THE TENANTS

weekly prompt :
what if you rent out your house and something goes horribly wrong when you arrive unexpectedly early?

Shiney blueblack bees as big as a mans thumb climbed out of the kitchen window sill, one after one, buzzing a base bee buzz. They formed a single file and zizzed past her ear, one, two, three, then more, making a circular survey of the kitchen, selecting an open and spilled bottle of tacky honey to dine on cafeteria style.
“OH my god, the walls, they are moving!” She looked at the stucco dining room walls that had been painted buttery yellow before they left. They WERE moving.
There were veins laid out like ivy bubbling under the paint, pulsing toward every door or window frame. Somehow they had gotten between the stucco and the cement wall and were methodically searching for wood. Termites. Here?
Something fell on her carefully groomed hair. Small black bits. She picked them out and looked up just as a hand sized gecko fell from the light fixture onto her upturned face.
“AHHG!” she gasped, horrified. She removed it roughly. It did not want to be removed and clung, one little hand on her nose, the other holding her bangs. “Hola” she swore she heard it whisper as its little pink tongue flipped in and out.
She continued brushing it off long after it had let go and scurried off under the red leather sofa. The sofa she noted with mounting hysteria
looked as if it had been intentionally slashed, but likely was the victim of the former tenant’s cats.
She tried to open windows and doors to air the house which smelled of stale tobacco and litterbox but they were rusted shut, their clever latching mechanisms useless.
She walked back out of the dark Mexican Casa into the bright afternoon sun. A red cardinal, at shoulder height in the fig tree cocked its head as she stormed down the flagstone path.
“Sure glad we’re only renting” she told her husband as she walked briskly to the property management office.