Nightmare Magazine, May 2025
Nadia suffers from a severe bedbug infestation in her duplex apartment, but despite months of searching, she cannot find a single specimen to show her landlord as proof—required by her lease to authorize extermination. Her body is covered in clusters of welts that itch relentlessly, yet her sheets remain clean and her traps empty. The isolation of the pandemic has shrunk her world to data entry work and unsuccessful attempts to connect with her distant mother, who now focuses entirely on Nadia’s pregnant sister.
Desperate for evidence, Nadia decides to use herself as bait, lying naked on her stripped mattress with tweezers and a mason jar, waiting to catch the bedbugs in the act of feeding. She falls asleep and wakes to find nothing. Her frustration leads her to wonder if the infestation might originate from her elderly neighbor Mrs. Papadakis’s side of the duplex. When Papadakis leaves for her weekly card game, Nadia breaks into the apartment to search for bedbugs.
While examining under Papadakis’s bed, Nadia hears a noise and discovers an attic space she didn’t know existed—one that doesn’t exist above her own apartment. A young woman named Eleni descends from the attic, claiming to be Papadakis’s granddaughter. Eleni bears the same distinctive bedbug bites that cover Nadia’s body, and this shared affliction creates an immediate bond between them.
Eleni invites Nadia into the attic, where they drink port together. The conversation grows increasingly strange as Eleni knows intimate details about Nadia’s life—her desperate voicemails to her mother, her loneliness, her fears. Eleni insists that the bedbugs haven’t weakened Nadia but transformed her into someone stronger, more willing to take what she needs. When Nadia demands to leave, she discovers she cannot open the trapdoor.
Eleni removes her bathrobe to reveal a body almost entirely covered in bedbug welts of varying ages, creating a landscape of inflamed skin. What follows is a disturbing sexual encounter where Eleni kisses each of Nadia’s bites, intensifying the itching to unbearable levels. The story culminates in a surreal, horrific climax as Eleni’s tongue—revealed to be proboscis-like—extends deep into Nadia’s throat to reach bites “even in those caverns of the body that cannot be felt or seen.”
The story ends with a meditation on the bedbug’s perspective: after feeding, engorged and immobile, the insect experiences a moment of complete surrender to fate, having sacrificed its wings through evolution for this single ecstatic experience of fullness and vulnerability. The narrative suggests Nadia has been absorbed into this same cycle of parasitic intimacy, her isolation and desperate need for connection exploited by something far more sinister than ordinary bedbugs.
Ian Muneshwar is a Boston-based writer and teacher. His short fiction has sold to venues such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Black Static, and has been selected for Year’s Best Weird Fiction and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. He has taught writing in the Transitional Year Program at Brandeis University, in the Experimental College at Tufts University, and in Clarion West’s online workshops. You can find out more about his work at ianmuneshwar.com.