I found a flea on my big toe this morning, naked, kitchen, half way through the
pint of sparkling water a tender tickle in my big toe hairs down there and there it is and.
Will you believe me if you’ve never had to do this that a flea is daftly hard to kill? I pinched smushed it between my finger and thumb, opened and it leapt there on
the floor, panicking already about infestation convinced it was bed bug, pinned it pressed it with my thumb into the click floor. It leapt again I pushed it
into floor againboing 20 centimetres away panicking I was going to lose it back to its mate or mates, polyamorous fleas randy fleas a fecund circus of procreation. I did not yet know if it was flea I thought bedbug New York Paris the new mattress topper the newish mattress all that hand-stuffed cotton.

I pressed down onto into it again with my nail, expecting some kind of crack or pop to see my own blood, darkened by its minuscule intestines, spurring out like zombie ejaculate.
Lifted up my nail my calcified guillotine boing again this makes no sense, I pinched it up put it on the breakfast bar and pressed pressed, rocking my nail tip across it, chopping garlic with one of those stop – pulled thumb away and it’s still moving, writhing, trying to jump back down to it harem, by now its spine, it has a spine? crushed but there’s been
no pop. The fact of it still alive insane we don’t use that word any more says my spastic brain but this this was what if someone repeatedly smashed the Empire State Building down onto me and still I was trying to write trying to write and then just a whole fistful of caterpillar
diggers smashed into my skull and still I’m trying to write?

This is it? I am the flea of literature? An image ruined by spazbrain delivering me
whoever that childish guitarist is that cartoon man who plays for one of those American bands playing his guitar or bass maybe it’s a bass on the hood of a cliché car in a cliché desert. There’s nothing left for us. Rain down your skyline your industry your decadent tools decant them all down onto me.

The problem with something like this, something like this monstrous alien in my home my flat my space maybe is this just a me-brain thing but I can’t now stop thinking about that there’s more fleas – the computer wants me to let it know that if I see one or two more because that would confirm the presence of a breeding pair. Fleas are fucking in my
skirting boards, in my already leak-damaged rug, I still haven’t been up to fourteen-oh-six to get the insurance number. The rug is dry but it was orange-mouldy before I scrubbed it.
Perhaps now it’s full of fleas, fucking, flinging, swapping the keys of their American cars in my rugs, skirting boards, bedding. These are the places the computer said I must vacuum then
empty the vacuum outside outside being my balcony sorry everyone below

Martin Jackson
London, 2026