It wasn’t the most pleasant place, but it was ours. The walls sometimes bled, and we could only take the trash out once a moon, which got a little stinky, but it was our stink. The canary roaches tried to move in every so often, but Tilly would strike a match and they’d scatter. She was down to two matches by the time it stopped mattering.
We’d been underground for so long at that point — safe and cold and damp and dark — that we grew complacent; foolish. We reveled in the fresh comforts of our doom: when the soil warmed below us as it did above, when the walls dried out, when the harpysong grew threnodic and more seldom until it no longer permeated the earth above our heads with its ominous chitter and thrum. But when the roaches stopped unpacking — that’s when we held each other close and prayed.
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