There is a wasps nest in my attic, I thought, as I lay in bed next to you, ignoring the itch in my veins. Her voice played in my ears over and over.

She, like me, was always itching, shivering, hungering for the bliss of absorption into something so much greater than herself. Scratching at the holes in her arms and devouring men whole, barefoot, red-clad, shambling.

I was not her. I itched. I shook. I hungered. I allowed men to eat me whole and believed it would unlock some higher purpose, or ecstacy. I did not have the glory of a thousand live, wriggling things. I mothered no offspring, though the dirt in my blood multiplied itself tenfold and crippled me, contaminating.

I lay awake, entwined with that which told me I was wretched, yet deserving all the same. I traced the winding web of black mould and mycelium and let it inhabit me.

There was no wasps nest in my attic.

But I buzzed all the same.

There were nights when the buzzing quieted, when the phantom wings folded themselves neatly against my ribs, and something heavier took their place.

It began with the weight. Not metaphorical — not guilt, not longing, not the ache of wanting to be devoured or to devour. This was sedimentary. Geological. A pressure that settled over me as though the house itself had grown tired of holding me up and wished instead to pull me down. I would lie beside you, listening to your breath, and feel the mattress dip, then sink, then soften into loam beneath my spine. Soil filled the hollows of my collarbones. Dust gathered in the folds of my skin. I could not move. I could only descend.

She had warned me, once, in that voice that rasped like a hive collapsing.

“There are worse things than hunger,” she’d said. “There is being wanted by the earth.”

I hadn’t understood then. I thought she meant death. I thought she meant rot. I thought she meant the way her own body had begun to sag and slump, as though her bones were turning to mulch.

But no — this was different.

This was invitation.

The floorboards creaked beneath me now, not with age, but with anticipation. The house exhaled dust in warm, damp breaths. The walls pulsed faintly, as though remembering the pressure of soil packed tight around them decades ago, before foundations were poured and attics were built and wasps imagined themselves into being.

I tried to lift my hand. It sank wrist‑deep into the mattress, into the earth beneath it, into something that shifted and welcomed and closed over my skin like a mouth.

I did not scream. Screaming would have required air, and the room had grown thick with the scent of peat and old, wet leaves. Breathing felt like swallowing handfuls of grave dirt.

You slept on, untouched. Unaware. The ground did not want you.

Only me.

Only the one who had already let herself be hollowed out by hunger and mould and the promise of becoming something more than human. Only the one who had mistaken infestation for transcendence.

The soil rose around my ribs, my throat, my jaw. I felt it press into my ears, muffling the world until all that remained was the slow, patient heartbeat of the earth beneath the house.

I thought of her — red‑clad, barefoot, shambling — and wondered if she had been buried once too. If she had clawed her way out, or if something had spat her back into the world half‑formed and ravenous.

I wondered if I would be so lucky.

There was no nest above me.

There was only the ground below.

And it wanted me.

When I surfaced from the earth — coughing soil, spitting out the dark — you were waiting for me.

Or rather, something wearing you was waiting. It had your posture, your hands folded neatly in your lap, your head tilted in that soft, curious way I had always mistaken for tenderness. But the face… the face was wrong in the way mannequins are wrong. Too smooth. Too symmetrical. A likeness sculpted by someone who had only ever heard rumours of humanity.

Its smile was painted on.Its eyes were glass.Its voice was borrowed.

“You were gone a long time,” it said, and the words were shaped correctly but carried no breath, no warmth. They clattered out of its mouth like coins dropped onto tile.

I tried to speak your name. It didn’t react. It didn’t blink. It didn’t breathe.

The buzzing in my veins returned, frantic, as if the wasps sensed an intruder. As if they knew this thing was not you, had never been you, had only ever been a placeholder wearing your outline.

It reached for my hand. Its fingers were cold and hollow, like gloves stuffed with nothing at all.

“Come back to bed,” it said.

And I realised — with a clarity that sliced me open — that I had no memory of your face anymore. Not truly. Not in detail. Only the idea of you, the silhouette, the warmth of your body beside mine.

It had taken that from me. Or perhaps I had given it away.

I followed it anyway. Because what else was there to do?

The house changed after that.

Not suddenly — not with the violence of a collapsing hive or the hunger of the earth — but with a quiet, insidious confidence. Hallways lengthened by inches each night. Doors shifted their hinges. The wallpaper patterns curled into new shapes when I wasn’t looking, spirals tightening, tightening, tightening.

He moved through it effortlessly, as though it had always known the new layout. As though it had designed it.

I tried to keep track. I counted steps. I marked walls with my fingernails. I whispered directions under my breath like prayers.

But the house listened. And it laughed.

One night, I opened the door to the bathroom and found the attic instead — the attic that did not exist, the attic where no wasps nested, the attic that pulsed with a low, droning hum that came from nowhere and everywhere. Another night, I walked toward the kitchen and arrived in the basement, though the house had never had a basement, though the stairs descended in a perfect spiral that made my stomach twist and my vision blur.

He watched me from the top of the stairs, its painted smile unwavering.

“You’re lost,” he said.

I wanted to scream that I wasn’t. But the truth was that I had been lost long before the house began to twist. Lost in hunger. Lost in mould. Lost in the buzzing that had replaced my heartbeat.

Down in the spiral, the walls breathed. Down in the spiral, the floor sloped. Down in the spiral, I felt myself unspool.

I kept walking.