“Invasion”

In the last weeks of her pregnancy, Leya developed a headache that started behind her left eye, radiated vertically over her skull and down the back of her head into her neck. When she said the headache was keeping her up even more than the ache in her hips and the baby pressing hard against her bladder, her doctor blamed hormones or stress, and joked that she’d better get used to not sleeping at night. Leya spent her first day away from her job lying on the sofa, watching Sex and the City reruns.

She had started her parental leave unexpectedly early because of the headache, and also because she could hardly wait to begin a full year off, away from her work at the NGO: the office politics, the weight of working on projects that sounded meaningful that never seemed to really change anything. Over time she found herself spending her days filling out applications for funding, having long meetings with the other staff and potential supporters, always raising money. The real work, the kind that connected them to others outside their organization, was then assigned to volunteers.

After a while it felt pointless. Soon after the pain in her head began, she also started finding ants in her house. The first one, a black speck small as a splinter, wandered across the bathroom counter as she was braiding her hair.

Out of the corner of her eye Leya saw it move and thought that the headache was distorting her vision. But when the insect passed behind the faucet, she dropped her hair, squ.