For Experience Writing Halloween Prompt: CREEPY CRAWLIES

Owen lives alone on the top floor in a small studio  apartment  called the Wetmore House.

The walls in his room are painted light green, so it’ looks like you’re underwater or maybe in a forest when the Sun shines through his curtainless windows. There’s a wooden kitchen table near his bed with one chair pushed under it, there’s a placard that says, ” Help Wanted ” taped to the closet door.

Owen works as a phlebotomist and he is hardly ever home. He works, he dines out, he goes to the library and sometimes to the park and stays out until bedtime.

Sometimes he sits and  listens to an old – fashioned radio in a white case  with a face that glows in the dark.

Owen lives a solitary, quiet life.

Even though he doesn’t jump into conversations, he doesn’t shove his way to the front of lines or cut people off in traffic.

Owen bugs people and when he is too close to people they will back up and move away from him.

When he’s at work and drawing blood, people don’t like to look down at  him. They turn in the opposite direction so that they don’t have to face Owen.

” He gives me the creeps. ” Owen’s mother said as she held him for the first time after he was born. She held him out to the nurse who took Owen in her arms and as quickly as she could she put him into his clear plastic bassinet and wheeled him back to the nursery.

At night, before he crawls into bed, Owen fluffs up the pillow next to the one he uses. He smooths the sheets, then pads around to his side of the bed and falls into it with a little sigh. He lies there for a moment, and then closes his eyes.

Owen Cox is asleep by 9:00 p.m. sharp every night.

Owen has trained himself to fall asleep without turning or thrashing around. He has taught himself to remain as rigid and stiff as a corpse in full rigor mortis.

If Owen takes a jagged, deep breath or jumps up too quickly, it makes things—well, messy. Smooshy, sticky, and unpleasant.

By midnight, Owen’s room, which had been silent, starts to wake up.

It starts with ticks, small clicks, and the sound of little legs desperately trying to make their way across an ocean of bed linens.

His walls begin to fill up with the shadows of bugs—and there are many different kinds of insects trying to find a spot in Owen’s room.

Remember, Owen’s room is small.

Some of the bugs are small and round. Some are long and have wispy antennae. There are spiders, and there are mites that move like fog rolling up from the ocean.

The bugs—millions of flying, crawling, limping, and rolling bugs—pour from Owen’s bed onto the floor and out of his window. Some scuttle under his front door; others fly down the drains in the bathroom and kitchen.

And then Owen is in his room alone until dawn.

Before sunrise, the bugs make their way back into Owen’s room and up onto his bed. They scuttle across the pillow, sheets, and blankets, and then they crawl up onto Owen’s face. They make their way into his ears, the corners of his eyes, up his nose, and down his throat. Through it all, Owen remains asleep, hardly taking a breath.

The insects that call Owen home are grateful for that because most of the time, for reasons they just don’t understand, Owen kind of bugs them.