There’s something living in the woman I love.

When I was a kid I had cancer— lung, which is rare in children, but there I was, eight years old, going through chemo, then surgery, then more rounds of drugs and tests and scans until I started to resent the treatment more than the disease itself. Every time there was another hospital trip I’d kick and scream and slam my wispy head on all the furniture, hoping if I raised enough hell my parents would give up and let me stay home instead.

They never did. They’d pick me up and haul me off to whatever procedure I was having that day, and in the end I beat the cancer, though I was too worn down to celebrate it much.

Any time I caught a bug or felt an unexpected twinge or itch in my body every piece of me would lock up in terror that it was happening again, bad cells spawning inside me, branching out through my system to spread their seeds into other organs.

Even when I aged into adulthood that fear stayed with me. There were nights my partner Deanna would lie awake with me, holding me tight until the shaking stopped like a dog with a thunder jacket.

“I can never get over it,” I’d say, and she’d stroke my hair which sometimes I’d dream was falling out again, or that something else had started growing underneath.

“It’s okay,” Deanna would say. “I get it, baby. I know.”

But I never believed her— how could she know? Deanna hadn’t been that little kid in the uncomfortable hospital bed, didn’t understand how it felt to read the news and hear about every contagion and epidemic, certain that if the cancer didn’t start up again then it’d be my immune system—shot to pieces by sickness—that would let me down.

I spent a lot of time indoors, coughing and scratching more as a response to thinking I was ill than from anything I’d caught. A nasty and inexplicable fatigue came and went, over as quickly as it started. But when Deanna got sick too it shocked me.

She’d been healthy all the eight years I’d known her, never picking anything up other than the odd cold or summer flu, and even then she’d soldier through it in a couple of days. She boxed, and swam, and went on hikes, got up at 6am most days with her water bottle in one hand as she bent down to kiss my drowsy face, squinting up at her from my pillow.

So when I came home from work one night to see Deanna looking red-eyed and fragile under a blanket on the living room sofa I was amazed. I even joked around at first at the novelty of it.

“I should have known it’d get you eventually,” I said, triggering a weak laugh out of her. “Everybody at the office has had that stupid virus now. All the coughing and scratching had me threatening to quit. We all get the day off tomorrow. I can stay home and take care of you.”

“I’ll be alright,” said Deanna. “I’ll be up and around again before you know it. Just give me some time.”

But when two weeks went by without her getting better my old medical paranoia started up, a familiar nagging voice that was no longer at the back of my head but right at the front of it.

“She’s going to die, Terry. She’s going to get cancer, just like you did, and then she’s going to die.”

“Let me take you to a doctor,” I said, watching Deanna shuffle back from the bathroom, her face whittled down by sickness almost to the bone. “This could be bad, D. You need to start taking it seriously.”

Deanna sat down on the couch and began to pick at a patch of skin on the back of her hand absently. There was no rash, but her skin itched from her scalp to her toes like it was alive and protesting having to stay where it was. Nothing seemed to help her, not the creams or cold showers or antihistamines I’d tried when I’d been in her position. But she wouldn’t accept any other help, no matter how many times I pushed it at her.

“I don’t need a doctor,” she said, inching down the couch to lay her head in my lap. “You got over it. I will, too.”

To me they were the words of doom, what people always said before they passed away in their sleep or hooked up to a breathing machine. False hope, swatted like a fly.

Slowly, however, Deanna started to improve, though she still scratched enough to trigger my own compulsions. Sometimes we’d sit side by side, digging our nails up and down our arms until they bled.

Then out of the blue Deanna stopped scratching altogether, though she still took naps long and deep enough that I kept thinking she’d died in her sleep. On an afternoon I was let off work early I came home to find Deanna lying on the couch with her eyes shut and the blinds pulled down. The only light in the room came from the TV, blinking red and white over her still face.

As I went over to wake her I noticed a seething wave of motion across her cheeks and forehead and down her neck like black static. It took a second for it to register that what I was seeing was hundreds of ants, crawling into Deanna’s eyes and nose and ears and mouth then out again in busy lines, their antennae twitching, their little brown bodies glinting in the low light.

Watching them I thought, ‘she must be dead. She’s dead and they’re eating her body.’

But I could see Deanna’s chest rising and falling, the unconscious twitching of her feet under her blanket. Then, as I leaned down over her, her eyes flicked open, the ants scurrying back into her body until only a few were left behind.

“Dee,” I said, my voice cracking in the middle. “There were bugs all over you. They went inside you just now.”

Deanna looked up at me, her face expressing nothing, the usual affectionate shine gone from her eyes.

“I know.”

I stared as she pulled herself up against the sofa cushions, stretching until one of her joints clicked.

“You know,” I echoed. “What do you mean you know? What does that even mean?”

Deanna reached up to touch the ants that were still on her face, guiding them gently into one of her eardrums. I couldn’t even move to stop her; helpless, I stood back, nearly doubled up by a retch.

“Don’t,” I said. “Dee, what the hell are you doing?”

“They live here,” said Deanna plainly, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I’m their home.”

I remember thinking, ‘this shouldn’t be possible. Why don’t the ants just die? Wouldn’t they drown in fluids or end up crushed or killed by the heat?’

But now I really looked at Deanna I could see them moving in the corners of her eyes and under the skin, a constant ripple of movement.

She reached out to take my hand, and only then did my body unstick from its frozen position as I pulled back, not wanting her to touch me.

“How did the ants get here?” I heard myself asking. “Did we have some kind of infestation in the house, or…”

Deanna shook her head.

“No, baby. No. They came from you.”

She got up to open the blinds, then gestured to the mirror hanging over the back of the couch.

“If you just look hard enough you’ll see them in you, too. They’ve been hiding from you. They didn’t want you to know that they were there. You might have done something, hurt yourself, and they didn’t want that. To lose their hive.”

I went over to the window and shut the blinds with a snap, not wanting to see what she saw, not wanting to believe her. But now I was concentrating I could feel the twitching of little bodies inside me, burrowing through me to make tunnels and chambers to live in and for their eggs to hatch.

“No,” I said. “No. I would have noticed.”

“You wouldn’t,” said Deanna. “They make it so that it doesn’t hurt. They’re not like other ants. They came from somewhere far away. Too far to even imagine. They needed us, living bodies to carry them. Palaces for their queen.”

She was speaking in a soft, warm voice, trying to win me over. Trying to spin what was happening to us as something good.

“No,” I said faintly. “Don’t say that. How do you even know?”

Deanna smiled, and I realised then that it was the smile of someone that had realised something terrible was happening to them and had decided to throw themselves suicidally towards it, embrace it rather than succumb.

“I know things, now,” she said. “Anything they want me to know, they make me understand. They’re in my brain. Their tunnels go all the way through, and as they pass in and out they release pheromones and chemicals; that’s their way of talking to each other, and to me. That’s how I know what they’re doing. They wanted me to know that they were there.”

I could barely stand to look at her. The longer she talked the more I saw the minute bodies at work inside her, gnawing a maze of holes through her flesh.

“Why would they want you to know about them? Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t they tell me?”

“Your colony thought you’d try to do something to yourself,” said Deanna. “Try to get rid of them somehow. It wouldn’t have worked, though. Not the way you’d want it to.”

Her eyes fell away from mine, and I saw an ant drop from a lash onto her upper lip, vanishing under it at once.

“What are you saying?” I asked her.

There was reluctance in Deanna’s answer, a truth she hadn’t wanted to let out.

“Now the ants are inside you they’re— keeping you alive. Think about it. If they weren’t there, there would be so much damage left behind. So many tunnels and holes and injuries. You’d die without them inside you; their secretions keep you healthy, your organs functioning. Your brain. They’re helping you. Us. Everyone they move into is going to live a very long time. They won’t get sick like they used to, not after their bodies adjust to housing the ants. You won’t have to worry about cancer anymore.”

Again Deanna tried to touch me, her arms going up around my neck. I bruised my calf against the bottom of the couch as I swerved away.

“I don’t want to be an ant hill,” I said. “I don’t want these fucking things living inside me.”

“But they have to, now,” Deanna protested. “They have to. You and the guys at the office, you were the first. They got into you without you even feeling it. Whenever you get close to other people some of the ants run out and onto them; that’s how the new colonies grow. Pretty soon they’ll be all over the world. We’ll all have our own.”

I raised a hand to my mouth, holding back the acid I felt jumping up from my gut.

“Why are you okay with this? How many holes did they eat into your head?”

Sadness touched the crazed face across from me.

“I’ve got to be okay with it,” said Deanna. “It already happened. It’s happening to everybody. Some will know. Some won’t. Some people are going to fight it, and you’ve been fighting so long, T. So long. And why would you fight it when this could be better for us?”

She came towards me, and I felt a sudden, violent urge to shove her away, an urge that scared me. I was sick with myself, wanting to lay a hand on the person I loved most. If she even was a person anymore.

“Deanna,” I said. “How do I know it’s still you talking to me and not them? How can I know you’re still you?”

Again she smiled, but sadly this time.

“You’re still you,” she said. “Right?”

Panic took over me, doubt and horror and a new terror for the future overcoming my dread of the cancer.

I started to overheat.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” I heard myself saying. “I can’t be here with you. I’ve got to do something.”

“You can’t,” said Deanna softly. “There’s nothing you can do. I know you get it. You can feel it.”

She laid a hand on my cheek, and I felt the ants under the skin of her palm skitter in response to me. Felt my own churn in answer.

“Don’t touch me,” I said, and I jumped back against the front door, scrambling for the handle. “Oh god. Oh my god.”

This time Deanna didn’t approach, only stood looking at me from across the room.

“Go out there, then,” she said. “Go and see what it’s like. Then you can decide what to do. I won’t stop you.”

I saw something in her eyes, then, a fear and resignation that was entirely human. Fear that I’d kill myself, or her, or others. Fear that I’d leave her alone with the ants.

It wasn’t enough for me to stay.

I banged out of the house, pausing only to dry heave in the street. Even as my body rattled with the force of a nausea the ants wouldn’t allow to develop into real sickness I felt the unrest all around me. There were voices shouting, arguing, and what I took to be distant screams, which I wanted to think for my own sanity were no more than children playing, their misheard laughter.

Still I straightened up and began walking the length of the street, walked until I found the source of those screams. A man outside Number 62 was beating his teenage daughter to death with a hammer, her twitching head spilling its brains out onto the lawn. Insects ran in oily black waves from the dying body, streaming from the wound and from under its clothes. Rats fleeing a sinking ship.

When the girl was dead the man went after the ants with the hammer, as well, bringing the head of that tool down again and again until he fell to his knees with exhaustion and despair. His red eyes followed me as I crossed to the other side of the road, but he left the hammer where it was in its coat of brain matter and flattened insects.

There were other bodies further down the street, some abandoned by their loved ones, others being dragged into houses or into cars, presumably to be hidden or disposed of. A woman in a white medical mask was spraying the entire exterior of her house with bug killer; as I passed her she paused and turned the bottle on herself, keeping her finger pressed down upon it even as she screamed in pain.

Observing her I wondered if Deanna had lost her mind in a different way, if I had, now, in my own. Did I even have a mind at all anymore, or were my memories and emotions only the regurgitations of the ants trying to keep my body living all around them?

What would they eat now that their tunnels were built? Perhaps they’d share in consuming what I did, or send scouts through the many holes in me to source sustenance from the outside.

Perhaps they’d eat me slowly, wait for my cells to regenerate and then eat again, the chemicals they expelled ensuring that they’d feed on my flesh for all their lifetimes.

I was glad that they may never let me know.

I kept walking, then, and just as Deanna had suggested there were people loading their laughing families into cars, carrying grocery bags into their houses, jogging, meeting up in the street to gossip— normal, at least on the outside, without any knowledge of what was living inside them. Still, each time I stopped to look closely I could see the alien insects writhing under the skin, motions you’d only notice if you knew what to look for.

Then there were those I assumed knew what was living inside them, and had chosen to go on without killing themselves or one another. Choosing to live accepting the new way under invasion, accepting that they were essentially living corpses, puppeteered by intelligent life. Their faces were strained, their bodies twitching in revulsion they couldn’t suppress even for the sake of keeping up appearances.

Finally there were people like Deanna, calmly cutting their grass or exercising their pets or any number of menial activities, caught up in the delusion that this could be a better way of living. A co-beneficial relationship rather than a parasitic infection, lethal if it were to be removed.

I couldn’t look at them any longer. Couldn’t stand their eyes following me, recognising me for what I was. Reminding me of it.

I found my way back to the house, aware with every step of the ants alive inside me. As I entered the front door again Deanna came out of the kitchen, shaking water and flecks of soap suds from her hands, having been washing dishes at the sink. It was hilarious in a darkly comic way that she still felt compelled to engage in domestic matters, knowing that she wasn’t a person anymore but a vessel for parasitic beings to live in, to feast and to breed within.

If we had our own children they’d likely be born already infected by her womb, or if we adopted—a girl, as Deanna had dreamed—all she’d have to do is touch the child to make her just like us.

She would do it because she loved her. Would want us to be a family in whatever way we can.

“Terry,” said Deanna. “Have you decided what you’re going to do, now?”

There was fear in her eyes again, which I guessed wasn’t entirely her own.

Still, I pitied her. I’d started this, being one of the first to be infested, to spread what was in me onto others.

I stayed with Deanna in that house, went to work as I always did and watched as the ants grew in number, crossed into all the countries of the world and ruled them from within.

What else could I have done?