The Niche In The Bathroom Wall

Trigger warning: voyeurism, body shaming

“…what on earth are all of you doing?” 

There were six of them, crowded against each other in a sea of pulsating, twitching black and brown, craning their heads to peer out of the narrow niche in the corners onto the sight below. And then there were two of us, the “scouts” as the colony would call us, emerging from our nest to look for these six runaways. 

Life was hard for all of us. We had to look out for each other. If any of us ran away, he might emerge dead in the form of a flattened corpse. 

That said, I had seen these six before. They were a bundle of faint chittering at any gatherings of the colony, a tight pulsing knot of friends whom the rest of the colony treated as outcasts. They were…revolutionaries, one might say. Or weirdos. They would preach philosophical insights about our state of living, the dichotomy between us and the humans out there, the flow of the currents that controlled this world, to anyone who would listen. They also disappeared frequently, scurrying like fugitives along the tiny tunnels all around this gigantic space we called our world and then some. 

Some called them geniuses. Most called them mad. Personally I found their disappearances fairly irritating. 

“…” The question hung in the stew of humid air. I had never been to this particular section of tunnel before. Yet the six skittered around the tight space with easy familiarity. 

The one nearest to me — Paul, his name was — twitched his feelers in an indication to invite me to come look. 

I hesitated, then clambered into the group. My partner chittered in alarm. His tone was one of worry and suspicion; he was technically my superior and could reprimand me for what could be seen as a leave of my duty, but it appeared curiosity intervened in his intentions, as he jostled into the mass of insects to take a glimpse. 

This mysterious view from the niche was one of white, slick tiles, veined with blurred blue; the space I was peering into appeared to be a boxy room of white sides and blue-grey above me and below me. With a start, I realised this room was familiar, for I had been in here before, but in a niche much closer to the blue-grey ground than from my vantage point here. The box was choked with a wet and humid mist, there was a continuous splashing sound and the walls were slick with water, and a few paces away, too close for comfort, was a pudgy mass of pink flesh, clothed with only water and the barest of skin. 

This compound of flesh was moving, a darkness on its upper portion of wet flesh was opening and closing, and off-key singing was emerging from its movements. The contours of the skin, the field of damp brown that grew on the very top like disillusioned grass, the beady, narrow slits near what I recognized as a “face”, were immediately recognisable to any scout who had brushed with death. This was the human that lived in this world. 

Of course he was not the only one in this world. There were two tinier, thinner sticks of flesh with not a field but a waterfall of the same brown plant-stalks, and a voluptuous one with a bubble of the same shiny brown around her face. But to us bugs, this human was the only one who mattered. This human was the only one whose violent, pudgy hand had brought the end to most of us. 

And he was idling in this boxy room with water pouring down on him, completely unclothed. 

This was a sight I was not used to seeing. 

“What is he doing with the water?” I could not comprehend why this human would want to drown himself with something so deadly. 

“He is bathing,” Paul said, eyes transfixed upon the sight. “Water in this amount does no harm to humans but rather cleanses their skin of dirt.” 

“Bathing?” I was not unfamiliar with the concept of cleaning; our colony members performed it regularly by scrubbing ourselves against a patch of rough cloth. No, what I was concerned with was what we were doing at this present moment. Even for us bugs we felt uncomfortable gazing upon another cleaning themselves, as if we were invading them in their vulnerability. Dirt was our armor, even if we had to strip ourselves of it sometimes. At this moment I felt an unpleasant rotting in my chest. 

“What are we doing now?” 

Silence. My question, posed with a terrible inkling, was met with the rush of water as its only reply. 

My partner vibrated uncomfortably. The six others looked content to leave my question dangling. 

I repeated my question. More silence. 

“…Is nobody going to say it?” 

Some other of the six — not Paul, his name was Mark — made a sweeping gesture to encompass all of us. “Is it not obvious to you?” 

“Your intentions are not.” 

Paul made an ironic sound. “And does it bear questioning?” 

Nearby the rush of water stopped. The human rubbed a white liquid across his skin, blooming bouquets of bubbles everywhere his fingers touched. 

Paul sighed. “Look, I realise this looks bad. I promise we do this for a reason.” 

“It’s voyeurism,” I said doggedly. “It’s wrong.” 

“And the continuous slaughter of our species is not?” 

I turned my eyes to the human. He was not the finest specimen of his species; his skin sagged and rolled like bunches of loose fabric, and I had seen humans entering this house, companions of the voluptuous one with hair like a bubble, that looked angular, their bodies inverted triangles, their skin composed of ridges and sharp lines. But his every movement, every casual flex of his fingers, all reeked of strength. Violence seethed under his skin. He was powerful, the boulders of his flesh the natural prevailer of our species. 

In all my living, the colony had a singular instruction that governed its life, all our lives: never engage the human. Never think we were equal. He was merciless, and his killing us was natural. 

“It is the way of life,” I said, my voice overlapping with all my memories of the colony elders preaching this very line. 

Mark scoffed. 

“And what has this got to do with- with watching him bathe?” I added. My head was swimming; from this strange conversation or from the carpet of hot mist in the air, I could not tell. The rush of water had started back up again. 

I still felt rotten inside. 

Paul’s voice was almost gentle. The other five insects had been scurrying their eyes back and forth from the sight of the naked human to our discussion, but now had settled over us with a kind of suspicion mixed with tentativity. I felt the weight of their eyes and sensed every uneasy twitch of their feelers. “It has everything to do with each other when you realise we are as present in his vulnerability as he is with us.” 

I froze. “What?” I voiced hoarsely. “What?” 

“He kills us,” Paul said softly. “We are vulnerable before him. Our God-given armor of our backs,” he gestured to his hard, shiny back, gleaming powerfully, and yet compared with the raw power of the human’s chubby fingers, it was nothing. “It is useless in the face of him. We will never be without our vulnerability before him.” 

“The way of life,” I repeated weakly. My head was swirling. I could only mumble these words that had mandated all my life. “Natural.” 

“It is not,” Mark spoke up angrily, his feelers piercing straight upright though the hot air in his fury. “We lived here first, for ages, before he moved into our world and slaughtered our colonies.” 

“Mark,” Paul said placatingly. 

“It’s true! He made us vulnerable before him! It is only right that we glimpse his vulnerability.” 

“Mark is right,” another member of the six voiced. “It is only right.” 

“But,” I asked, stunned, “what good does this do?” 

“What good?” Paul asked. Something in his eyes twinkled with what looked like amusement. “Oh, well, nothing at all.” 

I stared. 

“There is nothing material to be gained from what we do here,” Paul said. He guided me gently to the edge of the niche, to the gaping view below, the mass of all that pink and white skin, prickling with little bumps in part cold and part heat. “But look. When he kills us, he laughs.” 

Quite suddenly I remembered an incident when I was fairly young — a friend and I had scampered quite mischievously to this wood-adorned place with food and scent galore, when this human had approached, and swiftly slammed a large hand onto my friend. I had managed to duck aside and cower under a piece of shadow unreachable to him, but not so my friend. When the human lifted his hand, what was left was a flattened splatter of brown. 

At that time, I was too shocked to grieve. What really struck me, however, was the gleam of pleasure in the human’s beady eyes. A twinkle, malicious and mocking. A laugh. 

“He takes pleasure in our vulnerability.” 

That was a sentence roaming in the back of my head ever since that day, which I feared to materialize into thought fully. Paul, as if reading my mind for its secrets and histories, dug it out and manifested it to life. 

“Then what do we do?” I asked. My feet trembled. I felt as if I was on the cusp of something new, a chasm, a tipping point wherein I might stumble and lose myself entirely. 

“Us?” The group of five insects fanned out around Paul. “We take pleasure in his vulnerability!” 

At that moment I felt a great and pervasive force sweep out from under their feet, suffocating this tiny space with its power. It was something almost godly, something on a different plane where morals no longer reined back the proud and primal desires of animals. 

“Look at him,” whispered Paul. “Look at him in his nakedness. He can’t hide himself under his clothes and his violence. We have seen him staring at himself in some kind of reflective glass, pinching his centre with two fingers. We have seen him lament. He hates his nakedness!” 

“His naked form is weak!” roared Mark. 

“He condemns us to vulnerability by his presence in front of us. But us!” Paul sounded indescribably happy, but it was a happiness underscored with malice. “We condemn him to his own vulnerability by gazing upon him in his weakest state!” 

The noises they made, a buzz of sharp energy, was growing louder and louder, beating with an ever-quickening rhythm, fast, fast, faster, and I sensed they were about to crescendo. 

“Look at him. Look at him!” Mark pushed me closer to the edge. The six of them were now chittering in feverish excitement, suffused with a nervous energy. “Be free to judge him! Condemn him! Look,” he threw his head back and laughed, wild and free and strong, “he is so ugly!” 

And then the entire group, the six of them, the six whose quietness, whose constrained mumbling I was used to, laughed, and inside their eyes were the wildest of gleams, shinier than the fluorescent lights of this boxy room, shinier than the magical glitter of a witch’s cauldron, shinier than the burst of sun over the horizon every morning, shinier than anything I had ever seen. Inside them, like a bloodthirsty flower, bloomed the red of vindictive, greedy pleasure. 

“Crazy,” my partner muttered, his eyes and feelers darting frantically. “Crazy, you’re all crazy! I- I had enough! I’m leaving!” He turned and almost tripped over himself scrambling away, the click of his chitter high and frightened. 

Paul seemed incandescent then. They all did. He tilted his head. “Are you going to join him?” he asked calmly. “Run off in fear like your little friend?” 

I felt as if I was in a dream, separated from my physical body into a different realm. Everything was a haze. I felt my own voice, coming far off, echoing from a deep, dark, formless chasm. “No,” I said dazedly. “I think I’d rather stay.” 

And stay I did. The six welcomed me into their midst in a fever of enthusiasm. I was jostled among them, gathered with them to the niche where we gazed upon once again this naked human being, and this time I completely let go of the rotten feeling in my chest, let the feeling wash away with the continuous rush of water, and I let my eyes remain on this human, this sack of vulnerable flesh. I ran my eyes over him, every nook and rise and divot of skin, blooming in patches of colour, the sag of his arms and legs and torso, and I felt something electrifying crawl up my body underneath my brown outer shells. It was the cleanest and purest thing I’d ever felt. I was suffused with a jittery excitement; I was completely elevated. 

“Wow,” I marveled. The human’s powerful body was crude, the violence senseless, the chaos inside him rotting and turning inward in a riot that made his body bulge out in unsatisfactory places. I wondered how I could have missed this show of vulnerability, this show of lusterless flesh. “He really is ugly.” 

When I said that, the human opened the boxy room up to reveal a rectangular hole, and a gust of cool air swept in. The heat dissipated. My eyes were tingling. Under the bright lights long cool shadows were cast, and behind Paul and me were shapes moulded like the human head, torso and arms, and on the wall, in a mass of greyish shadow, behind the ugly, ugly human, was the shadow of a giant insect, reduced to the simplest form of itself.