Samsa Gregorovich feared the world would be taken over by bugs. She had a bad habit of doom-scrolling on social media, so her algorithm memorized her guilty pleasures and pressure points, spitting them back at her in an intoxicating rhythm. For every viral video—of the pesticide-resistant insects, swarming livestock; of scientists on the morning news, warning of the feedback loop between rising temperatures and pest pressure; and of the Conspiracist, ranting from a dark room about the imminent collapse of industrial farming—Samsa’s fear intensified, morphing into something perverse and unmanageable.

Samsa’s neuroses covered serious ground. She was an on-again-off-again agoraphobic who avoided confrontation like the plague. She was paranoid about corporations stealing and selling her data, and troubled by the growing unpredictability of the San Andreas fault line. But it was the bugs that scared Samsa most. Compulsively, she dreaded their approach, a knot in her stomach twisting ever-tighter, almost as much as she dreaded the collective apathy they would be met with. She became severely depressed, her hopelessness windfallen by the indifference already around her, seeping into her.

When she first sent a frantic email to the Doctor, some reasonably priced local quack she’d found online, she wrote:

My name is Samsa and I’m 25 years old. I have a recurring dream where I meet my best friend and roommate, Frankie, at the waterside restaurant where the breeze is salty and the sun hides behind the clouds. The cutlery next to my baby blue place setting is teeming with insects. I am desperately trying to communicate to her something of importance—of dire, urgent need. For some reason (my inability to speak or her refusal to take my concerns seriously, I’m not sure) my words fall on deaf ears. Frankie is literally shoving forkfuls of creamy seafood linguine into her mouth, unbothered by the incessant, layered buzzing; the shifting pockets of light on the dock-facing windows created by pulsing swarms. I am scrambling, pining, pleading with her to just listen, something is coming, something is already here, it’s bigger than both of us, but I am as alone in my fear as a child in the middle of the night, convinced to the point of paralysis of the malignance under a creaking floorboard or behind a drifting door. Just as the threat is about to swallow me, swallow us, whole, I wake in a panic. The impending doom spills into my consciousness. My first lucid thought becomes: what have I done?

The Doctor wrote her a mild prescription for a generic SSRI and instructed her to prioritize sleep hygiene, minimize screen time.

The medication mellowed her, but did little for her racing thoughts, each one a crippling blow to her functioning, another amorphous grain of salt in a festering wound. She spent hours locked in her bedroom, scribbling in her notebook about the bugs from her dreams and disappearing into the darkest corners of the internet. When she was supposed to be working the cash during her shifts, she was often hiding in the bookstore’s inventory room, under its blanket of new-book smell. One day, she lifted her head from its hardcover resting place to see her manager, a wilting, introverted woman with a gentle touch, standing over her. Dolly knelt. She said, “Sorry sweetie, you know we just can’t keep going on like this. Call us when you’re feeling better.”

Samsa had three months’ worth of savings. Unencumbered by the shackles of responsibility, she watched from her phone as efforts at containment with stronger and more toxic chemicals failed. The bugs devastated crops in California’s Salinas Valley before migrating beyond farmland, towards the Central Coast, towards Samsa.

On a hazy spring Sunday afternoon too pleasant to justify staying inside all day, Samsa and Frankie walked home together from their local pharmacy. Pimple patches, her roommate’s medication, and an oil the internet said would stimulate hair growth swung from a plastic bag in Frankie’s moisturized hand. Samsa’s notebook bounced on her upper legs in her stretched-out crossbody, rhythmically coming out of and slipping back into its fabric grooves.

Samsa, pretending to focus on Frankie’s impassioned play-by-play of the previous night, which was populated by a cast of characters Samsa had gradually fallen out of touch with since high school, initially registered the darkening sky as an approaching storm cloud. But the distant, throbbing hum, unlike any clap of thunder she’d ever heard, pulled her gaze upwards.

When she understood what she was looking at, Samsa’s stomach dropped into her ass. The pavement seared the skin on her right hand, breaking a hard fall onto her tailbone. With her left, she clung to Frankie’s wrist as she fell, tearing the plastic bag out of her grasp.

“Frankie, look! What the fuck is that?”

The hair oil rolled into the street.

Frozen with fear, Samsa watched the bugs descend onto the coast from inland in menacing, amorphous masses, slicing the horizon. Their shadows submerged the seaside town in darkness. These were the same bugs from the Conspiracist’s online content and Samsa’s dreams—beetle-like creatures with long, twitching antennae, hard-shelled wings, and spiny-haired legs. As the bugs swarmed closer to the seaside walkway where she and Frankie stood, Samsa let out an uninhibited, guttural scream, but her voice was swallowed by the buzzing, tickling her ears, radiating through her body, mistakable up close for high-pitched, layered chittering. Samsa was still screaming as the swarm took off. She barely noticed Frankie crouched down, bent at the knees, clasping each of Samsa’s wrists between her manicured thumb and index fingers.

“Hey, hey, Sam, chill,” Frankie said, her tone wavering between concern and irritation.

It was sunny again.

“Chill? Don’t you see those things?”

Frankie looked over her shoulder at the black hole writhing over the water, and shrugged. “I mean, yeah, I obviously see them, but…” she pulled Samsa to her feet. “What are we going to do about it? You have enough going on. Just try to ignore it, kay?”

Samsa tore herself from Frankie’s finger handcuffs and sprinted home, weaving inland through side streets.

“Samsa!” Frankie called. But she was gone.

Once seated at her desk hunched over her phone, Samsa typed the Conspiracist’s name into the app’s search bar and clicked the first profile that came up. They had posted another video just hours ago, a voiceover of what the caption claimed was footage of the bugs infesting an outlet mall a few counties over. They insisted that the ensuing infestations would irrevocably shift the ecological landscape, collapsing global food systems. Many comments below the video accused the Conspiracist of platforming doctored footage, fearmongering, and playing into anti-Western propaganda, but a few substantiated his claims and echoed his fears.

Samsa clicked the mailbox-shaped icon under their profile picture, taking her to a private chat with them, and typed: It’s happening. Just saw a massive swarm over the water like 5 minutes from my house. A small red exclamation mark appeared next to her message, accompanied by a notification explaining that the user she was attempting to contact only accepted direct messages from accounts they followed.

Samsa dropped her phone onto her desk and lay her head in her hands, the sky in her peripheral vision a rich, minty purple that bated off the darkness creeping into her room in slow-moving shadows. She stood up to flip on a light switch. From the other side of her bedroom wall, the sound of Frankie slamming the front door behind her as she got home, laughing with someone on FaceTime, burned a hole in her stomach.

Years ago, Frankie and Samsa had both ricocheted from one local high school to another before ending up at the same remedial arts program senior year. Frankie had courted Samsa with interest that bordered on obsession, sitting at the foot of her bed or keeping her on the phone for hours at a time—during work shifts, at appointments. She’d fawned over Samsa’s taste in movies and fashion, offering her own staple clothing pieces as tokens of loyalty and promising that their bond, like the clothes, could not be replicated. On Frankie’s 18th birthday, she’d insisted that they get matching tattoos, and they did, fine-line ghosts on their inner wrists.

Not really knowing the difference between enthusiasm and intimacy, Samsa embraced it all. Frankie did not, as so many others had, reproach Samsa’s irrational fears. She had her own eccentricities, such as curling long pieces of hair around her index finger when she was distressed or replacing full meals with low-cal-high-protein snacks that she picked at all day with long, vulture-like fingers. Most importantly, she did not quash Samsa’s temptation to self-isolate, cut herself some slack, call in sick to her shift at the bookstore, stay home and hang. Together, they skipped class, self-medicated, and perfected the art of evasive sarcasm bordering on cruelty, embracing these traits like the well-kept secret tenets of an ancient religion. Samsa was too seduced by the guarantee of unconditional companionship, even if it was hollow, to question her new yes man’s intentions.

Samsa’s early twenties came and went like this: she found herself grappling with and drowning old versions of herself in a bottomless pool, versions that mutated and multiplied like antibiotic-resistant bacteria as they briefly died before coming back with a vengeance. She slipped in and out of mental health episodes, each invariably punctuated by some world-ending breakdown that cost Samsa another old friend or forgiving relative and drove her deeper into the apartment she shared with Frankie. She thought spitefully, so what if I want to spend my whole life here, die here? The rage begged to be justified.

But in the past year, around the same time the dreams began, Samsa had grown apart from Frankie. No, not grown apart—she was overgrown, ingrown from her limbs pushing against the walls of that apartment, risking deformity to find space for themselves amid Frankie’s field of landmines: the mirrors she covered with towels; the uncomfortable vintage furniture she curated; the scattered, unread self-help books remnant of her frequent but fleeting paradigm-shifting epiphanies and ever-moving goalposts. The food Frankie left half-eaten on the coffee table, the Netflix true crime documentary somehow always blaring on the TV in the dimly-lit living room—everything belonging to her and emanating from her bristled against Samsa’s individuation, suffocating her.

Samsa soon emailed the Doctor another frantic plea. When the third day passed with no sign of a response, she stayed up all night watching Vice videos on YouTube, swearing she’d seen a bug scuttle underneath her dresser from the corner of her eye, then raced to his clinic first thing in the morning. On her way, she saw the bugs swarming around trash cans, darting overhead, thrashing in sidewalk cracks. Still, the people she hurried by on the street seemed more preoccupied with the rat’s nest on her head, the makeshift pajamas she had on, than the growing infestation.

The swarms had gone viral, but were just as quickly drowned out in the news cycle, eclipsed by stories both more digestible and more obscene. It was difficult to tell whether people genuinely didn’t believe the bugs had arrived or if they simply didn’t care. Samsa wasn’t sure which was worse. She was spiralling fast, the spread of uncertainty and panic in her body matched by the bugs’ decisive coastal conquest.

The clinic was a dimly lit carpeted waiting room with foldout chairs and a small office that reeked of microwaved lasagna and cigarettes smoked on someone’s leather couch. The nameplate holder on the office door was empty. The Doctor, a thin, frail man with a receding hairline and deep forehead folds, handed her a tissue to let her blow her nose and catch her breath before having her complete a questionnaire. After scanning her answers, he agreed to prescribe a stronger medication. He said that she was not the first person to seek neurochemical relief from the bugs, a thought that was eerie yet comforting. She imagined who those others might be, where they were right now. She brushed off the Doctor’s warning about the medication’s severe side effects: she’d seen it all, and she would take pretty much anything if it meant she could escape what the bugs were doing to her. Lack of appetite, low libido, fatigue, nausea, headaches, mood swings, insomnia—anything.

As he handed her the prescription paper, the Doctor said, “You seem to be in quite a state of distress. I want to help you, and I will—the medication will help—but you should consider speaking to someone about these feelings. I have therapists I can refer you to.”

“I don’t like therapists.”

She typed the pharmacy’s number into her cell.

The Doctor sighed. “The world is a terrible, unfair place, Samsa,” he said. “A lot of people choose not to face that. You can destroy yourself trying to force them to.”

In Samsa’s view, an unsolicited opinion only ever came from someone speaking to their past self, offering the advice they once wanted but never got or followed.

She left to pick up the meds, started taking double the recommended dose, and waited. The waiting was long and vicious. She passed the time by watching the Conspiracist's vlogs as he traced the coastal infestation. She intermittently typed obscure, health-related questions into Google, tacking Reddit to the end of her search inquiries, more trusting of some anonymous hypochondriac’s online ramblings than the prescriptive formalism of the Mayo Clinic.

Frankie would occasionally knock at Samsa’s bedroom door to toss out a half-hearted invitation to join her in whatever pricey pastime she was conflating with identity lately (most recently, it had been thrifted clothing and antique shopping, succeeded by a brief stint as a sourdough-baking lifestyle influencer that petered out as her partying ramped up, then Pilates to round it all out), but it was clear they were courtesies not meant to be accepted. Fine by her. She resented Frank’s ability to enjoy music and movies and to laugh unironically at social satire while Samsa locked herself in her room, dreaming of and writing about bugs in a self-fulfilling spiral. Why did she fear the bugs, avoid the bugs, structure her life around the bugs? Why couldn’t she be as profoundly unaffected by the world as Frankie was? How to distance yourself from shitty friends reddit. When will my medication start working Reddit. Can you die from anxiety Reddit.

The paucity of content on the internet about the medication gave Samsa pause, but she remembered what the Doctor had said: the new drug, completing its clinical trial stages, was not on the commercial market yet—in fact, he had done her a favour by cutting corners. She also remembered what he had said about the side effects, something about withdrawal posing a risk of mania and grandiose thinking.

One day, a month into taking the medication, Samsa felt inspired to go for a walk. She weaved a familiar path downhill to the coast, by the Doctor’s office, towards the restaurant from her dream, along the street on which she had first seen the bugs blanketing the sky.

Just as the Doctor promised, the bugs were gone. The streets were quiet and clean. A glow emanated from the pristine trees, the neatly trimmed grass. Of course, it made no sense; the Conspiracist had just posted a video of an infestation a mile from her house, but there was not a single piece of evidence that the bugs had ever been there at all, not a distant, stray buzz. She called the Doctor. “Try to enjoy it instead of asking so many questions,” he said. “Isn’t this what you wanted?”

“It is,” Samsa said.

The drugs erased the bugs, and soon, the vibrant landscape of her adolescence and early adulthood folded out before her. Her life took on the colorful aesthetic and safe predictability of an early 2000s movie rewatched for comfort, its visuals and soundtrack embedded in the innermost drawers of long-term memory. It was a miracle how quickly she fell back into old routines once the medication’s effects crystallized. Free from daily panic attacks and crippling psychosomatic anxiety, she cut her Internet time in half. She applied for jobs, started exercising, and accompanied Frankie on her escapades across town—museums, book launches, store openings. She wasn’t writing or sketching as much, but she was too focused on how good she felt to care. Logically, she knew that the bugs were still present beneath a medicated glaze, but this awareness no longer computed into the frenzy of negative emotions it once had. In fact, it was the opposite: Samsa acutely believed that because she couldn’t see, hear, or touch the bugs, they weren’t there at all. She blocked the Conspiracist with a light tap and went on with her life, a life she’d just weeks before both reminisced on and resented.

Her obsession with the bugs, the Conspiracist, avoiding Frankie—these were all symptoms of an illness she was suffering from. An illness she was in remission from. This was what she told herself, repeated to herself, many times daily, trying to persuade herself that the problem was within, and therefore excisable.

Despite her positive affirmations, something malignant began brewing beneath Samsa’s manufactured return to normalcy. At first, it was a whisper of dread right as she woke in the morning, gone before she could identify it as such, leaving an odorless yet noxious exhaust in its wake. She shrugged it off, kept taking her medication, and tagged along with Frankie to the summer film festival, where she took candid photos of her roommate sipping cocktails, leaning against an anachronistic ticket booth.

But the dread metastasized over the following weeks into an infected wound, tender and aching—at sporadic moments, longer and more painful each time they took hold, the drug’s effects abated completely and the world seemed to pulse violently like the surface of a canvas being torn apart by invisible hands from the inside out. When the sensation overcame her, Samsa felt sick, on the verge of throwing up. Clutching at her windowsill for fresh air, sweat sliding down her inner arms and the sides of her face, she felt the bugs inside her, clawing their way out, bursting from within her and all around her. It didn’t matter that some chemical trick had obscured them from view; the dread, a meteor tearing through a valley on a starry night, filled her mind with racing thoughts anew, thoughts of dreamless slumbers, relationships given up on and projects unfinished; the brief, deceptive feeling she’d had on the cusp of adulthood that she was on the brink of everything, that there was an everything to be on the brink of and not a bug-infested, forsaken world that Frankie did not think worth mourning, a world she was so terrified to face that she’d drugged herself senseless. She thought of the Conspiracist’s videos and sobbed, bent at the waist over the windowsill, her forehead resting on her forearms as her back folded in and flattened out with each sharp, wet breath. She thought about unblocking them, checking their profile, but decided against it. Instead, she crawled under her wrinkled, crumb-covered sheets and lay in the fetal position, mentally running through the plots of her favourite childhood TV shows until she fell asleep.

When she woke on the first day of August, she decided she’d had enough. Her breath was ragged, her mouth dry, her vision fogged. She called the Doctor several times before he picked up. “Samsa,” he said when he picked up, trying to calm her down. “Samsa. This is all very normal. You’re on strong medication to help you cope with the outside world, and there are costs to its benefits, like with any medication.”

“No, you don’t understand. This can’t be normal. I can’t live like this.”

“Whatever you do, Samsa, do not stop taking the medication. Now that your body has adjusted, it can be very dangerous to suddenly cease consumption. Please listen to what I’m telling you.”

Samsa hung up and threw her phone across the room. She took refuge in her room again; Frankie wrote off Samsa’s temporary presence in her life as casually as she had accepted it. When Samsa emerged briefly for food or water, Frankie noticed the small whiteheads and hormonal acne that had been picked into scabbing open wounds on her friend’s face and said, “I thought you stopped doing that.”

Samsa would sometimes stare out her window and look for a breeze in the treetops, listen for the distant sound of breaking waves at the shore. But she could feel the bugs crawling beneath her feet, gnawing at the world’s canvas, secreting a juice that caked the earth in a sticky coating and that tainted everything Samsa saw, tasted, touched. Erasing the bugs had not erased the decay or the alienation that preceded them; it had only laid them bare. She felt that writing, that all art, was futile. Her notebook gathered dust. She spent several weeks in this frantic, helpless state, until she felt immobilized by the dread.

The restaurant’s annual celebration of summer’s end was scheduled for Labour Day Friday evening. The event promised a bittersweet scene: live music; garden lights woven through the dock supports; tipsy patrons climbing onto the rocks, illuminated greypurple by the cool shades of night, exposed by low tide. With each passing year, Samsa found it more difficult to take in the lively ambiance without feeling sad.

Samsa hadn’t planned on attending this year until she overheard, from the bottom of the stairs, Frankie talking about it on FaceTime in the kitchen. Frankie’s freckled lips were curled into a half-moon smirk, her bony knees pulled to her chest on a stool, swallowed by a hoodie and sweatpants. On the other end, Frankie’s Other Friend Sil stopped mid-sentence at the sight of Frankie’s roommate in the background of the call.

Frankie filled the negative space by offering: “Hey Samsa, are you coming next week?” There was a false, tempting comfort in the relentlessness of Frankie’s affection, which manufactured closeness even in the absence of intimacy.

Samsa filled a glass from the cupboard above the sink with tap water and popped open her pill bottle. Maybe because the absurdity of it all was setting in, or maybe because the dog bites the hardest before it lets go, she said: “Of course I am.” And she moved the pill between her thumb and index finger before bringing it to her lips, but she did not take it. She lowered her hand and placed it in the drain so that it didn’t clink against the metal as it went down.

She had eleven days.

On the Friday before Labour day, Frankie and Samsa glided on their bikes towards the coast, chasing the sunset, nightfall trailing them. Samsa’s notebook bumped against her knees in her bag as she pedaled. She’d felt scattered sensory shifts and hormonal spikes and drops since stopping the medication but as she picked up speed, careening ahead of Frankie, and the main seaside road unfolded before her, her vision sharpened.

The world crystallized, unretouched. The glow that once emanated from every crack and crevice receded; the synthetic colours of her medicated stupor dulled. And the bugs emerged from their canvas, their cocoon, in a scuttling symphony. Clouds evaporated to reveal swarms. Furious buzzing rose in her ears. The bugs were embedded in walls, hovering around trash cans, circling angrily above Samsa’s head.

Incredulous of the world she inhabited, Samsa threw back her head, air rushing along her neck, and laughed. She heard Frankie join in behind her and knew she was not laughing with her, but she also knew that she felt at least as sorry for Frankie as Frankie felt for her. The dread she’d been carrying for so long fell from her body, giving way to something fresh, potent, and unmistakable. The sensation brought tears to her eyes and, as Samsa rounded a smooth turn, reached a stunning crescendo.

At the restaurant, they were lucky enough to snag a coveted, circular table by the dock-facing windows, the table from Samsa’s dream. The conversation was pleasant, the alcohol flowing, and the atmosphere light. The bugs had made their way inside the restaurant, and sang a low, collective buzz that was conspicuously layered in with the clanking of cutlery, cacophony of voices, and live music. Towards the end of their meal, Samsa’s eyes followed one bug as it scuttled from under her baby blue place setting and launched itself off the table onto the salt-stained restaurant floors. It then crawled out the ajar front door. Samsa stood up to follow it.

“Are you going for a cigarette?” Frankie said. “I’ll come.”

Samsa ignored her and pushed open the restaurant door. She followed the bug down the dock. It reminded her, in its lone determination, of the Conspiracist. It kept walking right off the dock and into the ocean where, Samsa’s eyes realized as she traced its trajectory, the bugs were packed tightly together in groups of hundreds, even thousands. They created a thick film above the water and nearby rocks with their crawling bodies. In fact, they covered the water’s surface as far as the eye could see, peppered only by discarded scraps of plastic. Angrily swarming superbugs tornadoed from the top layer of the film over the water up to the plump grey clouds in the sky. A fluorescent sign that creaked in the wind read, DANGER! KEEP AWAY!

“Samsa, where are you going?”

Frankie’s voice was muted by the monstrous buzzing as Samsa neared the dock’s edge. Her heart dropped into her stomach.

“Hello?” Frankie exhaled out her nose. “Dude, where are you right now? You're always, like, somewhere else.”

Frankie’s voice was now behind her head. Samsa focused on the buzzing.

“Sammy?” She felt Frankie pulling at her jacket. “Can you stop?”

Samsa stood firm, unmovable.

Frankie’s voice took on an abrasive hiss. “Please, stop it. You can’t just do this shit anymore, Samsa. It’s exhausting. This isn’t normal.”

Samsa spoke to the sea: “This is what we’ve decided will be normal.”

Clutching her crossbody to her chest, she then bent her knees, jumped off the dock, and fell plummeting towards the sea. The moment she spent midair was suspended in time. The sound of the bugs and of the restaurant faded out of earshot. Beneath it all—the buzzing, the clanking silverware, Frankie’s terrified shouting—the sound of the water was now discernable again.

Beneath it all, she heard the waves crashing at the rocks and it was beautiful.

The bugs quickly crawled in every orifice of her body, blocking her ears, filling her mouth and nose. From within the swarms, the collective buzzing gave way to millions of distinct, piercing shrills. Her arms and legs were pulled under the surface of the water.

Some of the shocked and horrified restaurant patrons who had gathered on the dock were filming or live streaming the whole affair; others pointed and gaped. Footage from every angle would be picked up by the Conspiracist later that night and shared in a viral stream. They told their followers: She was a hero who engaged in a courageous act of defiance. Rest in peace, Samsa Gregorovich.

Samsa’s estranged family and Frankie were devastated and mourned her death publicly. The outcry surrounding what was formally deemed her suicide gained so much traction that her loved ones used the funds and awareness to kickstart a mental health platform in Samsa’s name. It became very well-known and successful in the seaside town.

Samsa’s internet search history became public in the investigation of her untimely death, and the masses subjected her to brutal post-mortem online scrutiny. A few months later, Frankie’s Other Friend Sil took over Samsa’s bedroom in the home they’d shared. The Doctor, when questioned over the course of the official investigation, attested emphatically to her degenerating condition: her chronic denial, insomnia, substance abuse, and mania.

Samsa’s body was never recovered. Her notebook disappeared with her, on its final page a drawing of a girl so intertwined with the bugs that she was one with them, and an entry that read:

In my recurring dream, the one with Frankie, the restaurant, and the bugs, I think I made a mistake. I wrote that I woke up thinking ‘What have I done’, and that’s true. I wake up and I’m as certain of my own mistakes and complicity as I am of the fact that I am alive. But the more I think about it, the more certain I am that I was wrong, that I had it wrong. That maybe by ‘I,’ what I really meant was ‘we.’ As in, what have we done? What have we done? Do you hear that? Do you hear the difference? I do, that’s why I’m saying it. It feels important. It feels like the difference between death and deliverance.