infestation

This morning I woke to Ever and Lola laying low and folded in clean white sheets and blankets and beautiful light falling in glowing white envelopes from the shutters, and then, with my eyes closed, I heard Ever's tiny bebe voice squealing flea! flea! I rolled over and squeezed open my eyes to watch Lola pinch a tiny bebe flea off of Ever's fatty arm. We have fleas. We don't have money for Advantage. What we do have is a venti Starbucks cup with soapy water and about a million dead fleas lying at the bottom. At night I lay my Fifth Witness down and place my swollen feet on the carpet. I wiggle my toes. They are bait. The fleas jump and twitch and bip and make me sick. They congregate. Last night I was sitting in my thong in my close on the floor, eating chocolate pop tarts and reading Anne Lamott's  Traveling Mercies and and I looked down to see four fleas closing in on my vagina. I don't know if this has ever happened to you but I highly recommend against it. It's the closest thing to action my vagina has gotten in a while though. My life feels very random and scary right now so controlling the flea population of my bedroom does have some satisfaction. When I put on the lamp and lay a blanket over it to dim the light, the fleas wiggle butt upward out of the beige carpet fibers and begin doing their ticky dance around the heat of the bulb. It's like pulling crops from the fields. And then drowning them. I washed the dogs last week and the amount of fleas on them was staggering. I don't know how life as we know it will end but when all is desolate and still, I expect tiny black flecks of fleas to begin popping up from the scorched earth. I feel like Mrs. Hannigan- kill! kill! kill! That woman knew how to be depressed. I need a gin bath, red lipstick, a scratchy record player and a penchant for rich bald men with muscular necks. And in the end I'll be good enough anyway, and everyone will sing around a large fountain and give me free liquor and my lipstick will be red but not smeared and I won't ever put little girls in closets again, or drown fleas in suburban Starbucks cups.