Michael Collings - The Slab

She jerked her hand away, the action simultaneously rousing her out of her threatened faint and intensifying her disgust and revulsion.

They were climbing her hand and arm!

Shuddering beyond conscious control, she screamed again and sliced frantically at her arm with her other hand, fingers stiffened into knives, palm slapping viciously against her own flesh, oblivious to pain, oblivious to anything but a burgeoning horror.

Roaches.

Roaches!

She might have been able to handle one. Perhaps. But even one was generally enough to send her screaming for help-please Willard get it out of the tub please Willard flush it down the sink please Willard please Willard.

She might have been able to handle one. On an extraordinary day, two.

Three? Never.

But now the floor seemed alive with them, flooding in and out of the darkness to scuttle with their hideous dry, raspy click from darkness to the eerily distorted square of light from the living room, then back again to the darkness. They jittered across the white plate on the table, they danced in mindless pagan circles around the white plastic cup, they slithered like animated nightmares in and out of the red-and-blue printed plastic bread wrapper that should have been tied with the little yellow metal twist-tie but that Willard had left open. In and out. In and out.

Feeling the hot press of vomit in her stomach, Catherine moved. Unthinking, responsive only to her body’s single command get out of here now! she stepped back into the safety of the living room. Her foot touched carpet, reveled in the sudden sensation of shag loops tickling the sensitive skin. Her hand slapped the dimmer switch and unconsciously twisted it to full. The four bulbs in the kitchen’s overhead fixture glared down balefully, and Catherine took a single long look and screamed for a fourth time and closed her eyes.

By the time Willard reached the living room, Catherine had screamed three more times, each cry short, sharp, pitching upward into registers he had never heard from her. Only seconds had passed, but from the sounds coming from the other end of the house, Willard understood at once that an eternity of subjective time must have separated them.

He careened around the corner.

Catherine was standing on the coffee table-impossibly, on the coffee table, and she wouldn’t even let the boys put their school bags there for fear of scratching it.

Dressed only in her nightgown, dancing barefoot up and down, she flicked at her arms, her neck, her breasts. Willard flashed to a scene he had seen as a child of some English actress-Dame Someone-Or-Other-playing Lady Macbeth in the throes of madness. Her bony fingers had seemed to stretch for miles as she held them rigidly, like radiating spokes from the central hub of her palm, and rubbed hand to hand trying to remove imaginary blood. The image had disturbed him as a child; he had dreamed of it for days. Seeing the image made flesh in his own wife chilled and horrified him.

He rushed to her, grabbed her arms, and tried to lift her down from the table.

She screamed again, flailing out at him and staring with unseeing eyes at the wall behind him. One hand connected with his cheek, hard, and his head rocked back and he saw bright flashes of stars and comets.

Then suddenly, as if someone had turned off a control switch, she slumped. Her dead weight almost threw him off balance, but he managed to stop her from falling. Half carrying her, he swung her around the end of the coffee table and laid her on the sofa. He reached down and lifted her legs onto the cushions as well. For a moment, he thought she had fainted, but when he looked back at her face, her eyes were open. Her lips were bluish, her skin whiter than he had ever seen it. She was clearly in shock of some kind, but at least she was conscious.

“What’s wrong with Mommy?” piped a small voice behind Willard.

He whirled.

The kids-all but Sams-were lined up across the entryway. At any other time, Willard would have been bemused to see that they had automatically arranged themselves by size-Will, then Burt, then Suze. But right now that was the last thing he noted.

“Nothing. Go on back to bed,” he said, trying to keep his own panic out of his voice. No use getting the kids more frightened than they already were.

“But…”

That was from Will. He considered himself pretty much a man, and all too often irritated Willard by offering to help in situations he would do best to stay out of.

“Now,” Willard said.

“Yes, Dad.” The boy’s voice was low and frightened, but Willard was too concerned with Catherine to pay much attention. Her skin felt cold and papery, and she was starting to shake. Willard suddenly became aware as well that he was bare-legged and barefoot, that the air was frighteningly cold in spite of the hummm that told him Catherine had turned the heater on.

He twisted his head around. The kids hadn’t moved.

“Wait,” he said quietly. “Will, get me some blankets from the linen closet.”

Will nodded and ducked into the darkened hallway. A second later, a light glowed from somewhere, and a second after that, Willard heard a door open with a hollow squeak.

“Burt.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Get me Mommy’s pillow.”

Burt disappeared as well. Suze took a step or two closer. Her thumb was in her mouth, and her wide-staring eyes seemed the size of quarters, large and innocent and frightened.

“It’s okay, sugar. Mommy’s just…she’s just real tired.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes, hon.” He answered absently, not taking his eyes from Catherine’s face.

“What’s that?”

“What’s what, hon?” After living for so long with four children, Willard could handle this kind of question-answer dialogue without even hesitating.

“There.”

“Where?”

“There.” Suze’s voice had that oh-Daddy-you-can-be-so-silly-sometimes lilt that he liked to hear when they were teasing each other but that now seemed horribly out of place.

“Where?” he repeated, not taking his eyes off his wife’s still face, her sallow cheeks, her dry lips that had begun moving as if she were trying to murmur something.

“There. On Mommy’s foot.”

Catherine screamed. She sat bolt upright, her foot extended so stiffly that Willard half believed he heard tendons and bones shatter from the pressure. Suze screamed as well, and Will and Burt burst into the room as if they knew Nazi hordes had descended on the Huntley home and only they could combat them…with maybe just a little help from Superman or Spiderman or Iron Man or even Indiana Jones. Willard grabbed at Catherine’s foot.

There was a sticky-looking smudge of something dark and crushed and partly fluid pasted on her instep.

An insect.

No, he realized with a flash of understanding that answered Suze’s question as well as many unspoken ones of his own. It was not an insect, no.

It was a cockroach.

He grabbed a tissue from the box on the end table and swiped at the sole of Catherine’s foot, wiped again and again to remove all of the squashed guts he could, then folded the thin white tissue in on itself to hide as much of the oily dark brown stain as possible, and thrust the soiled mess at Will.

“Toss this.” Will took it gingerly between finger and thumb. Willard watched his son disappear into the dark kitchen, all the while holding Catherine tightly.

He whispered reassuringly to her, “It’s all right, baby, it’s all right. Everything’s under control. Relax.”

He felt weirdly as if he were coaching her through the Lamaze births of each of their four children-all the stress and fear and pain compressed into a single trauma that he was only now beginning to comprehend. “Relax, Catherine,” he whispered soothingly.