#also i just found a fucking silverfish in my bed

[strawberrymeatloaf]

Y'all ever stare at a little speck of dirt on ur bed to see if it moves or is that just a me thing?

[dramatic-dolphin]

why am i always the one who has to see Creatures in this apartment

[cavitymagazine]

𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐰𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐦𝐲 𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞

Mom had begun to cry in silverfish, those insects named for the way their bodies seemed to swim across kitchen tile in a steely glint unique to armor or else fish scales; when she wept they poured from her eyes in the place of tears, six-legged and writhing all over her face. Why she cried so often and lately I did not know. In her retirement she had become fascinated with immortality, spending her social security checks on powders and pills, saying things about cell death, how if you kept shedding the details of yourself you could live forever, so long as the sickness drifted dust-like out and off your skin, so long as you continued cycling regularly through the decayed layers of yourself. To me it all sounded like so much dirty laundry. After a glass of wine, then, she’d bring up the story about how some priest sixty years ago had ruined her youth when he stuck his tongue down her ear, wiggled it around in there like an overfed slug. All the while as she talked silverfish tinkling against the counter before they scuttled off into silence.

We lived in the marsh. At night there would be the smashed egg smell of sulfur. There would be strange lights shifting on the horizon. There was only one job you could get in town, and that was at the mattress factory in the very center of everything. Most days looking at its smokestacks and turbines and cargo trucks spewing as ventricles I wondered where does a body begin—for it seems to me it must start with a heart before all else, the bones and meat growing around it to fit like petals encompassing a bud. Inside the factory our sweat boiled. My shifts were corridored by yellow warning tape on the floor between the machines and a screeching plugged by the foam we had been mandated to jam into our ears. 

Our product was made in America, as we were in America, making it. The metals and parts we used were from China or else Vietnam or whatever corner of the earth steel is oozed from. This was a key selling point, the salesmen said, this made in America stuff—they would tell it to customers on polished sales floors wearing their polished shoes and this would transmogrify these customers into buyers. 

“A customer becomes a buyer,” the salesmen would explain to us in corporate meetings, our bodies crunched against foldout chairs, “when a relationship is built.”

And then the conveyor belt that was the week, Monday through Friday, machines trembling, needles automated and sewing, my sweat following me into my sleep. Once when I was on lunch I ran into one of these salesmen, or I guess I should call her a saleswoman, in the breakroom where she started a conversation with me. She started it the way you would a match, like an idle flick of the wrist. 

“I had to bring my car to the mechanic this morning,” she said, darting around like a mosquito. “It was making strange noises. Turns out there’s a whole family of mice living in the engine!” She smiled glassily, pausing in the middle of loading the coffee maker. “I bet it’s like a Disney musical in there…all the little forest critters singing and dancing…throwing a party! Ratatouille!”

The mattress coils we made in the factory were renowned for how much crushing they could withstand. They could be crushed one hundred billion times and still spring back to shape. In fact, during tests we had to turn the hydraulic crushing machines off, just because things reached a point where it was obvious the coils would not break and to try any further would be a simple mathematical loss of time and money. 

So, the priest’s tongue in my mother’s ear, that pink slug. I could understand slugs, at least: my own life was detestable, yet I managed to endure it enough to keep trailing the mucus of myself everywhere I went. All the guys I worked with had a wife or a kid and in both situations at least a girlfriend. When I imagined these relationships, semblances of a family, they appeared to me in my head like a manmade star in those science fiction movies, metal constructs planet-sized and still half-finished. Myself, I was always roaming bars and backroads laden with dirt. I’d had my allotment of intimacy, quick suction of lips, a rasp like something slipping down a sink drain. A customer became a buyer when a relationship was built. I felt myself as a terrestrial mollusk, my shell the bathroom stall at work I could duck into once every two hours during my approved bathroom break.

Meanwhile Mom was having ideas about repainting the inside of the house. She moved all the furniture out and onto the mud of the front yard. She wrapped every last surface in plastic, the stairs and counters and railings. By this point her eyes had vanished into insect nests, dual pools of writhing silver. “What do you think about this color,” she said, holding up a bucket of cement as bugs dripped down her cheeks.

At work I was promoted to delivery driver, the daily factory hum translated to the low grumble of a truck. I still sweated, but it was inside people’s homes, airy spaces with sunlight and windows as I jammed a mattress up a staircase. I saw the world outside my town’s sludge, marsh reeds giving way to gold-tinged fields and plains, and perhaps this made me greedy. I wanted to be everywhere as a cancer.

In the factory parking lot I encountered the saleswoman again. I offered her a ride. We fucked in the back of my truck, atop shrink-wrapped mattresses whose coils could get crushed continually and always and then pop back to life, retaining their shape. When I was younger there was an arcade now boarded up and filmed with dust, and I would go there to play a game called Whack-A-Mole, in which moles would pop out of holes and you had to hit them, suppress them back down into the plastic machine meant to represent earth and dirt.

Wind caught in the cellophane sheets of my home. All night you could hear the air trapped there and crinkling. Mom’s painting was erratic, half-hazard smears crumbling off the walls. The bugs had spread from her eyes and taken free reign of the place, swarming colonies in every room, and I woke most mornings to their crawling on my skin, although otherwise they did not make a single sound in all their scuttling.

“The problem with cells,” Mom said as I stomped in from another shift, “is each individual unit is an entire prison in and of itself. The military industrial prison complex of the self compartmentalized, partitioned into the four walls that surround you and the room that is your entire life. So if you can destroy the cell…break down the membranes…everything bleeding and oozing together and into unity. No more walls. Life, then, freed and unbounded…eternal…” 

I was taken aback to hear her speak. She had not talked in months, and her voice had obtained the frayed quality of torn paper. When the other delivery drivers talked at work, it was all the same, a recycled joke about how it was someone’s job to sleep on all the mattresses we hauled, to test them for quality. “Wouldn’t that job be nice,” we would laugh to each other, jamming a bed up yet another staircase. It was also probably somewhere someone’s job to design child-sized crash test dummies and then launch those dolls into fiery car explosions, but I did not mention that subject. There were a lot of things, I noticed, that I let go unsaid in a day.

Another promotion and I was a salesman, working in coolly air conditioned stores, hair slicked and wearing even a tie. I spoke rapidly and at all times, firing off mattress dimensions and coil count and foam measurements. I only sweated then in my sleep, entombed by insects. I learned how to make my smile dazzle, having gained the unfortunate tendencies of sustaining eye contact and layering my voice hypnotically, and this resulted in sales, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of mattresses sold. I was building relationships. I was better off than I had been on any factory floor.

What was next? Life seemed infinite as the interstate. I could be a regional district manager, a CEO. I explained enthusiastically to customers that our mattresses were special because of the coil, American-made and resilient, designed to withstand millions of pounds of hydraulic crushing, springing always back into shape. I did not mind the silverfish so much anymore, for they wrapped my body like blankets. I could not locate my Mom, searching all the cabinets and corners of the house, shouting out for her in the middle of a night. The painting was left half-finished. Sheets of cellophane fluttered in the hallways like curtains. I was surprised to find myself so old and suddenly.

[Author Bio]

Nathaniel Duggan lives in Maine. He can be found on Twitter @asdkfjasdlfjd.  Website: https://neutralspaces.co/nathanielduggan/

[thefloorisbalaclava]

hi lovie how r u? I dunno if u r taking requests, but maybe... I was thinking something where Javier starts to get a little bit cold towards y/n cos he saw horrible things that the narcos, pablo sicarios, did to some woman's relative to some other guys, including to Connie's cat and he's scared as hell they do something to y/n but when he realizes she's so sad and down, peña stars to show little acts of love in secrecy, like a note, one flower, a ring, just I don't know some angst and fluffy sorry for this long ass ask. thank you for your good posts ♡

Pairing: Javier Peña x F!Reader

Warnings: Angst, hurt/comfort, mentions of violence, flashbacks, trauma, mentions of sex

A/N: My friend and I have been talking about Javi a lot lately so you sent this at the perfect time! Thanks!

[Javier Peña masterlist]

“Are you coming to see me today?” you asked Javier over the phone. He looked around the office then lowered his voice.

“I’ll see what I can do.” He regretted it almost immediately.

“I haven’t seen you in a week, Javi,” you reminded him. It was becoming plainly obvious that he was trying to avoid you or at least distance himself from you. What had you done wrong?

“I’ve been...busy,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a lie but just a few weeks ago, he had made time to see you almost every day.

“Right,” you sighed. You looked at the bags of groceries you bought to make dinner for you and him tonight. “Whatever.”

Javier sighed loudly. “I’ll call you later. I-” You hung up before he could finish whatever it was he was going to say. He slammed the phone down on the receiver and put his head in his hands. “Fuck,” he whispered.

He knew getting involved with you was a bad idea and not because you weren’t good or anything like that. If anything, you were too good. Fucking perfect. You were his safe haven, his softness, his saving grace. And that was the problem. You saved him but what if he couldn’t save you? He had seen what could happen to you. If anyone wanted to hurt him, you’re the first person they would go after and he couldn’t have that. He experienced firsthand with someone he loved and, God, he couldn’t live through that again. So he had to leave you.

Because he loved you.

You stared at him in awe as he stood in front of you and told you this. Then you scoffed and turned away. It was all you could do to stop yourself from slapping him in his stupid, beautiful face.

“To protect me?” you repeated bitterly. “Just say that you don’t wanna be with me and stop using work as an excuse.”

“I’m not here to argue with you,” he said calmly.

“No, you’re only here to break my heart,” you snapped. “Well...you can go.”

“Okay but-”

“No! Just go...please.” You couldn’t look at him mostly because you were so angry but also because you didn’t want him to see the tears in your eyes. “I’m sure there’s a woman out there who will happily welcome you back into her bed.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said and finally you whipped around to look at him.

“Fuck you, Javier.” You didn’t care if he saw the tears now. “If you’re being cold and indifferent to try and make this easier...fine. It worked. Get out. I never want to see you again.” You stormed away only to grab the pack of cigarettes he left on your table for when he came over. “Don’t forget these.” You threw the pack, hitting him directly in the face.

He scoffed and picked the cigarettes up then turned to the door. He stopped as if he was going to say something but then you heard the door close behind you and he was gone. Only when he was back in his car did he let his emotions show. His eyes filled with tears and he hit the steering wheel over and over again before putting his head against it. He tried lighting a cigarette but his hands shook so badly that it was impossible. Another burst of anger as he threw his lighter somewhere in his car.

He had to do it. Right? He had to. He couldn’t stand having another one of those dreams about finding Helena only for her to change into you when he got close enough.

There were plenty of nights where he would sit outside your place in his car just to make sure you got home okay. He was dreading the day he saw a man following you inside. He also wondered if you got any of the notes and gifts he left for you. This was the safest thing for now. 

You sighed and rolled your eyes when you found another note from Javier slipped under your door, another little gift for you on the table, and a bottle of your favorite wine. The first time it happened you could only laugh to yourself when you remembered that he still had a key to your place.

As always, you threw everything in the garbage.

Except for the notes. For some reason you couldn’t part with them. Maybe because they smelled like him--that faint smell of his soap mixed with the smell of his cigarettes. Maybe because when you read them you did so in his voice. That goddamn voice of his and how it could change so quickly. Sometimes it was sweet and welcoming with just enough rasp to give him that air of that bad boy type. Other times it was low and growly which was usually reserved for when he was inside you, talking dirty to you, calling you a bad girl but how you were so good for taking him so well.

You closed your eyes and bit your lip at the thought.

“Enough,” you said quietly, walking over to grab that unopened bottle of wine from the top of the trash.

Some nights you felt like you were being watched when you walked home from work but not in a threatening way. If Javier was watching you he kept himself hidden well because you could never find his car when you stopped to look for it.

You touched the necklace you wore as you turned the corner to your apartment and Javier watched. It made him sit up a bit when he noticed you were wearing it. He waited until he was sure you were settled down--he knew you had to ear dinner, shower, then watch a little television before you really got ready for bed.

Then he called.

“Hello.” You answered on the third ring like you always did. He didn’t know what to say. Hey, I’m sorry I was an idiot? Hey, I’ve been watching you come home every night like some creep? “Hello?” He could hear the slight annoyance in your tone.

“I-It’s me. It’s Javi,” he finally said.

“Oh...”

“Don’t hang up!” He added quickly.

“I want my key back,” you said.

“So you’ve been getting them?” he asked.

“Getting what?” You looked down at the necklace then touched it.

“The gifts I’ve been leaving you.” He looked up at your window and could see your silhouette through the curtains.

“I throw them all away,” you lied.

“I don’t blame you.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I miss you.”

You were quiet for a long time--afraid to speak because you knew what would happen if you did. “I miss you too,” you cried, sniffling quietly. Javier’s heart ached. He wanted nothing more than to run up those stairs and into your arms. But as soon as he closed his eyes he could only see you lying there, beaten and bloody, all because he couldn’t leave you alone.

“I’m gonna hold you again one day,” he said. “I promise. We’re both gonna get the fuck outta here...so far away. No one will be able to find us.” His throat tightened as his own tears threatened to spill over. “Look out the window...”

“What?”

“Just look out the window.” He looked up at your window just in time to see you carefully pull the curtains back slightly. “Hey hermosa.”

“Hey handsome,” you said tearfully.

“No llores,” he said although there was a tear rolling down his cheek now. “Please, don’t cry.”

“Promise me you’ll hold me again, you’ll kiss me again, you’ll make love to me again,” you cried.

“I promise. I swear to you.” He looked up and saw that you put your hand against the window so he put his against the car window. “I love you.”

“I love you too...you asshole.” You laughed through your tears and it made him smile.

“Goodnight,” he said quietly, not wanting to let you go.

“Goodnight, Javi.” You hung up and walked away from the window. It would hurt too much to watch him drive away.

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