bedbugs tender_square there wasn’t tell-tale triangular patterned bites to noticed on my skin. no itching or irritation. and even after i spotted them, crawling on brandon’s sleeping face, i reasoned that they were bugs shaken loose from the roof work happening above our heads. weeks later when i lifted the mattress and saw their filmy casements along every lip of my box spring, i got drunk and slept on the couch, left a line of masking tape along my bedroom doorway to trap them if they sought the carbon monoxide i expelled. in a hungover state, i stripped my sheets and saw the morse code messages left on my bed skirt, my dried blood issuing the warning i couldn’t hear. exterminators left my mattress and box spring dusted in a fine bone powder that suffocated their colony: “you can keep the bed, just put a plastic cover over both so their bodies stay trapped and die.” they told me it was one of the worst cases they’d ever seen; a metropolis of millions. at night, i tried to sleep on my living room futon, on pillows wrapped in garbage bags that crinkled with every adjustment of my head, on a mattress that was wrapped in a raincoat. i slathered the wooden legs with vaseline, placed each foot in a plastic circle that was designed to make their umber bodies too tired to climb up to me, a rapunzel hovering six inches above the carpet. every sensation on my skin and on my face was their bodies tormenting me, and i flung the lights on to inspect my cream-colored sheets, desperate for evidence i couldn’t see. 211103 ... tender_square *notice not noticed 211103 what's it to you? who go blather from