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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/8_Bit_Nerd on 2026-05-25 00:10:30+00:00.

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My parents worked in this small expatriate compound in Saudi Arabia, a little no-name place that’s not even on the maps anymore. Trust me, I looked, but all that’s left are the outlines of foundations where our houses once stood. It’s all gone now, bulldozed, left to the desert and buried like some unmarked grave.

About fifteen families had lived there and fifty or so bachelors working as engineers, doctors, and nurses. I knew everyone and everyone knew me. It was small as small towns got, a handful of square miles of desert with a station to process and pump crude oil from the Eastern Province Oil Fields up into Lebanon, and rows of manicured lawns around company homes.

I was about ten years old, I think, when I woke up one morning and found my mom and dad standing by the glass door to the yard. I remember my dad holding my mom close with one arm. It was dark outside. Not like night, but shrouded like when a sandstorm hits and the haze gets into the houses.

Grasshoppers were crawling all over the glass … locusts like the biblical kind. We’d gotten them before, pushed by storms in Africa across the Red Sea and through gaps in the western cliffs of the Arabian Peninsula. I’d seen them twice before, and I hated them. Imagine your every step crunching them under your shoes and sending dozens flying all around you. I used to run home when they came. It felt like torture, walking slowly.

Thing is, these weren’t the locusts I remembered. The color was off, ash and soot like they’d just spun off some campfire, and their rasping tickling the insides of my ears. They crawled on the sliding glass door by the dozens, and in the yard by the tens of thousands and beyond that, there were millions of them buzzing around. They crawled over our manicured lawn and sat on tree branches, eating anything they could find. Thinking about them still makes my skin crawl even now.

When my mom finally saw me, she rushed over and told me, “It’s okay, it’s just locusts.” But every time I tried looking past her, she’d pull my face back and say, “They’ll be gone soon, okay?” I kept staring at the bugs, though—hard not to—and I kept wondering…

…why’d they look like they were disintegrating?

I spent the next couple of days just pestering my parents with those kinds of questions.

“When are they leaving?”

“When they’re full,” my mom said. She tried to be brave for me, but I could read her like a book I’d read a thousand times. She was scared, and so that meant I was scared.

“Where’d they come from?”

“Sudan or Egypt,” my dad said. I don’t know if it bothered him much, and he just sat on the couch, reading one of his dog-eared Louis L’Amour Westerns. If my dad was a book, I didn’t know what language he was written in. He didn’t hate me or anything, but he didn’t relate to me either.

The television wasn’t working either … something about locusts interfering with the short-wave antenna from our little transmitting station. This was before home computers and streaming were a thing. So, with nothing to do but read, fear gave way to boredom and I wandered back to my room to find some comic or toy I wasn’t bored of yet.

But I couldn’t help myself either, even though my mom had told me to stay away from the windows. I left the lights off like a spy and pulled the curtains open a bit, just so I could study  those freaky locusts leaving trails through the film of ash covering the glass. The strangest part was that their wing membranes had been eaten down to the cobweb scaffolding or whatever it’s called. How did they even fly? And why did they make sounds that made my inner ear itch? It while watching them that I saw something moving in my backyard. I just about jumped out of my own skin.

I couldn’t make the figure out but it looked like one of the old bedu who worked in camp maintenance. We called him ‘Old Hajj,’ but I couldn’t really tell with his shemagh wrapped tight under his chin.

He was walking around in the storm of locusts, just casual like this was an everyday thing, scooping up handfuls of them and shoving them in his burlap sack. The bedu ate grasshoppers, it was like a delicacy, but nah… that was all kinds of ‘nope’ for me. Couldn’t do it, even when I’d seen Old Hajj roasting a few grasshoppers over a small campfire once. He’d offered me one, but I shook my head, too scared to try them. I remember him laughing and then digging into a grasshopper with his teeth, eating it like how I used to eat chicken wings (I stopped eating them once I made that connection).

Anyway, I’m rambling. So, I see who I think is Old Hajj in my backyard and I start pulling on the curtains when suddenly, the locusts just burst into flight. I back away and watch him walk up to the window, all this ash and dust blowing all around him. Now he’s just standing outside, looking down at me. Then—get this—he runs his hand along the window sill, scoops up a handful of locusts…

…and jams a fistful right into his mouth.

I screamed, I mean Jesus, who wouldn’t, and I run into my parents as I’m trying to run out the door. I know I wasn’t making any sense to them, but by the time I got them to look out the window, the old bedu was gone.

After that, I slept on the couch. Forget my own bedroom with that window near my bed, I was done. Anyhow, another day of this storm and my dad gets a call from work. All hands on deck—they needed all the doctors and nurses to come in to treat people. Nobody told me what for, but my mom and me watched him get bundled up and run for our Buick that was parked on the street. We could barely see him, his windows were covered in bugs, and when he turned on the windshield wipers, they just crumbled and smeared the glass. My heart sank as I watched him drive away. We weren’t close, but that didn’t mean I didn’t need him.

Not long after that, the telephone rings again, startling the crap out of us—we were on edge. My mother started talking to someone in Arabic, and I could hear the worry creep into her voice. I was afraid it was about dad, and by the time I got up to see what was happening, she was already putting on her coat and covering her head in a scarf.

“Mom? Is dad--?”

“Your father’s fine.” When she took me by the shoulders, I knew that meant she really wanted me to listen. She said Myriam, one of the mothers, was hurt and that she needed to go help her.

“What happened to her.”

“She hurt her ears, I think.” But even my mom didn’t sound certain about that.

“How?”

“Honey-honey, I don’t know, okay? I have to go help her and her children.” I could hear the edge in my mom’s voice. Everyone in the camp trusted her and all the kids loved her. She was their teacher and mine since kindergarten. I guess that meant I had to share her as mom.

“But I want to go with you,” I said, probably whining knowing me, but she was firm in a way that told me not to argue. Then just like that, she left me alone in the house, in my little bubble, surrounded by that steady whirring that scratched deep inside my ears. It was driving me crazy.

Anyway, I was alone for a long while. I can’t say how long, but I kept hearing things. I’d be flipping through Tintin or Asterix & Obelix, and then I’d hear something like a cry or a shout. I’d stop reading … I’d just listen … but I’d hear nothing else. Did someone get scared? Were my friends running around outside? That was crazy, so I stayed put.

Finally, I got up to go pee. I’d kept ignoring the pressure on my bladder for too long, but when I opened the bathroom door, the droning just spiked in pitch and I swear I could suddenly feel it vibrating against my brain. I jammed my fingers into my ears and hummed, but nothing worked. I almost ran from the bathroom, but I was about to piss myself. When I lifted the toilet seat, though, I--I remember screaming. Yeah, just screaming until my throat seized up and I tasted copper.

There’s no pretty way to say it—the toilet was filled with locusts. I don’t mean they were crawling around inside the bowl, I mean they filled it … like a plug. I’ll never forget that, the way they just surged up and overflowed the rim. It was like they were waiting for me to find them, and then *boom* they were suddenly flying out from the bathtub and the sink drain too.

I bolted, slamming the door shut behind me but they were coming up the kitchen sink and more were squeezing underneath the door. Oh, and here’s the best part about all this. I was barefoot. I should have worn slippers; scorpions were always problem where I lived and the red and yellow ones could kill me, but I thought I was safe in my own home.

I swatted and batted and stomped on the ones that jumped me, and I felt them crumble. They filled the air with swirls of dust and ash. I was still screaming too, my voice pretty raw, but I couldn’t stop myself. I never felt terror like that before, but that was before I heard glass shatter. I froze. I was terrified. It sounded like it came from my parent’s bedroom, which was down at the end of the hallway. I stared at their dark room, and when I heard that rasping rise in pitch, I knew the bugs had gotten in somehow. I knew it the second before they came bursting through that open door, hundreds of them just… vomiting out into the corridor.

How did they get in? That’s what you’re wondering right? I thought the same thing, but then I heard more glass breaking, this time in the kitchen, and I saw a rock go skidding across our tile floor along with broken shards of glass.

Someone had thrown the rock. So...

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