A
fanciful, disturbing vigniette I wrote around age 19 to express a
certain... discomfort with the idea of physical interaction with
insects. My feelings have mellowed since then. I've always liked
looking at insects, but touching them still feels kind of dicey.
A BUG STORY
I looked at the bug. Of all
the millions of species it could have belonged to, this species had
been evolved to annoy me. Me personally. Of all the bad
luck.
I knelt beside it and sang it a
lullaby. No dice. The bug could not fall asleep because it
wasn’t awake. It wasn’t that complicated an organism. It
just was, and that bugged me, because I knew it was alive. Not
just the table decoration it appeared to be. I blew on it.
It didn’t fly to pieces as I had
been afraid it would. It fell over itself several times, and then
it came to rest. It was strangely content. “It must be
adapted well to being blown over and lying there” I thought to
myself. I poked it.
It crawled up my arm. I
debated whether I should brush it off. I decided that shaking it
would be safer. So I shook my arm. The whole back slice of
the bug peeled off and dangled, connected to the rest by a fiber or
two. As I watched, it dropped to the floor. All that was
left on my arm was a thin veneer of bug. I grimaced.
The veneer was still crawling up my
arm. It reached my shoulder and inched its way up onto my neck,
my face. Rather than tangle physically with it, I decided to
psych it out. “Don’t you feel any respect for that big piece of
you that just fell off?” I asked it. It must have been wise to me
because it didn’t answer. Then it got onto my face.
This was too much. I raised a
finger to brush it off. It kept crawling. I moved my finger
across its more-than-naked back surface, and it broke in two. One
half was stuck into my skin, biting me. The other half was
suddenly dry and crusty, and it got tangled with my facial hair.
I used my fingernail. The
crusty part got stuck in the nail, and when I attempted to clean it out
with a nail cleaner, it just spread thinner over my nail. I felt
like I had just dug a trench for it to burrow into. I washed my
hands, but the color was still there. Or was it? I couldn’t
remember if my nails had been that color all along.
The biting half of the bug’s chiton
was still crawling, and it had almost reached my nose, so I gently
brushed it aside. It exploded silently. One of the pieces
went up my nostril. Another went in my eye. I didn’t see
where the others went.
It felt like at least one of the
pieces was still alive, so I asked it what it wanted from me. It
said “Nothing, I just want to torment you. All I want from you is
what you are doing now.” I felt the bug inside my nose, moving
things around, recruiting my dormant body fluids to be bugs too.
I didn’t know what was alive and what was dead anymore.
“How many pieces do I have to cut you into before you die?” I asked in desperation.
It didn’t answer. It probably didn’t know either.
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