Dearest Slumlord,

The ceiling in the kitchen cracked and split, and from the black abyss in between the clouds of plaster dived a team of brown water bugs the size of baby mice.

Each thwip-thwip-thwip of their wings raised in me a light shudder. I stood mesmerized watching the paratroopers cascade. After a minute, I scrambled for the nearly empty can of bug spray stashed in a cabinet beneath the sink and I sprayed, catching two or three as they descended. Their bug wings stopped in mid-flight and the pestilence tumbled to the floor where they seized and convulsed and spun on their backs before lying still save for a few stray twitches. 

The water bugs already on the floor scattered while I tried to reach them with the can’s sputtering stream. In the broken ceiling, their comrades surveyed the damage of the scene. The bugs inched backward, thinking better of their planned descent. And then they made their retreat deep into the abyss where it remained safe. 

I can’t tell you, my slumlove, when the war began, but it didn’t begin with the water bugs. It started perhaps with the mice who dart from a hole in the living room wall and nip in and out of the kitchen, tearing with their teeth the sponges at my sink, eating my stray foodstuff, and rolling about in the bags of flour they entered through holes made with their teeth and claws. A few live in the dust bag of an old vacuum cleaner I keep in the kitchen. Most live in the walls with the water bugs. I laid a glue trap next to the oven and a furry gray one with a long pink tail became ensnared nearly immediately. I tossed him into the city garbage can out front. I threw several into the trash depths, imagining this had gained me advantage in the war, but there were hundreds, if not thousands of them in the wall and my sticky traps only peeved them. I think I see their perspective; it is I who is encroaching on their territory, they believe, not them on mine. There is an unbreachable expanse between us. I don’t understand their squeaks, and to them my words mean nothing. I might as well be roaring like the dinosaurs must have. We can only communicate through the language of aggression. The mice’s response to the glue traps was to invite the brown roaches to scurry through the kitchen and invade my cereal boxes. I sprayed them causing the roaches to invite the water bugs to rain down on me. I think it was the water bugs who invited the fruit flies to buzz the trash and the ants to trudge up the walls in unbroken lines, to congregate by the thousands upon the floor and to march toward anything sweet. I caught some of them carrying away crystals of sugar on their backs. When I spot them soloing across the counter or a wall or something, I roll individual ants between my fingers. Their blood smells like rotten coconuts. The ants too felt the wet poison of the bug spray. All these creatures have an advantage over me in that, for the most part, I can’t see where they live. So much of a structure is beneath the floor, above the ceiling, behind the walls. We can live in a house or an apartment all our lives and see only a tiny portion of it. These hidden crevasses are where the critters dwell and plan their assault. The mice conferred with their allies, the water bugs, the ants, the roaches and they all decided to call in the most feared, if not the most dastardly—the most dastardly was yet to come—the rat. Now the rat is king shit of garbage mountain. The ones I saw waddled in their bloat. Chihuahua puppy size. Pink nose and red-eyed. One walked—no, sauntered—about with two glue traps stuck to its back. The rats speak the squeak-language of the mice and that’s how they planned their attacks on my dignity. I woke one day with Corn Flakes strewn about the kitchen, the cereal box and the plastic bag within ripped to shreds. I purchased poison and rats died in the walls, the thick musk of death choking us on humid days. 

The murder of the rats proved too much, far far too much. An assault on sacred King Shit. An atrocity. Short of calling a swarm of snakes, the allies arrived at the most drastic thing they could think of.

I awoke to red welts all over my body. New welts for each day. Each hour even. Some seemed as big as doll heads. My enemy remained invisible, numbering in the thousands, I imagine. I sprayed in every direction hoping to catch a bedbug in my stream, but they hid themselves well. I only confirmed the allies had brought the vicious insects when one lay on the top edge of my couch, fat, full and thoroughly inebriated from long swigs of my blood. 

Please, please, I said. Tell the ants, the mice, the remaining rats, tell them all we can coexist. You can live in the walls and we never have to see each other. Please. Please. Just stop biting me, I beg of you.

It’s too late, the bedbug whispered. Far too late. We can’t co-exist. Your blood is far too sweet. When we’re finished, you won’t exist.

So, my beautiful slumlord, my love, I’m forced to co-exist with you even though your neglect is what allowed this occupation to occur. I don’t know what to do if you don’t respond to one of my fumigation requests. I may burn the place. Fire is more efficient than bug spray anyway, I hear. More cleansing too.

Sincerely,