– she likes the way it feels in hers, soft and spongy. Through slitted eyes, sticky with sleep, she watches the clock tick over to 3 a.m. Disappointed, she finds herself alone in the familiar surroundings of her bedroom. ‘I can’t feel. I feel a light dull pain in my head.’ Noni tries turning. She prefers lying on her right side – flipping the end corner of the doona and hanging her feet out. But she can’t turn. She tries and tries. Fifty times. One hundred, but like a pendulum, all she manages is to rock back and forth on her back. ‘What is going on? Am I dreaming? she gazes at her doona on the verge of slipping. Noni wants to reach for it. She wills her hand to reach out and grab it, but instead, a spindly hairy leg erupts from her left side spasmodically. ‘That’s not possible. My mind has finally abandoned me. The burdens of the past few months have caught up with me.’ Her eyes close. She doesn’t let go of his hand. When I first met Sam, I had a persistent headache. I went from doctor to doctor, but no one ever made a diagnosis. The optometrist told me I had perfect vision, twenty-twenty, which was very rare. And then, we got married and, my headaches went away. I wondered, was it loneliness all along? We made a home in an old warehouse converted into apartments near the wharves in Woolloomooloo. It had good light for Sam’s indoor garden and a view of Sydney harbour. I liked the salty stillness. We spent Sundays eating bacon sarnies, and pancakes rolled like fat cigars covered in sugar and lemon. I asked him, why do we make homes? He told me the answer is, I think, simple. To keep everything you love indoors and everything that you don’t outside. But what happens when there is an incursion? We had rats in the apartment. An abomination. But, better than cockroaches. Still, I don’t like rats. Call it a thing from my past that is hard to explain. Is it that I don’t really like? I don’t really like that we have rats, and they were everywhere. At first, our cat Megs cavorted with the rats until she grew bored. We laid in bed, listening to her crunch down on their bones. Although I preferred it to the nighttime skittle-scuttling of cockroaches; Sam convinced me to send her temporarily to live with my mother. We bought some traps, and Sam learnt rats preferred peanut butter to cheese. It was still morning – a little later – watery sunlight slants through the black framed window. Breathing heavily. Noni’s breath falls from her lips (labrum and labium), and she slowly opens her eyes. ‘I’ve had these dis-associations before,’ and she felt confident the fantasy would dissolve. The low-hanging clouds added to the biliously melancholic mood in the room, and raindrops splattered audibly against the windowpane. Noni inched her way towards the bedhead, and lifting her head, she slowly lowered her eyes, processing the patterned square segments of her (thorax) torso and curvaceous. ‘Is that an abdomen? I am. I am a cockroach.’ Her legs began flickering, jittering in anxiety-driven back and forth motions like she’s running on the spot. She slid back down to her original location. Cautiously turning her head towards the bedside table, she wonders is it possible to negotiate the buttons on her mobile to call Sam. Sighing heavily. She fades into unconsciousness. She doesn’t let go of his hand. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, we find an abandoned piano on the street. Sam composes short, sweet verses and plays after dinner. I watch him play. It is the happiest I’ve seen him for so long. But then. The piano is taken over. Tiny black cockroaches scuttle in between and under the keys. He douses them in a stream of poison, but the damage is done. We return it back to the street. The summer I fell in love with Sam, we rented the falling-down house at Mermaid Beach. We held each other close, my head on his chest. Sam was the kindest man I’d met. But then it changed. I un-kind him. She doesn’t let go of his hand. When Noni comes to, she remembers, and she thinks, ‘why did he ruin my best thing?’ Then a sensation under her ribs (shell), not exactly pain but discomfort like standing under a cold shower, stirs her. She tries stretching one of her legs, but they all begin to flap uncontrollably. ‘I’m going to have to learn to control these legs.’ She looked across at the clock. It was fast approaching 1 p.m. ‘What is this other-worldly nightmare I am in? Do I worry? Or will it pass?’ Surprisingly she was feeling lethargic for being in bed for half the day, but at the same time, she was hungry. She would need arms to eat. ‘I must try to get out of bed and make my way to the fridge.’ She tried sitting up but forgot she no longer had a human body. She then tried shuffling down the bed but too impatient for the sluggardly pace, she hurled herself forward and bumped violently against the bottom of the bed frame. She screamed (squealed) out in pain. She remembered the bottom of the cockroach was the most sensitive part of its body. Her mother always told her to face her fears. But to do that, she had to name it. Re-evaluating her plan, Noni decided to guide the top of her body out of bed guardedly; she shuffled her robust girth towards the left side. Once her head was overhanging out in the open space, she became very apprehensive. ‘What if I damage my head? Do I risk an irreversible injury? Indeed cockroaches can live without a head, but human beings can’t.’ She pauses. So recently, I’ve been having this weird recurring dream. Sam breaks up with me over a degustation meal with matching wine, saying wait for the last dish. But the last dish never comes. I always wake up. I mention this to him, and he gets agitated, saying nobody is breaking up with anyone. But he did, we did. A high pitch squealing – uncontrollable, painful squealing filled the room. It startled Noni. ‘My voice is shriller than I intend. Is that really how I sound?’ Noni could hear the similarities to what she thought was her voice but realised the words she’d spoken sounded nothing like words. She did the only thing she could – she laughed because ‘I could die laughing here.’ Noni slowly moved back to the middle of the bed – she looked across to the clock – 5 p.m. behind the clock was a photo of Sam sitting on the stairs in front of the Opera House taken the year before he left her before he met the yoga instructor from Byron Bay. The discomfort continued. She knows what it is. She could avert her eyes away from him, but she doesn’t. She feels something terrible erupt deep inside of her. The world is full of monsters, the wreckage of lonely souls, with open mouths waiting to be filled with love. She closes her eyes, ‘You’re beautiful. But what I mean is, I’m dying.’
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