I had this dream in which there were fruit flies (drosophila melanogaster -- my freshman year biology teacher was so excited when she talked about them that I henceforth remembered the scientific name through all these years) embedded into the skin under my palms, dotted like living chia seeds sprinkled onto my hands, winged blackheads that squirmed and I felt them all, felt each of them wiggling around under my bumpy palms. I had to squeeze each of them out like an overripe pimple and felt the bugs leave my skin with stinging puss. I remember waking up that morning and checking my hands frantically to see if it had transferred into reality.
I don’t know why, but that feeling -- the feeling of uncomfortable squirming under my flesh in such an inevitable, un-ignorable way haunts me constantly. When I feel stressed, my palms tingle slightly as if I can recall the feeling that I haven’t technically felt before -- echoes of the flies’ movement that I felt the morning after the dream. It feels so real, so threatening, so violating. I can bring it up into my head upon command, the erratic buzzing and the pain as I squeeze them out, the way my hands become home to bugs and then craters of stinging, exposed skin after I’ve removed them all, many of them dead because I disembodied them in my strenuous attempt to rid myself of the parasites. Afterwards, my hands look like a sponge with small holes, as if someone took a metal suction straw and sucked out little bits of my palm, dot by dot so that when I make a fist, I can feel my skin fold around the holes, feel the sting of the fresh, sensitive skin five layers deep that met the world’s air months too early.