I had caught a praying mantis / grasshopper in a jar. It was grotesquely opaque and had a disproportionately large head with fanglike teeth as the prominent feature. I kept it in a jar filled with water (apparently an amphibious praying mantis) and it was sort of my pet, only it was extremely hostile and evil and halfway dead already. A family member remarked on my prehistoric insect-in-a-glass-jar pet, saying that it needs food, it needs sustenance, and when was the last time I fed it? I didn’t know, I said. But I had this frog or tadpole-like creature, equally as disgusting as the praying mantis, somewhere else in the kitchen. I fed the tadpole to the insect in the jar and they swam through the ancient, dirty, clouded water before finally detecting each other’s presence. In the way rival fish do, they twitched upon touching each other, then were frozen for a second before the mantis pounced on the tadpole and caught its head in his mouth, biting viciously through the neck and swallowing it whole. Then the jar faded out through the atmosphere, the water became murkier and harder to see the insect carnage through.
The scene shifted to my grandmother’s living room, also wildly out of proportion. Everything was too big, too far apart – the carpet was the wrong color, dark blue and orange instead of cream. There was something digital about it. We were in the future, or a holographic vision of the future, or doing an experiment where we could see ourselves in the future – in any event, something having to do with time and space. My family was there in their physical selves, but they were not who they are. They were shells, or characters. We were on a mission, trying to reach something. We traveled along the lines of the rug and the curves of the chair and the lining of plastic bags. But the important point is that cockroaches (though I called them termites) were hatching in pods which I pulled out of my ears. They were born in green husks, and I could tell when they were there because fibrous strands hung out of my ears, which I pulled out. Sometimes they were already alive and moving. Sometimes they were still in husks and green until emerging, sometimes two or three at a time, crawling all over me and falling onto the carpet, disappearing into it and frightening me even more because I couldn’t see them, but knew they were probably scheming and procreating down there.
The cockroaches / termites would crawl out of my ears throughout the story. I was polluted with them.
I was in bed with someone and didn’t dream about the actual act but about afterwards. I got up from the too-large bed with a sparklingly white, fluffy comforter and terribly white sheets, to look in the mirror. I wore dentures over my real teeth, and the dentures were whiter, with differently shaped front teeth. There was something wrong with my own teeth. I went to the mirror feeling something gritty in my mouth. I took off the top set of dentures and looked down. The inside was filled with black, gritty material. Plasticky and gravelly. It was slowly decomposing. Not decomposing, but coming off. I looked again at my own teeth. They were fragile and yellowed. And there was a brown line across the top ones, marking where the dentures were. I tried desperately to pick it off and clean it, only succeeding halfway. My teeth were loose. Especially on the left side. Decaying. And graying.
