The Larva Room

AKA my writing room. I was too embarrassed to write about this before, thinking you might pass some sort of judgment on my housekeeping abilities, or worse, Jo.’s, but the truth is my office has bugs, not just bugs, but pre-bugs.

Shortly after I returned from my trip to the States last month, I went into my office one morning to get back to work on the novel after a three week break. I opened the curtains. I plugged in my computer (the battery now lasts about five minutes before dying), and, as usually happens when I first sit down to write, I stared off into space. Or rather, I looked around the room, thinking about one thing or another, until my eyes settled on the base of the curtain where I saw something gray clinging to the fabric. Was it a hairball of cat fur? I got up from my seat to take a closer look.

Oh, how I wish it had been a hairball. Instead I found a cocoon.

I opened the curtain a little wider. There was another cocoon. And another. Six on one half of the curtain, two on the other.

I was utterly skeeved out. As one friend noted, don’t they just open up into pretty butterflies? Okay, yes, but eight hairy cocoons holding dark slimy budding creatures inside my little sanctuary are not pretty creatures. It means my room is dirty. And moist. Because don’t cocoons like dark, dirty, moist places?

I texted J in a panic. In his response he seemed infinitely more calm than I thought he had the right to be; he told me to get out the bug spray, the rubber gloves, and a whole lot of paper towel. Which, feeling only slightly absurd, I did.

I check the curtains daily. The cocoons have not returned—at least not on the fabric. I found a small one this morning on the runner track the curtains hang from. I know you’d all like to see pictures, but it’s just too gross for me to document. I’m embarrassed by the cocoons.

The other morning while I was brushing my teeth, J called me out of the bathroom. “Do you want to see something gross?” Obviously I don’t want to see something gross, but it’s impossible to turn this question down. As soon as I said, “No,” I was running out of the bathroom before J could destroy whatever it was and I lost my chance to see. I found him studying something on the wall of—where else—my office. There were small little specks of bug clustered in the middle of the wall. At first I took them for the tiny little ants that we occasionally see on our deck devouring a dead cockroach (our apartment is awesome, really), and so I asked, “What are they eating?”

“They’re not ants,” J answered. “They’re larvae.”



And indeed they weren’t moving and eating like the little ants do, they were little tiny larvae that would soon erupt into I don’t want to know what.



The rest of the walls were clear, but when I came home later that afternoon, two more larvae spots had sprung to life on the opposite wall.

Now the whole room requires a routine check for living things of any kind. I just hope my writing flourishes so well in that room.