BUGS
Cockroach Killer
Word Count 922
At first you don’t miss him. What an asshole, right? Seven years with a loser who lied through his teeth, lived a double life, and exhausted you with the predictability of his unabashed failures. He was always big, bold, and brave in the face of mythical tyranny.
But he had a skill. A value that cannot be denied. He killed the big bugs. You don’t fear spiders, serpents, the errant wild possum, rabid racoons, or the venomous southwestern Gila Monster you have encountered twice in the wild. You have one great horror: The giant, American, sewer cockroach, a reddish-brown beast the size of a substantial human hand, sometimes glamorously glossed over as a “Palmetto bug.”
Bugs ‘R Us
Word Count 1412
When I mentioned to a friend that I was researching the microbiome for a magazine story a few years ago, she asked if that was the project in Arizona where people lived under a dome and went crazy? That’s the biosphere. The microbiome is the term used for the trillions of bacteria that live on and in our bodies, outnumbering our own cells by an astonishing 10 to 1. Technically, bacteria, which often consist of a single cell, are not insects. They don’t have legs, they don’t bite, they don’t hatch eggs. But when we get sick, “we have a bug” and if you look at some bacteria under a microscope, they look “bug-like.” Perhaps we should call them our inner critters.
Cicadas and the Sun
Word Count 409
At first I could not understand why everyone was so excited about the cicadas. They're coming, they're coming, wait for it, they're coming — then suddenly the ground was riddled with bullet holes and the air filled with insect sirens. Out crawled the nymphs who stuck themselves to the foliage shoulder to shoulder, much the way the cockroaches used to coat the counters and floors of the houses we rented in Austin during the late 70s, only the cicadas do not run when you slam the door and turn on the lights. Instead, they wildly shrill their unceasing raucous chorus, an aural carpet-bomb of car alarms and can openers.
Are they really so much better than any other big, greasy-looking bug?
Thumb Sucker
Word Count 735
Yes, we had roaches on the East Coast—but they weren’t the size of the Titanic, and they couldn’t fly. In Connecticut, roaches died easily with the swat of a slipper or a rolled-up newspaper. In Arizona—our new home—they were encased in hard-shelled body armor, apparently necessary to survive in a harsh desert environment. Killing them was like a back-alley street fight: they zigzagged around the room like B-52s. Sometimes it took our whole family to corner one. And then—whap whap whap—my dad beat them to death with repetitive blows from his size 12 Oxford, at which point they released their gooey, paste-like insides in a final death spurt. It was almost better to let them live.
Stinkbug
Word Count 651
Something flutters onto my shirt, or almost onto my shirt, and I brush it away, with what has become a familiar motion, what with all the bugs that have arrived in the house since the flap on the dog door fell off six months ago. The bug is on the floor. I put a glass over it, slide an envelope under it and under the glass and take a good look. It’s a stink bug, looking prehistoric, shaped a bit like a shield. I love stinkbugs. This is the first one I’ve seen this year. A stinkbug moves slowly and deliberately until it finds a spot where it wants to stop, and it does, for days at a time. Is it meditating? Contemplating its next move? Pretending it is invisible? Loafing? Hibernating? No idea.
Something Bit Him
Word count 1184
The Husband stops me in the hallway. “I’ve got ticks in my bed,” he says. Maybe he wants to abandon the guestroom and return to the bedroom formerly known as ours. That’s how I think during our divorce.
He looks up from his smartphone. “A whole mess of them.” He shifts the suitcase strap higher up the shoulder of his blue Hugo Boss jacket. He flashes his conference smile. “Big meetings in DC,” he says. “I’m getting closer to the power source.”
I avoid looking into his dark, electric eyes. “Good for you,” I say.
Days later our nine-year-old, Milo, comes into the kitchen scratching either side of his stomach. Hanks of dark hair, like his dad’s, cover his square face. He scootches between me and the pancake pan. Bubbles grow and pop in the circles of batter.
The Bargain
Word Count 1305
The way I grew up, the sequence was almost a reflex, and about as unquestioned: see bug, squish bug. Or, for us kids: see bug, summon parent. As children we understood the rank responsibilities of adulthood to include bug removal – by shoe, vacuum, or tissue-gloved hand. Or, regressive but true, by attachment to a man who seemed bound by unspoken agreement to relieve you of this distasteful chore.
A bug could be anything from the most thread-legged spider, discreetly absorbing moisture from a bathroom corner, to a full-figured cockroach whose agility and speed and abundance of guts precludes direct confrontation. My father could sometimes get the job done using a finger gun and some rubber bands, but when faced with too hardy an exoskeleton he did not hesitate to use blunt force. For such formidable monsters, my mother preferred to dispense poisons from a safe remove, where we hid behind her, hands covering our noses.
The Loathe of the Flies
Word Count 826
Flies were the nemesis of both my mother and grandmother. Since summertime threatened to bring a squadron to our suburban home, my father would lug the cumbersome galvanized steel screens up from the basement, replacing winter’s storm windows. In the days before air conditioning, open windows were a necessity; a window without a screen was tantamount to a door without a lock.
While my Dad brushed flies off as a harmless nuisance, my mother felt truly threatened. In her mind, jet setting flies carried germs from one port of call to another, a direct route from the slums to the suburbs, with pit stops along the way to refuel in piles of manure, But it was Sadie, my grandmother, who was most shaken at the sight of a fly.
Where Have all the Spiders Gone?
Word Count 801
Childhood: Growing up in suburban New Jersey, the scariest bug imaginable was a daddy long legs. I worried about those spiders a lot. I worried they’d jump out of my shoes, I worried they’d swing down from the ceiling and bite me in my sleep. If you’re of a certain age, you remember the urban myth about Bubble Yum and spider eggs. So I had to worry about that too.
College: I briefly shared a grubby little apartment on the Upper West Side with a girl named Lydia. Although it was many years ago, it’s hard to forget reaching for a roll of aluminum foil and a giant cockroach scrambling out, nearly crawling up my arm. That trauma was soon overtaken by another one. The building had a rickety two-person elevator, which had no business being in operation. I had to pry the door open and pull myself out of it at least once. By the end of the lease, roaches in the kitchen had been downgraded to a minor concern.
Murder Hornets
Word Count 754
By the eighteenth month of the pandemic our living room had become sacred space. The world outside raged and moaned, but my husband and I had two couches (one for each of us) reading lights, stacks of books, two dogs, and honest work to keep us afloat. Our house was in a little forest, so we were surrounded by trees and forest animals who sang to us at night. Here was safety, we thought.
One night, we heard a thick buzzing. A zeppelin of a bug flew out of the living room light and began to circle.
“What the fuck is that?” I squealed and ducked my head under the couch blanket.
“Murder hornet,” my husband said without looking up from his book.
Specimens
Word Count 817
I started collecting insect eggs around the same time I began catching butterflies. You only caught butterflies in order to kill them. That required a killing jar. My net was an old racket with netting from my old blue fairy costume. The killing jar was made by cutting a slit in the metal lid and inserting a strip of material. The local Pharmacy sold me small bottles of chloroform, which I dripped onto the material, killing the trapped butterfly. You had to pin the butterflies quickly after their death, because they'd stiffen up. The pinning board was foam, with a groove for the body. When the butterflies died, they folded their wings so they covered their thorax. In stretching the wings back so they were flat, you had to be careful not to lose too many of their glorious scales in the process. I didn't actually kill very many, and none of my specimens were in any way perfect. What I really wanted was to hatch my own butterflies.
The Horse Fly
Word Count 475
When I was thirty years old, a love affair came to an end. I didn’t much like the man but had stayed with him for almost two years. This was troubling. What kind of person stays in a bad relationship for that long? It was August in New York City-- hot, humid and emptied out. Everybody who could get out of the city had, while those left behind stared at each other in a state of embarrassed torpor.
Travel has always held the promise of change, so I left my car at the long term parking lot at JFK and got on a plane to Guatemala. I had read it was called the land of eternal spring because it never got too hot or too cold. Perfect. Also, the death squads were said to be on hiatus.