Photo be Pexel.com: Ekamelev
Maisie mistook the centipede’s legs for tally marks at first, counting them one by one the way she’d been taught to count quieter days, and even when the marks began to move, she didn’t scream because screaming meant the count would start over and then there’d be more tally marks on her, too.
The next thing she noticed was that each segment of the creature’s body pulsed with a beautiful brown sheen; and, second, that her own breath now synchronized with the rippling motion of its many limbs, breathing in when it contracted, out when it extended.
When the shouting resumed downstairs, it was the centipede who flinched first, and Maisie understood suddenly that it had been there all along, hiding in corners, watching her cry, witnessing the pink blotches that appeared and disappeared on her skin like weather.
After three nights of whispered conversations—conducted through antennae twitches that Maisie somehow understood perfectly—she woke to find tiny pathways cleared along her bedroom floor, intricate tunnels of dust swept aside by countless miniature feet while she slept, all leading to the window where the tomato plant’s leaves flapped its open arms.
The baseboards came alive then, what she had always thought were cracks in the paint revealed themselves as thousands of insects—ants and beetles and silverfish and crickets—their bodies forming a living bridge across what had once seemed an unbridgeable gap between her bedroom and the world beyond.
Before the sky could change its mind, Maisie—who had never been afraid of falling so much as afraid of staying—placed her foot on their backs and found them solid as stone.
Tiffany Harris is a short fiction writer residing in California’s Sacramento Valley. Her work has been recognized by Bath Flash Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, Tadpole Press, and appears in Buckman Journal, Black Glass Pages, Humana Obscura, Vermilion, Westword, and elsewhere.
