This morning I made my way up the narrow steep stairs to my attic office and thought, as I cleared the top and saw no bat shit or mouse shit, How pleasant it is to live pest free. I thought those words and advanced towards my desk, where I sat down. But as I sat down I saw first one, then two flies, house flies, black and convivial. They landed near me, but would not allow themselves to be killed and one, having made several escapes, landed on top of my monitor where he sat and rubbed his arms together, taunting me.

Then I noticed, on the floor, a mass of tiny ants swarming, as ants do when they are devouring something tasty, and then I realized that there was another fly, who had fallen there, and was being eaten. Several hours later, having eating what they could off him where he lay, they departed, leaving his carcass behind.

I used to think that I had infestations, I had a mouse problem or bat problem or ant problem or a roach problem, but only recently, and only thanks to my house, which, over time, is losing its status as a thing apart from me, in the way that my body, as it fails me, becomes my whole self as it wasn’t when it worked and I could do what I wanted with it, without thinking about what it was I wanted to do, have I realized that I live surrounded by teeming and buzzing and crapping armies, they are all around me, they run through my walls and up my siding and they scamper on the roof. Some lie sleeping above where I lie sleeping, although not, actually, while I lie sleeping, but the point is that they are there, breathing in and out, fulfilling their purpose as living beings, as I fulfill mine.

The universe is an infestation.

The exterminator returns this week.

This is a story about a sink that was too small and a car that whined in the cold, the boy who didn’t want to grow and the boy who learned to read. The boy who didn’t want to grow would only wear old clothes, nothing new, and the boy who learned to read loved to read the word drool, and could spell, when it was spelled out loud near him, the words dump and asshole. They had wonderful times in the house with the bats and the mice and the rats and the spiders, killing things and listening to them scratch in the walls at night, except that the boys slept soundly, on their backs, their arms thrown out, and never heard the mice at night. Only their father, the man who could hear the beating of enormous moth wings, heard the mice in the walls at night. Their mother, who did not hear the mice in the walls at night, did hear their father at night. Their father had holes in his shoes and their mother had one silver hair and an unreliable lower back and had somehow lost her serve, and even though she couldn’t hear the mice in the walls at night she could hear the people on the other side of the tennis court telling each other what they should do with her second serve, since there was so little on it.

But this isn’t just her story, this is their story, the story of the sink and the car and the two boys, one who didn’t want to grow old, but needed new shoes, and one who learned to read, the story of the animals outside the house, which collected nuts, and inside the house, which made noises in the walls. It is the story of the train ride home, and orange cones on the road. It is the story of everything, even of the stories we haven't told.