly
understood that Eddie wondered whether she was nuts.
Sometimes, she wondered too.
Eleven

EVERY MORNING SHE SEARCHED for corpses. To her delight, she

found none in the first few days of Louis’s residence. The cat seemed
amicable enough, not at all interested in his newly acquired humans.
Instead, he lazed about the house, found sunny spots to sleep in, and almost
always vacated the premises as soon as Kim came into view. Other than
having to feed him, it was as though Louis was a figment of her
imagination, as though he didn’t live with them at all.
But less than a week into Louis’s adoption, Kim started seeing bugs
skittering along baseboards. She spotted one dashing across the blue
patterned living room rug to hide beneath their sofa. A little after five AM,
there was one hanging out beneath the metal stovetop grates, poised atop
one of the burner caps—far too close to the coffee maker for Kim’s liking.
Seeing it there spiked her anxiety, giving rise to a wave of nausea she could
hardly contain.
“Louis?” She called out the cat’s name, stupidly assuming it would peek
his head out of wherever he was hiding in response. Coiling her arms across
her chest, she started to leave the kitchen when her steps stuttered to a stop.
She hadn’t noticed it before because it was tucked into the far corner of the
breakfast nook, but it was impossible to miss now. Louis’s food bowl was
still full, tiny fish-shaped kibble crawling with a group of feasting insects.
Rather than being revolted, Kim found herself captive to fast-growing
panic. Because where was Louis? Where the hell was the cat?
 “Lou?” Now that she thought about it, she was certain she hadn’t seen
Louis since the previous morning. She’d thought nothing of it. Louis had
proved himself naturally evasive, so not seeing him for a full day hadn’t
struck her as odd, at least until now. Maybe he got out. She thought back to
the day before. She’d taken Sophie on a walk in the morning and had left
the door leading to the garage open while strapping the kid into her stroller.
There was a chance Louis had snuck by, had bolted as soon as the garage
door rolled open. Kim wouldn’t have seen any of it, preoccupied with a
cooing infant.
For one of Sophie’s naps, Kim had placed the baby’s carrier in the car and
driven a few miles to grab an overpriced coffee while the kid slept in the
back. Louis could have gotten out then, as well.
After Eddie had come home from work, the trio had spent some time in
the backyard, enjoying the balmy evening. Perhaps Louis had dashed out
the door when Eddie hadn’t been looking and was now long gone, forever
doomed to be an annoying neighborhood stray that yowled at the moon.
Hell, it could have happened at any time. Neither she nor Eddie were used
to having an indoor cat. Or maybe Eddie let him out on purpose. It made
her sick to consider it, but she could see him doing it, hissing through his
teeth at the animal as Louis dashed down the driveway.
She looked everywhere. She and Sophie even took a field trip to the
grocery store for a can of tuna, which Kim reluctantly left on the kitchen
floor, certain she’d come back to another group of roaches getting their fill,
growing bigger, gathering their strength for their takeover.
No Louis.
By the time Sophie was down for the night, Kim was genuinely worried.
“About an animal shelter stray?” Eddie asked with a roll of his eyes, his
tone surprisingly cold.
“He’s not a stray,” she shot back at him. “At least not anymore. He’s
ours.” So, what if she got Louis at the shelter? He was still their
responsibility, wasn’t he? He’d done nothing to deserve Eddie’s ire. “You
didn’t let him out, did you?” she asked, surprised with how easily the
question had tumbled past her lips.
“What, you mean on purpose?” Eddie shook his head at her, annoyed by
the suggestion.
“You wouldn’t have, would you?” she asked, her tone pleading with him
to not hate her for needing to make sure. “I promised we could take him
back, Eddie. You didn’t let him out, right? You wouldn’t have…”
Eddie gave her a hard stare. “No,” he finally said. “I didn’t free your
damn cat, Kim.”
Anger flashed against his eyes. Something akin to disgust or discontent
shifted within the contours of his face. He was pissed that she’d insinuate
such a thing, angry that she’d think so little of him. For a moment, all Kim
could feel was shame. She looked away, unable to hold his gaze, her
attention falling to a corner of the room she hadn’t inspected in days—
hadn’t inspected because Louis had been doing a fantastic job of keeping
the house bug-free. But now she noticed something peeking out from
beneath her bedside table, which was piled with books about baby sleep
cycles and childhood development. There was something there, furry and
curled delicately like the curve of a question mark.
Kim’s mouth went dry. She blinked at Louis’s tail, willing it to move with
the power of her stare. When it didn’t, she pressed a hand to her mouth.
“Eddie,” she whispered. “Oh shit…”
Despite being disgruntled, Eddie stepped around the bed with a
murmured “what?” He spotted it immediately.
“Louis?” Kim spoke the name softly, afraid to do anything else. She left it
to Eddie to creep closer, to nudge the end of Louis’s tail with the tip of his
bare toes. Louis didn’t move. Instead, a few Palmettos dashed into various
corners of the room.

She didn’t watch Eddie go through the motions, but she tracked his
movements with her ears. After grabbing the latex gloves and a trash bag
from beneath the sink, Eddie bagged Louis’s body and took him into the
garage. The next morning, Kim could hear him digging a hole somewhere
in their backyard, each rhythmic thud and scoop of the shovel sending a
tremor down her spine.
She spent the early morning hours going over it in her head—her
bringing Louis home, setting him free. She was certain he’d been eating
those bugs the way she often ate potato chips…one after the other until she
was sure she would burst. The longer she thought about it, the clearer a
terrible realization began to dawn. Could it have been that, with all the
insecticide she’d sprayed in previous weeks, she’d inadvertently poisoned
the cat they hadn’t yet adopted? The bottle had been specific: don’t lay
down poison around animals. But it had also said that after it dried, it was
safe. Yeah, she thought, safe if you don’t spray a half gallon every other day,
Kim. Safe if you use it like a normal person, in normal doses. Not the way
you did. Not like that.
The idea of having poisoned poor Louis was too much. She cried in the
shower, sobbed into the spray of water while Sophie slept across the house.
She continued to whimper as she toweled herself off and stepped into the
bedroom, her tear-rippled gaze drifting to the place where she’d spotted
Louis’s body the previous night.
“I’m so sorry,” she hiccupped past her slowing tears. “I didn’t know. I
didn’t think.” Hadn’t thought because, when she had finally broken down
and driven to the animal shelter, it had been days since she’d last sprayed
anything along the baseboards. Hadn’t thought because it had seemed
unlikely—as unlikely as buying a house teeming with roaches. As unlikely
as a strange woman sitting in a dark room, waiting to be discovered, waiting
to insist that the house was perfect, the ideal place to raise a child if only
Kim was willing to sacrifice. Sacrifice. Sacrifice.
Kim pulled the towel from her wet hair and tugged a T-shirt over her head
before her thoughts froze her in place. That woman. She’d hidden away in
the same room where Louis had died, perched in the same corner. Her
rocking chair had sat in the exact spot where Kim’s bedside table was now.
And last night, when they had discovered Louis’s body? Eddie had
reacted to the dead cat with a muted sort of horror, but he hadn’t reacted to
the roaches that had dashed away from the corpse as though he hadn’t seen
them. There had been at least three of them running out from beneath the
bedside table and into the shadowed corners of their bedroom. Wasn’t he
bothered that they’d be hiding in their room after the lights went out?
Didn’t it make his skin crawl to imagine roaches climbing onto their bed
and beneath their sheets? And what about Sophie? The bugs could squeeze
under any door, could crawl into any space. What was to keep them from
invading their daughter’s room while everyone slept, while there was no
one to keep watch?
Wiping at her eyes, Kim stared at the spot beneath the bedside table
where Louis had passed. He’d only been dead for a day, two at the very
most. There had been no smell, no decomposition. So, why then, were their
bugs around his body?
She turned away from the corner, moved across the room, found herself
standing at the bedroom window and looking out at a square of freshly
packed earth at the far end of the yard. Louis was buried beneath that dirt.
Kim pictured enormous Palmetto bugs crawling out of his mouth, imagined
the nest they’d created inside his body, having hollowed out a cavity like a
cave—the perfect place to feast and grow and breed before crawling up out
of the ground like something out of a George Romero flick.
Perhaps Eddie was secretly happy to live in a creeping horror house.
Maybe, while he’d never admit to it, he liked the bugs because it reminded
him of his favorite stories; it made him feel like he was living in a gleeful
nightmare. A favorite movie. A book, sprung from someone’s dark
imagination. But for Kim, this wasn’t fiction. It was her life.
And now, they had killed the cat. If they could do that to Louis, who was
to say they couldn’t do worse.
Twelve

KIM CAME HOME WITH another half-gallon of bug killer, four cans of
Raid, and a fresh starter log for their yet-to-be-used fireplace. She told
herself to wait it out, to not initiate her plan until the next morning, after
Eddie had gone off to work. But upon returning home, she and Sophie were
greeted by a cockroach clinging to the edge of their breakfast table, almost
as if it had been waiting for them to return, waiting to challenge Kim, to
dare Mama to do her worst. Kim sneered at the thing as she dropped her
plastic Lowe’s bags next to the door leading out to the garage, then hefted
Sophie’s car carrier against her hip and proceeded down the hall to the
nursery.
With Sophie changed, fed, and down for a nap, Kim got to work.
She moved the fireplace screen aside and stared at the half-burned logs
that rested atop the steel grate, left there by the house’s previous owners. It
was only then that she found herself wondering why the owners had
decided to sell the place, if the woman she’d found sitting in the master
bedroom had been one of the owners at all. Somehow, she doubted it,
suddenly sure that the previous inhabitants had been forced out by
something beyond their control. The old woman’s face flashed against her
periphery, and Kim reeled around to face an empty living room. Had she
even been real? Of course, she had. Kim had held an entire conversation
with her, had stared at her long, rat-like teeth. And yet, the longer she
considered the more disquieted she felt. What if Eddie hadn’t seen her
because she hadn’t been there after all?
 It was then that Kim’s breath staggered to a standstill, hitching in her
throat, because she suddenly understood. Eddie wasn’t seeing bugs—at
least not in the same capacity that she was—because the Palmettos weren’t
meant for him. They weren’t even there for her. As soon as Sophie was
born, the plague had gotten exponentially worse.
This is a perfect house to raise a baby, the woman had said while sitting
in a dark corner of the master bedroom, and Kim had believed her.
And just as Eddie wasn’t seeing bugs now, he hadn’t seen the woman in
the corner then. Because she hadn’t been meant for him. She had been
meant only for Kim. Only for the time it took to strike a deal.
Make an offer. Sacrifice one thing.
Sacrifice. Sacrifice.
Sacrifice one thing.
Except, no. No. That was insane. Like something out of one of Eddie’s
movies. She shook her head, refusing to entertain such nonsense for even a
second longer, turning back to the task at hand.
The floor of the fireplace was littered with ash, hunks of charcoal, and
enough roach corpses to constitute a mass graveyard. She remembered what
the first exterminator had said. Palmettos love crawling in through the flue.
Open the damper and down they come. Pulling in a deep breath, she
crouched beside the hearth, lifted the starter log she’d purchased two hours
before, and carefully positioned it atop the old logs. Satisfied with its
placement, she took a step back, grabbed a can of Raid from the plastic bag,
and jammed her thumb against the cap, popping the top.
Kim didn’t know how much good this impromptu cleansing ritual would
do, but she knew it had to be done, because those roaches were up there as
certainly as they were swarming inside the house’s water pipes. Even if her
plan failed, it would at least make her feel better knowing that she’d
explored every avenue, had tried every tactic before telling Eddie the house
was unlivable, that she was finally making good on her threat and leaving.
Whether Eddie chose to come with her and Sophie would be up to him.
Grabbing the long-reach lighter from atop the mantel, it was only as she
leaned forward that she realized that, for the first time in what felt like
months, she felt like herself again; queasy and unsteady on her own two
feet, wanting to run rather than face the task at hand. And the task was far
from an easy one. Not only did she have to light the starter log, but she had
to yank open the flue once the fire roared to life. A moment too soon, and
her plan wouldn’t work. If she waited too long, she’d risk second-degree
burns. There was also the can of Raid, which she had purchased for backup.
She had to wield the can, point it at her target. She needed an extra set of
hands. Maybe if she waited for Eddie to come home…
“Stop thinking about it,” she hissed at herself through her teeth. “Stop
thinking and just do it, already.” Going through the logistics of it all was
only making her that much more anxious. For once, she chose not to
acknowledge her doubts at all.
She held the lighter to the edge of the starter log’s packaging. It caught
fire fast, and Kim found herself taking a few steps back, surprised by the
heat. She began to reach for the flue but stopped short. “Wait,” she
whispered. “Just wait.” She needed the outer wrapper to fully catch to feel
confident. When those nasty fuckers came pouring out of the chimney, she
wanted them to be falling straight into a burning, inescapable hell.
Shoving the lighter back onto the mantel, she held her breath as the fire
ate away at the paper packaging. Her fingers tightened around the can of
bug spray, which she held uncomfortably in her left hand rather than her
right. She needed her dominant hand—her strong arm—for the act of
jerking down on the damper’s pull-handle. Smoke began to gather in the
chimney’s closed throat. Her eyes grew wide as rolls of black smog began
to pour into the room. Unable to wait any longer, she braced herself against
the heat and shoved her arm to the top of the firebox. It was only then that
panic set in. She knew the damper handle was there, having located it
before driving out for the starter log that was blazing a mere three feet
beneath her arm. But now, with her heart beating hard and smoke rendering
her blind, she groped at thin air. The handle was gone. It was gone.
“No.” The word left her as a strained cry. The heat licked at her skin, then
bit. She cried out, ready to give up her search before the tip of her pointer
finger grazed the damper’s pull. She shoved her finger through the steel
loop and pulled.
The flue door fell open.
For a shadow of a moment, she was convinced that nothing would be in
there, but like a self-fulfilled prophecy, a deluge of roaches poured forth.
The insects hit the fire.
She could hear them popping, squealing—the same awful sound she
swore she’d heard coming from the sink. Some of them unfurled their
greasy wings and fled the fireplace in alarm. Others scattered over the
hearth in a torrent of segmented thoraxes and spiney legs.
Kim stumbled back with a startled cry, reflexively pointed the can of Raid
in front of her and pushed down on the trigger. A half-second later, she
screamed as a fireball blew her hair back in a hot gust of air. She felt the
roaches crunching beneath her feet, could sense them scrambling across her
jeans. She screamed as one rushed up her arm, disappearing beyond her
shoulder before she could slap it away. A second followed its brother,
darting into her hair.
Kim squealed and began to thrash, desperate to get them off. She sprayed
the pesticide again, and while she was too preoccupied to look, she felt the
fire roar again. Spinning around, she watched bugs flee the living room, all
of them rushing toward the hall.
“Sophie!” She ran, convinced that she could get to the baby’s room
before the infestation did, hopeful that she’d find a way to keep them from
scurrying beneath the nursery door.
By the time she got there, they were all over the room. Gathering in
corners. Crawling across the ceiling and walls. Surging past the crib’s
vertical rails and finding sanctuary in Sophie’s bed. Kim shrieked at the
sight of it. Tossing the bug spray to the floor, she charged forward, grabbing
the now wailing baby out of her blankets, pressing Sophie tight against her
chest. She spun around to leave the room but could hardly believe her eyes.
The room was teeming with insects, so many that the sage nursery paint
was blotted out by a grotesque, rust-colored wallpaper that quivered and
breathed.
Kim stood motionless for a moment, in terrified awe of what she was
seeing. Finally shaking free of her torpor, she stuttered to a halt just shy of
Sophie’s bedroom door. Flames leapt across the hallway runner and up the
board and battened walls, blocking her exit. She screamed and reached for
the door, bugs crawling across the back of her hand and up her arm as she
slammed it shut to keep the fire at bay. She screeched again and shook her
arm, trying to knock as many insects away as she could, but the heat that
radiated from Sophie’s door reminded her that bugs were the least of her
worries now. Despite feeling them crawling down the back of her shirt, she
twisted where she stood and rushed to Sophie’s window.
Tearing open the curtains, she stared out onto the picturesque backyard.
The sun dappled lawn was a vibrant green. The azalea bushes burst with
pink and white blooms. A wave of relief washed over her as she used her
free hand to flip the window latches and pull up on the bottom sash, but her
relief soured when the window refused to budge. She pulled up again,
harder this time, but the bottom sill remained fixed in place. The window. It
was painted shut. The one detail she and Eddie had decided to overlook
when buying the place, the one thing they had agreed to fix themselves in
the name of having the perfect house but had put off.
Another cry wrenched itself free of her throat. She was a feral animal,
trapped, desperate for escape. Her gaze frantically searched the room,
looking for something that she could use to break the glass, but this was a
baby’s room. Everything was soft, no sharp corners on anything. The glider
chair was upholstered, far too heavy to lift. The wooden bookshelves
displaying a menagerie of colorful board books were screwed into the wall.
Kim crossed the room and grabbed one of the vertical slats of the crib,
trying to wrench it free without putting Sophie down. All she managed to
do was move the crib. The slat refused to come free.
Flames began to eat the carpet beneath the door, melting synthetic fibers,
creating a toxic smoke screen over an impassible exit. Suddenly, Kim’s
attention snagged on the diaper pail—rounded but metal. Knowing there
would be no way she could break the window one-handed, she placed a
now wailing Sophie down on the recliner, grabbed the trash can, reeled
back, and slammed it against the glass. The pail bounced back, sending a
shockwave through her arms. She tried again, putting all her weight into it
this time, releasing a garbled wail as the container sent a spray of glass into
the room. Kim gasped at the splintering crash, then frantically used the edge
of the pail to knock out jagged shards from around the window’s
weatherstripping. A moment later, she paused to marvel at the fact that,
there it was, an exit. Neither she nor her infant daughter would die by fire.
At least not today.
She turned back to the recliner only to stare wide-eyed at her baby
daughter. Still lying in her nursing chair, Sophie was motionless and quiet,
almost completely obscured by a swarming rust-red blanket of antennae and
wings.
Kim sobbed out a horrified cry, her hands flying toward her child, batting
the insects away with sharp, hysterical movements. She only stopped when,
feeling heat at her back, she turned in time to watch the far wall go up in
flames. Snatching Sophie up, Kim angled them out the smashed window,
protecting Sophie from the shattered sash while a shard of glass tore
through her own jeans and into the flesh of her thigh. With both feet finally
on the ground, she trip-ran across the lawn toward the back fence,
collapsing just shy of Louis’s freshly dug grave.
When Kim finally forced her attention away from the inferno that was
growing faster than she imagined a fire being able to consume anything, she
realized that Sophie was still quiet. Wide-eyed, Sophie kept her attention
rapt upon her mother. Kim exhaled a whimper, and that was when Sophie’s
face lit up. For the first time since birth, the baby laughed. And it was only
then, while staring down at her daughter’s open mouth, that Kim saw it—
the glint of a Palmetto bug, its wings flashing rust-red deep within her
baby’s throat.
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ania Ahlborn is a Polish-American author known for her work in the horror
and thriller genres. Ahlborn began her writing career by self-publishing her
first novel, Seed, before gaining recognition for her distinctive voice in
horror. Her novels often explore dark and psychological themes, captivating
readers with her ability to create chilling atmospheres and complex
characters. Her storytelling style often blends elements of psychological
horror, suspense, and a keen understanding of the dark intricacies of human
nature.

Originally hailing from Albuquerque, New Mexico, she has lived in

Portland, Oregon and Greenville, South Carolina. She currently resides
outside of Raleigh, North Carolina with her family.
ALSO BY ANIA AHLBORN

Seed
The Neighbors
The Shuddering
The Bird Eater
Within These Walls
The Pretty Ones
Brother
I Call Upon Thee
The Devil Crept In
Apart in the Dark
If You See Her
Dark Across the Bay

W W W. A N I A A H L B O R N. C O M