I wasn’t really awake, I was just finishing a yawn, standing in front of the bathroom mirror which is illuminated from behind by fluorescent strip lights and there suddenly, floating in front of my eyes were those things. Those things always float in front of your eyes first thing in the morning when you’re just waking up. Somehow, and don’t ask me how for I know not how, my hand shot out and smashed palm down against the surface of the mirror, trapping one of the translucent little things.
Some say they float just on the edge of your vision, but I reckon they phase in and out of reality and we’re only ever attuned to seeing them in that moment of in-betweeness between sleep and wakefulness. I have never before known if they count as insects until now.
I removed my hand slowly from the mirror, aware that I’d just left a very large handprint on it. Dead center of where my palm had been however was a small circular squished mass of interdimensional insect. I peered closer at it, adding a noseprint to the mirror and picked up a pair of tweezers that Pix uses to tweeze those things that might need the occasional application of tweezers (it occurs to me now that perhaps I should have washed these after what I did next).
I peeled away one layer of carapace; the chitinous exoskeleton that had protected this little floating beastie from everything but the juggernaut of skin which had finally broken through. With the tips of the tweezers I rooted through the soft white fleshy insides like I was picking through a fleck of cottonwool and determined there and then that the floaty thingies that only appear at the edge of your vision first thing in the morning are in fact insects and have an internal nervous system akin to that of the common cockroach.
Thanks, it was nothing.