In the Golden Age of Reading, some short stories by some writers achieved a kind of immortality by way of ubiquity, underlying their authors’ subsequent careers.  The stories turned up in every anthology of short fiction—Modern American Stories, Great Modern Stories, The Best Short Stories of ___, etc.  You know the ones:   “Haircut,” by Ring Lardner, Irwin Shaw’s “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.,” John Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio.”  Everybody read them.  Their universality meant the writers could coast along, literary reputation-wise, without slaving over blockbuster novels or dazzling Book of the Month Club behemoths.  Just one lousy short story.
            I had mine, earning those 15 or so free minutes of fame.  (Remember when Liberty always gave you the average reading time for every story—20 minutes or 7 minutes or 13 minutes?  Time was precious to short story readers in those days of magazines, glossies, weeklies, monthlies, stern cardboard-covered periodicals.)
             My one precious all-popular short story, “Infestation,” was published in a “little” (or little-ish) magazine called blue. and published in some lost place on the rim of the galaxy, Fort Dodge, Iowa, I think it was, which ran for six or seven slender issues.  The reading time for “Infestation” would have been ca. 11 minutes at the outside.  Yellowish paper, blurry type, stapled unevenly with a studiedly grey and lifeless cover on crinkly card stock.
            But my story “Infestation” was spotted by some of those obscure competing annual award anthology-dealies—Best American Short Fiction of 19__, Stories of the Year, Great New Fiction Annual, 19__, etc.  Then it began appearing everywhere and small (small-ish) royalty checks fluttered into my mailbox like starveling moths returning to the scene of the crime. 
            However, little else happened in my writing life.  Other stories I mailed out with SASE came back only with the usual smudgy multilithed rejection slips I knew so well, and even when I touted myself as “author of ‘Infestation,’” nothing much resonated.  Nobody even asked “So what?”  My hometown weekly ran a half-column story on page 11 amongst the weddings and funerals retailing my putative fame, spelling my name wrong and calling the story “Investigation.”
            I felt some of this hollow renown was owed to blue.  The mag’s title was supposed to be read as “blue period,” but no one ever got the pun.  And then I found out the dismal little rag was not even indexed in most periodical catalogues.  It existed in a black hole.  I had somehow scaled Mt. Parnassus only to slither sideways into a bottomless crevasse of gloom.
            “Infestation” was a tale fitting into a vague category of “quasi-gothic” fiction—stories that are faintly creepy by very indirect implication, mere hints and whispers of the uncanny.  You know, like the one about the man who swallows an invisible parasite that torments him till he can pass it on to someone else.  Or the classic about the man who contracts a cafard.   Or the famous bug-man story—wake up and be an insect!  There were once lots of them—some authors made a lifetime’s work out of trick endings and relentless ambiguous innuendo, hints that we are now entering the Crepuscular Zone.
            My story wasn’t exactly autobiographical, though all readers need to believe that fiction writers can’t possibly make anything up but just keep detailed diaries for story-fodder.  At the time I wrote it, I was traveling as an editor-sales rep. for a national magazine, Contemporary Farmer, and hinterlands was my middle name.  I drove across green baize prairies into hidden valleys, up uncharted hills into every cowtown, corn palace, hayseed haven and misbegotten stockyard metropolis in the “heartland.” I edited special issues on hog cholera, bovine botulism, glanders, hoof rot, beak rot and virulent sheep fistula.  I organized symposia on price supports, land banking, contour plowing and the three-field rotation system and its cognates.
            Somewhere amidst this rolling pilgrimage of on-the-road hysteria I lodged for the night (or nite, as usually spelled) in some shoddy motel—a Motel-5, Super-8, Sleepy 6 or other budget barn, one of oh! so many blurred along the lost highways of my memory.  I ate unidentifiable fodder at a fast-food unit on the highway, crept to my sleep unit and fell asleep on prickly sheets, under a blanket stamped out of semi-rigid felt.
            In the middle of the black nite, I woke to feel something nestling furtively in my armpit.  Now, the axillary region is a male’s softest soft spot.  Women have lots of crannies and special bouncy bits but men’ surfaces are pretty much as uniformly tough as corrugated iron.  Wide awake, I turned on the 40-watt bulb over the bed and dug my fingers into my axillary hair, extracting a small foreign object.  A little lozenge shape, brownish or greyish or blackish.  It fell to the sheet and lay there.  I prodded it and peered at it.  It seemed hard and soft, yielding but unbreakable. I held it close to my eye—it was featureless, without excrescences such as legs. carapaces, wings, feelers, mandibles or other insectoidal clues.  A teeny inscrutable thing.
            How did it arrive in my private, secret, personal armpit?  I had bathed in the feeble lukewarm water that dribbled from the shower, certainly washing my armpits.  It must have—gotten on me in bed.  I tore back the sheets and blanket, rolled the three pillows around, fell to my knees and inspected the no-colored carpet, the old bed, the bedsprings.
            It had to be an infestation of—of bedbugs!  I had never seen a bedbug, knew them only from legends and scabrous folktales like all the stories about the travelling salesman and the farmer’s beautiful daughter.  “Mean Old Bedbug Blues.”  My father always called “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” as I crept up dark stairs to night land.  I saw figures from low comedy, proletarian hovels, peasant boarding houses, ancient flophouses, obscure bordellos. 
            I continued ransacking the dreary, featureless room.  I discovered a bedside Gideon Bible, a paper fan from a local mortuary, a defunct ballpoint pen, an advertising giveaway beer-can opener (always called a “church key”) for Schultz Fine Ale and a blue folder of matches embossed in gilt, KIT-KAT KLUB * Alton Pines, Kansas 37-4296  On the Dixie Highway.
            The original intruder lay on the sheet on its back—if it had a back—in a glass ashtray with an etched motto—GOLDEN EAGLE INSURANCE CO.  PIQUA, O.  I studied the little thing, took off my glasses and used the bottom bifocal part as an impromptu magnifying glass.  What would Sherlock Holmes do?  Ask Watson to write it up as “The Case of the Hypothetical Bedbug.”
            I found no veritable clues, proofs, demonstrations to show that this object was, in fact, a bedbug and that one bedbug portended a vast bedbug armada or phalanx.  No bedbugs were detectable.  I turned off the light and sat bolt upright and sleepless, in the deep darkness.  The room’s one window glowed faintly from time to time as a car or truck swept past on the highway.
            Then I flipped the light on suddenly and rummaged again in the bedclothes.  Nothing.  So it went, all nite long.  By dawn’s feeble light I was worn, agitated, dazed and endowed with the germ of my story “Infestation.”  When I came off the road a few days later, I sat down and typed it out, as if it were dictated by a road-weary but letter-perfect archangel.
            I invented my hapless and immortal protagonist X., created a setting in the Paradise Motel, and we were off and running.  Words tumbled onto paper, sentences unreeled in perfect order and syntax, inspiration flowed like electricity.  I finished the last lines, by now so well known to millions of readers exposed to the constant reprinting of the tale:

                        I watched as dawn seeped through the muslin curtains of the
                        motel, reminding me that night is the kingdom of doubt, the
                        boundless empire of  unreason.  There breed monsters.  As I
                        turned back the sheet and started up from the rumpled bed, I
                        saw in the corner of my eye a tiny movement.

                        Something infinitesimal, a mote at the margin of vision, moved.
                        A small, blackish body.  Waiting.

                        Waiting.