Insects pattern the walls of the room as if they wish to be wallpaper:  oblong bugs, small and dark, with wings built for jumping; timid ladybirds, nestled where the wall joins the ceiling; multitudinous, disparately colored moths, furry bodied, floating towards the glass lighted bulbs.  Only silent insects dwell here - unlike the swarm that plagued my home the October the Indian Summer haunted New York, when carelessness for taking out the trash invited the thousand yellow bodied flies to 2FA.  They ringed tribal dances in hoards around the fluorescent ceiling fixture for weeks, humming like death or a factory whole of machinery, the kind that catches children’s hands in the warp and steals their fingers, hungry.  My hands, clothes, furniture, and hair smelled of RAID for weeks, though men couldn’t smell it when they leaned in for a kiss.  I vacuumed flies from the ceiling, swatted them from the bookcases with rolled up love letters…

But here there are no flies.  It’s just the moths, decked in fur coats, and the lucky lady bugs and small black oblong insects I haven’t got a name for.  Years ago, I came home to this bed and crawled into the sheets to be stung by a wasp that had burrowed there for winter.  I peeled away the sheets in fear and courage of its companions, but the bed was empty, and I was alone.