2.

An ecosystem was sprouting up from various points of entry into the apartment. It got to the point where they didn’t care anymore. The flies came and laid eggs in the bits of hog shit that Arthur failed to eat when it was fresh. Somehow bedbugs were introduced, which the roaches thrived on even more. Gnats flew in their annoying cyclical patterns in the space over the sink dishes and garbage, sometimes in thick swarms.

Spiders came in droves to go after such tempting means of subsistence, which were really the only bugs Alex couldn’t stand. He had a phobia of them and though he was immune of any disgust at roaches or gnats, the spiders were terrifying to him. Every time he saw one that was not clearly a daddy long-leg, he was sure it was a black widow or brown recluse and jumped to the other side of the room. Neither he nor Marty really knew how to spot poisonous spiders and distinguish them from the non-venomous, but Alex was sure each and every spider was deadly.

Marty told him they should leave the spiders be, since they kept the other insect populations down; but Alex reasoned that if their goal was to eliminate bugs, it was a contradiction to leave spiders be in order to eliminate them, since they were bugs too. Protecting bugs in order to kill bugs made no sense at all.

One day Marty found a painting in an alley by some trash, and he liked it well enough to decide to take it home. It wasn’t anything serious--just a Wal-Mart print of a whale in blue-green water; but he liked it and it didn’t have any garbage juice or stains on it so he brought it home. There had been black ants streaming out over the garbage, and he’d thought he’d brushed them all off; but apparently he was wrong. Some ants must have hitched a ride on the picture, and they found they’d made it big in the filthy apartment. They flourished on the garbage, dead roaches, dead everything that was thriving all over the damn place.

The fruit flies continued to swarm about the trash and dirty dishes, and these days they had given up on washing the dishes and keeping kitchen the trash pile low, since it would take nothing short of a trip back in time or the move they couldn’t afford to get a handle on things now.

Whether it was bedbugs or spiders or something else altogether that bit them in their sleep each night, waking with fresh bites every morning, it was impossible to tell. Any day now they expected to see plant and animal life sprouting up in their apartment as well. But luckily they had no mice or rats, and no weeds could find a foothold from which to creep out off the floor, though they wouldn’t have been shocked to see it happen.

Arthur just loved the roaches. He was growing fat and feeding him cost nothing. He kept the garbage pile low without their having to take it out as often. He porked up, bloated, so much so as to be incapacitated. Alex adored him. Had you asked Alex now whether he’d planned on fattening and eating Arthur when he’d bought the hog, he would honestly look at you perplexed, and ask you what in hell you though he was.

Marty had seen something on TV about bot flies in Central America, and developed a paranoia about the houseflies that spawned in Arthur’s shit. He was scared they would lay eggs in his face, ears, eyes--that he’d find a boil and squeeze it and see a live maggot emerge. He knew deep down it was an irrational fear, but just because something is irrational doesn’t mean it can’t happen--just look at the morning paper to prove that one. Any sort of mark or bite that he found on his skin he watched carefully, with foreboding. Sometimes deep down he hoped he’d see a maggot crawl out of his flesh, so that finally he could experience it and thus lose the phobia that must have been at least as bad as the reality.