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Jean's house has termites.
They are, as it happens, very polite termites. They stay scrupulously away from load-bearing beams, so that he never has to worry about his roof collapsing onto his head. He does have to replace the non-load-bearing walls occasionally -- and the porch railing, and the interior doors, and the kitchen table -- but they stay away from the bookshelves, so overall he counts it as a win.
The bedbugs are polite enough not to bite. Jean is pretty sure this should not be physiologically possible, but he's learned better than to ask too many questions. The mosquitoes do bite, but they don't bite him, and they're careful about only biting one animal so they don't spread disease.
He didn't have silverfish until he designated a bookshelf to devote entirely to a collection of really, truly terrible books. It features Fifty Shades of Gray and To Train Up A Child and Dianetics and tie-in novels for various franchises. Now he does have silverfish, but only in the one bookshelf, so that's okay.
His favorites are the bees. (The spiders are his sister's favorite, but she doesn't mind that he likes the bees best. Bees are good too.) He has hives and hives of them, and none of them ever sting him, which is good, because if they did they would die and that would be awful. They make more honey than they need, so every so often he gets to go open up one of the hives (he warns them first, politely, so none get squashed by accident) and fish out jars and jars full of honey. He has a pantry full of it, all different colors, shades of gold and brown and pale and even auburn. Sometimes he shares it with the bugs.
The bees need flowers, of course, but he has forty acres all to himself, and when the grasshoppers know to stay away and the worms know to come and thrive, that can grow a lot of plants. He gets monarch butterflies every fall when they migrate, and he stands outside counting them and crying. He doesn't love them quite as much as he loves the bees, but he still loves them, and there's fewer every year.
They miss him, when he's gone, traveling to act or to attend conferences or to do other things, and he misses them. There's bugs everywhere, but his house has so many, and such good ones. His sister sends him all sorts of strange and foreign creatures: dung beetles with carapaces that shine like jewels, long-legged spiders that weave him clothes of strange fabric, African termites that build clay statues at his command.
They're letting him be, right now, so he can focus on his work, but he can still see them moving out of the corner of his eye, and it makes him smile: small winged things darting irregular paths through the air, or heavier bugs scuttling across the floor, going about their business. He never has to be alone.
Jean clicks out of the ninth article on bee depopulation and squints at the screen, tired-eyed. increasing bee population, he googles.
Ten minutes later, after working through a fruitless page of results: getting bees to breed more
After another ten minutes: bee mating
bee sex
what do bees think is sexy
how to seduce a bee
![[splat]](https://d1anwqy6ci9o1i.cloudfront.net/users%2F94%2Ficons%2Fadc9d776-c665-4899-9437-07ab8210fb4f_gore_by_crazyruthie-d9o6qvr.jpg "[splat]")
There’s an itch.
It’s just the barest hint of one, in the back of his mind, like a mosquito bite that hasn’t yet blossomed into a welt, like the absence of your wallet in your back pocket, a faint nudging of his thoughts in the right direction.
Right now, it’s easy to miss.
When it's not occupied, his mind will keep wandering to that first video, where "Z" was clutching his face and screaming, clearly somehow in ecstasy.
It's been a long time since he's been stung by any kind of insect. Does he even remember how it feels?
...yeah.
Yeah, he remembers that pretty clearly. His sister used to slip up more often than she does now. He has a pretty good tolerance, by now, but it hurt. That's the point. That's why they sting.
Memories of sensation are slippery. They're not quite accurate. You can't ever perfectly recall a taste, or a smell. You slide off it, never touch the heart of it until you feel it again.
It's hard not to think about what he saw in those videos. It's natural, somehow, to slip back to remembering it.
Without quite meaning to, he finds himself back on the page, late that night, refreshing to see if there are any new videos.
There's nothing new on the list, yet. But the front page seems to load something new every time it refreshes.
He could always come back in the morning.
Or he could stay and watch. Maybe just one.
It’s another cutting video.
This one seems more intimate, somehow. Maybe it’s because he’s not trying to monologue.
He carves long, deep vertical slashes down his torso and legs, digging the blade of the folding knife so deep it’s surprising he never hits a major artery or opens his body cavity. He whimpers and moans through the whole video, with the occasional “fuck” when the blade scratches bone or catches on something.
He’s drenched in his own blood, painted bright red and shaking hard, when the page refreshes automatically and the next video starts to load.
There’s a sense of loss, when he shuts his computer, of unfulfilled hunger, something necessary being taken away.
Not all of it goes away. His blood is still hot under his skin, full in his veins. His pulse feels like it shivers his whole body.
The images of Z’s open body linger, an afterimage on his mind’s eye.
(This is a new type of beautiful. It's a kind Jean didn't understand before. But he must be starting to understand, now.)
He doesn't --
-- doesn't like it -- doesn't understand -- doesn't...
There's a moth beating its wings against his cheek like a kiss.
He curls up and tries to sleep.
![[lung]](https://d1anwqy6ci9o1i.cloudfront.net/users%2F94%2Ficons%2F8e431906-d75d-4cfe-bdd5-25a78ea1a849_4a3afd4679b0367e54528e0ee5f413bf.jpg "[lung]")
in his dreams he slits his own wrists and it feels like a song
his blood spills out over his lap and soaks his clothes and pools glowing with color on the floor
he kneels in front of him and drinks from one wound, cheeks and lips and chin stained and dripping, and then bares his own wounds and invites him in
He wakes up, chilled to the bone in his sweat and crawling with ants.
He gropes for his computer, squints painfully against the brilliance of the light.
What was that email again...?
from: clover.anytime@shininghour.com
to: body@zlovesyou.red
subject: who are you
do you actually answer emails
He knows better than to ask what are you.
from: body@zlovesyou.red
to: clover.anytime@shininghour.com
subject: re: w-ho are you&
sometimes
guess it must be your lucky day
from: clover.anytime@shininghour.com
to: body@zlovesyou.red
subject: re: who are you
you didn't hurt the tarantula hawk
from: body@zlovesyou.red
to: clover.anytime@shininghour.com
subject: re: who) are you
nah
bugs don't have that ?frequency?
it just would have been mean
from: clover.anytime@shininghour.com
to: body@zlovesyou.red
subject: re: who are you
what's your cult for
from: body@zlovesyou.red
to: clover.anytime@shininghour.com
subject: re: who a*re you
rude
i wouldn't call your house infested
they're fans. they know what's up
from: clover.anytime@shininghour.com
to: body@zlovesyou.red
subject: re: who are you
cultus deorum
from: body@zlovesyou.red
to: clover.anytime@shininghour.com
subject: re: w ho are you
'rude' retracted
what are cults usually for?
from: clover.anytime@shininghour.com
to: body@zlovesyou.red
subject: re: who are you
burnt offerings?
I don't know, it's just me here
from: body@zlovesyou.red
to: clover.anytime@shininghour.com
subject: re: who are you-
i like you
lot of people learn best by doing
from: clover.anytime@shininghour.com
to: body@zlovesyou.red
subject: re: who are you
I belong to somebody