Our Father, Tardigrade - Caleb Bethea

You know tardigrades? People call them water bears too. Basically microscopic little fucks that look more like a pig with a gas mask.

My roommate had just tried to save my soul again so I thought I’d sleep it off. I laid down for a while. And, well, there was a tardigrade in my bed. The reason I was able to see it was that it was as big as my own body. Wasn’t dreaming either. I could feel the indentation of the mattress, rolling me into its piggy skin. Actually much softer than you’d think. Like velvet or what I imagine gossamer might feel like.

So there I was, cuddling a tardigrade, thinking of gossamer. I wanted to wear its gas mask, wondered if my roommate would talk down to me so much if I wore a gas mask. That’s when the tardigrade spoke with the voice of god.

Telling me to come on in.

And I immediately caught a handle under a fold of skin I was stroking on  its back. It was cold, and I clamored this awful metallic noise out of the little fuck until it opened. Turns out it was an escape hatch to get inside the tardigrade.

 I said—Sure, god. I’m coming.

Let me tell you, it was a birth in there. Fluid working its way up my nostrils and down my throat and I could only breathe halfway. But I couldn’t see. Didn’t matter because it didn’t take sight to know that there were other bodies all around me. Bodies like mine, the listening type, the walk-through-open-doors type. Didn’t matter until the hand of god knuckled a gas mask tight in my own grip.

 That’s when I could see. Through the fluid, I started checking the other bodies for my roommate. He wasn’t really the listening type but I thought maybe the water bear converted him before he got into my bed. Amen?

None of them were my roommate. He has a full body. And these bodies, they were in pieces. Mostly. Some of them had been in pieces but had been stitched back together by a microscopic surgeon’s hand. But these were macro body parts and the handiwork was coming apart in the fluid. Even the arms and legs that hadn’t totally come undone, you could see little schools of tardigrades, flooding out between the gaps of the wounds by the millions.

I was a little disgusted and wanted to see these bodies back in their beds. Wanted to see a life-sized hand stitch them back together for their open casket viewings. But, most of all, I wanted my roommate. Wanted him to see me now, how I could navigate these bodies on my own.

So I kicked my legs, knowing they might not be attached to my body much longer, swimming against the other slick skins until I got to the top. And suddenly there were two windows looking out into the world at my bed, the indentation of where my body laid before.

I cinched my gas mask tight. Didn’t need to hear god to know what was happening next. All I had to do was push my face mask in until my eyes lined up with the two windows that were god’s eyes, the tardigrade’s eyes. It took some doing.

But when they clicked, I squealed. Suddenly, I couldn’t even feel the fluid. Couldn’t feel the stitched-together bodies. Just the folds of my own gossamer skin, reveling in my own bed. I heaved around tardigrade legs and it gave me a migraine to feel how soft my sheets were with eight legs to touch them.

Honestly, I would have gone somewhere else. The spiritual migraine would have transported me - to other bodies, other fluids - if it wasn’t for the gas mask. That’s what kept my eyes open to my room. To my door, shaking, struggling to be opened from the other side.

Could hear the voice of my roommate, the little tardigrades of his words flooding out between the crack of the door. Asking me if I’m okay.

I squealed. With the voice of god.

***

Caleb Bethea is a writer from the Southeast. They earned their MFA at UofSC and now work in marketing. But, the best of their time is spent with their wife and two goblins by the ocean. You can read their work in HAD, Maudlin House, hex, Twin Pies, autofocus, and elsewhere. They tweet at @caleb_bethea_.