They came at night — a great pilgrimage of arthropods. They poured in from faucets, electrical outlets, light fixtures. They squirmed through hairline fractures in the walls, making their way from the dark hidden places of the cottage and coming together, at last, finding one another, at last, in the crib. It was the place where, one after another, the babies had not slept.
They were never still. The mass of translucent appendages in the crib was forever rearranging itself, forever coming undone and remaking itself. She tried to make sense of the frenzy. Don’t they need sleep? Do centipedes sleep? Perhaps they move until they die, squirming from cradle to grave, drawing from some secret reserve that burns bright and then burns dim and then smolders. Hadn’t she once read that sharks need to keep moving or else drown? It had something to do with the design of their gills, their circulatory system. “Do you have lungs?” she asked the hive. “How do you breathe?” No answer—only the strange music of delicate legs against brittle carapace. It was a dry sound: dead leaves in the wind; sandpaper against bone.
She spent her hours in the rocking chair, unwinding the knitwear. It was the chair where, one after another, the babies had not nursed. She unmade the scarves and sweaters and swaddling blankets. She unmade the mittens and socks and tiny toques. She braided the yarn into a long rope and hid it beneath a loose floorboard, along with the knife.
She left the windows open, day or night. It made no difference — the same blackness through the panes at all hours. The turning of the planet was measured, instead, by flying insects: wasps during the day; moths at night. Whatever segmented body flew too close to the crib would be consumed by the seething mass. Good, then, she thought. They need to eat, after all. They must hunger.
She heard babies crying, sometimes. Through the open windows, sometimes, she heard them crying in the darkness, their tiny voices straining for purchase amidst the drone of cicadas or bullfrogs. If the sound was loud enough to pinpoint, she liberated the knife from the sub-flooring and added another X to the map she had carved onto her stomach — an intricate lattice of raised scar tissue.
He moved through the cottage draped in an aura of discordant noise. Wherever he went the floorboards moaned or cupboard doors slammed or tools rattled in their box. He distilled spirits in mason jars in the basement and came home late at night smelling of gardenias. He trapped unfamiliar animals in the woods and left their carcasses on the counter; in time, she learned to brine the meat in milk to lessen the stench of ammonia. He moved through the cottage according to his whims and she was careful to avoid his shadow — it might leave its stain on her as it had the kitchen table, the cellar door, the bed.
They lived under the same roof, shuffling about in the same dust, shitting in the same hole. But no word had passed between them since the day he had extinguished the sun for her. A memory: blood pooling around her hips and she had sworn she would go after it, this time, find where he had hidden it, this time, bring it back to the crib, this time — even if the forest claimed her, she would go out there and find it. And he had stuffed his mouth with raw placenta and placed his hand over her eyes and made her blind to the outside world, draped a black shroud over everything beyond the four walls of the cottage. And then he had ferried the potential usurper away, out into the blackness.
How long had it been?
There were more centipedes with every passing day. She set traps for the mice, cast their bodies into the seething hive. She collected spiders and woodlice from the ducts. She massaged her menstrual blood into kitchen scraps and bits of old leather. The hive was always hungry.
They never stopped moving. Like her, they never slept. Like her, they made no distinction between day and night. Hadn’t she once read that most centipedes are blind? “How do your eyes work?” she asked. “Do you have eyes?” No answer, only the faint sound of tears through the open window. “How do you hunt in the dark?”
When he was away, she sang her songs to her hive. The old songs, the old stories: that village upstream from them; the god they kept chained to cinder blocks in the depths of the bog; the trinkets and coins and jewelry they presented as offerings; the divine voice carried to the surface in bubbles of methane. Sometimes, as she sang, the mass of writhing limbs found itself in the shape of a child for a brief instant before dissociating, succumbing to disorder and anxiety. Perhaps by chance, she thought. Perhaps by chance.
The river is cold and deep enough to drown a child. He had said this to her, once. Once, he had said this to her and she’d believed him. Stupid. But that was long ago, before he had stolen the light from her. She knew better now. Now, in the dark, she could hear things once hidden from her: the rain on the water; the worms tunnelling through the foundation; the babies crying in the forest.
She waited until he was drunk and the groan of the bedsprings pronounced him asleep. And she took the knife and the rope of braided yarn from their hiding spot. And she stooped over the crib, lifted the hive in her arms, felt its desperate throbbing against her breast. And she carried it from the nursery into the bedroom, walking on her toes, careful to avoid the creaky floorboards. And she laid it down beside his slumbering silhouette and she kissed it. They were always hungry — they would know what do to.
She tied one end of the rope to the doorknob and the other, like a noose, around her throat. And then she set out into darkness, coils of rope unspooling behind her, recording the way back home. She set out on all fours, crawling, feeling her way across the forest floor with delicate fingers, following the map of her flesh.
