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Brainbugs

Madeleine Hollis | Fiction, Fall 2025

The wife often attempted to explain the fullness in her head by equating it with pests. I have ants in my head today, she’d told the husband once, after they’d been dating for nearly four months. It was that purgatorial time in the relationship when she felt comfortable enough to say something he might find strange, but hesitant to say something flat-out like I’m feeling depressed or I was on medication for a time before you came along. Instead, she spoke of ants and he laughed and asked what she meant and she said that she was just feeling jittery, maybe a little restless. 

What she really meant however, was that she could feel their tiny feet walking along the crevices of her brain, pushing up at the skull, like it was an oversized piece of dried bread they’d found on a hot span of concrete. The pressure of it was overwhelming, and sometimes, in the quiet of the night, she could swear she heard their little ant mouths chewing at the sides of her cortex, whispers of mouthfuls in an otherwise dark and silent room. 

When things got particularly bad, she imagined a made-up device, something cylindrical and silver that one might see in a made-for-tv sci-fi movie. In the scene behind her eyes, she saw it very clearly: she would hold the silver device against her right temple and it would make a whirring noise and then the end piece would spit out and slice a perfect circle into her skin, an opening for every bad and evil thing to come crawling out. The ants would spill out with the quickness of a burst vein and fall dead to the floor, where, upon closer inspection, the mass would turn out not to be ants at all. Instead, it would be a wriggling, writhing mess of wife. Every bad thought and hurtful word she’d ever had or said would be torn from that soft spot on

her scalp, and when it was all done pouring out, her skin would sew itself back up to normal and she would be a new, cleansed version of herself.  

Tonight, the ants in her head felt more like spiders. These were the truly ominous ones, the ones that yanked and bit and brought tears to her eyes. She’d thought that being with the husband might silence the little brainbugs, a term coined by a boy she’d dated once long ago. Like your own personal bedbugs, he’d explained, touching the tip of his finger to the wife’s temple. But it hadn’t silenced them. It had maybe even made them worse in the end. 

The cylindrical device did not work with the spiders, proving time and time again to be entirely useless against their gnawing. When the spiders came, the only solution was to take one half of a sleeping pill, as prescribed by the doctor, and let them chew their way across her forehead until she drifted into sleep. 

Sleeping pills were not an option tonight, because she’d been taking perhaps one or two more than the recommended dosage lately, out of necessity of course and nothing at all worrisome as the husband might think if he noticed. Fortunately, he did not notice most things these days, like how the plants had begun dying and the food had begun expiring, everything in the house on the precipice of rot in some way or another. She simply hadn’t gotten to fixing it all, but she would, she knew, once that thrumming in her head calmed and she could think again. 

____________

The husband always left for work on time, which left the wife to do all that needed doing around the house. A job she should be grateful for, he said, as it was a merciful reprieve in comparison to his hard work at the office. When they spoke of the office, she imagined a magical land for husbands, a place where they went to do business, do computer, do work email and god it’s good to be away from the wife. It was difficult to imagine this land where he disappeared to

for eight hours a day, a place from which he returned with a sigh and an I wish I didn’t have to go into the office tomorrow, though she knew that if she asked him to stay, he would chuckle as though she couldn’t possibly understand the hard work it took to be the husband. It was easy to be the wife, he reminded her often, so easy to flit around the house in a dress and water plants and read books and make dinner and clean and gab with the girls. What girls? She did not know. When he said these things, she knew that he had just as little knowledge about her life as she did his, and there was some comfort in the idea that she might still be unknowable. So when the first ant crawled from beneath her fingernail, she did not speak a word of it. She stared a moment, and then placed it in a jar, where she spent an hour watching it attempt to scale the walls. 

____________

Her new morning routine involved trying to clean the grout from the bathroom tiles, which was difficult work because it required a perfect mixture of baking soda, dish soap, and hydrogen peroxide, which took some time to soak and then quite a bit of effort to scrub to the point of shining. It took many tries, but eventually one full tile was sparkling clean; a snow-white oasis of hope in a sea of otherwise mildewy gray. 

Once she’d poured a bit of elbow grease into three or four tiles, she made herself a breakfast of yogurt and bacon, because life was about balance after all, and she wasn’t willing to give up all of the good things just for a tight waist. The plant had also begun looking livelier after 

only a few days of watering, and she chastised herself for not getting to it sooner. Such an easy task, she thought. So silly that it took so long to get to it. 

As she watered the plant, she whispered a small hello to the growing colony of ants that sat beside it. Six and counting. They’d begun springing up like leaks, two more from her fingernails, one from the toenail of her pinky toe, one from her ear and two from her nose. 

She’d had to poke holes in the top of the jar because the first had died and the others had eaten it with a voracity that made her realize they must be starving. To make up for her neglect, she’d begun crushing up the crumbs of a cracker and tossing them into the jar like a fairy godmother sprinkling golden dust upon her beggarly, beautiful ward. 

____________

The doctor’s office was not at all her favorite place to visit, though she was reminded that she must go, that not sleeping made her dazed and grumpy and not nearly enough honey you’re home! It was true that she hadn’t been sleeping entirely well, that the fuss in her brain was more than a bit distracting. And so she’d conceded, though that may be a strong word for the miniscule fight she put up, the meek protest that she was fine when she was “obviously not.” 

The waiting room was a nightmare drenched in blaring overhead light. A baby wailed to the left of her and a mother tried desperately to calm it, using such classic techniques as shushing it and handing it toys that it would then throw to the ground. She tried to ignore the parts of her that wanted to scream at the baby, to quiet its screeching, to howl back at its face until its eardrums were as sore as hers. The inevitability of her own motherhood pulled her back, the admission that she must become more graceful in the face of loud and terrible noises. The husband had always told her what a lovely mother she would be, how patient, how kind, how giving. How she wanted to lunge across the room and hold her hand against its mouth. 

A kind-looking receptionist eventually escorted her into the examination room, where she waited for only ten minutes before the doctor appeared. He came with questions of her mood, her physical state, her mental state, how well she’d been sleeping. 

“That’s why I’m here. I just haven’t been sleeping well.” 

“Has it been affecting your mood at all?”

“My husband says I’ve been a bit grumpy.” 

“Well, aren’t we all when we haven’t slept? Nothing to worry about.” 

They spoke of prescriptions and when he asked if there was anything else bothering her, she shook her head and smiled politely and wondered if it would be strange to ask whether it was possible for something to travel all the way up from your brain down to your toenails. 

____________

When the husband returned home the next day, she greeted him with a kiss on the cheek and an exclamation that dinner would be ready soon. They had meatloaf followed by a dazzling pineapple upside down cake that looked, if she did say so herself, nearly identical to the one pictured on the cover of Frida’s (Fabulous!) Family Cookbook. She’d received it from his mother last Christmas, along with a tightlipped smile and a comment about how she ought to spend all that time doing something, if he was going to spend all of his time supporting her lifestyle. Lifestyle, spat like a poison, with an eye directed at the pearls her husband had given her for their 2nd anniversary. She paid no mind, of course, because it was polite to dress for company, even if company glared at you while you fixed them dessert. 

Now he was leaning back in the chair, a few pineapple crumbs stuck to the corner of his lip, which ticked up in languid satisfaction. He rubbed his belly and complimented her twice on a job well done before placing his dirty plate in the sink to be cleaned. 

“Is that new?” 

She glanced at the ant colony she’d bought from the pet store, home to twenty-six happy, well-fed bugs, and smiled as she nodded. 

“That’s an interesting hobby.” 

She hummed in response and continued humming until all of the dishes were done.

____________

The husband broke the glass of the ant colony after they’d begun reproducing, creating their own small versions of the wife. Her grandbugs, she sometimes thought affectionately. She heard the sound of shattering from the bedroom and dutifully followed it, expecting a broken vase or some other similarly insignificant item. 

“You really shouldn’t have left this so close to the edge.” 

The husband was in a mood, though she could not for the life of her figure out why, as he was the one who had done the breaking. 

When she covered her face in an attempt to hide the tears, the husband rolled his eyes. “They’re ants, honey. Honestly.” 

But they were hers, didn’t he see? Her little secret, her body, her insides. 

She considered picking up a shard of glass, holding it to his eyeball and pressing until it popped out, telling him he shouldn’t have been so careless with it in the first place. Then she considered doing the same to herself, her stomach, the only part of her he spoke to these days. 

He told her once more to be more careful where she placed things and then walked back into the bedroom, leaving her to scrape the remnants of her colony into the dustpan. That night, she got her first spider. 

____________

After the cleaning of the colony and a morning of half-whispered apologies, brought about only by the exasperated recognition that the wife had become inexplicably attached to these creatures, life moved seamlessly on. As the months passed, the bathroom tiles transformed into a sparkling scene from Homemaker’s Weekly, and though the wife understood that the

husband would not notice or care, she still took a certain pride in watching them shine as she lurched over the toilet bowl. 

Insects continued to birth from her crannies, finding stranger and stranger places from which they would debut into the world. Each time, she scooped them up with a gentle finger and placed them into the well-polished colony that sat safely upon her sewing table. The husband did not often wander there, and so they were safe, both from physical harm and his obvious disdain of what he considered an unusual and immature project. At night, they lay beside each other, his mouth against her belly as she rubbed a hand along the gurgling mess of her womb. He was softer some days, and meaner others, and on one particularly violent night, he decided that it was only fair to march into the den, pick up her colony, and flush its contents down the toilet. She’d deserved it after all, because she’d voiced the idea of starting her career up again, which led, in one way or another, to an explosive discussion about how her only skill was ant-farming. 

____________

Three months later, a bold headline splashed across local and national journals:

Woman Gives Birth to Spider Nest

______________________________________

Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?

“This piece traces a line down the spine of myself more than grabbing hold of me fully; the strange fantasies I keep myself awake with at night, the mirrored reflection in the eyes of a woman I am afraid to be, and yet, in some ways, long to be. In some terrifying ways. An amber trapping of a time before (life having not yet started for me, as a mother might say) — a domestic terror that I may come back to years from now, an oven mitt in my lap as I slide a finger along the smooth surface of youthful naivety. Condemnation, a caress, forgiveness.”

Madeleine Hollis is a multidisciplinary Louisiana-raised writer with a keen interest in the strange and magical details of everyday life. Against all good advice, she has decided to pursue a teaching certification and plans to begin her MFA within the year. Her fiction also appears in the New Orleans Review.