Bartleby the Beetle Eater

I ate a bug once.

Some black and shiny beetle, I think, suffered the misfortune of my grubby hands and curious tongue. I must’ve been in primary school then. I’ve no idea what possessed me to do such a thing (and my mother had the same inquiry); maybe the iridescence of its little exoskeleton gave the impression of candy. Maybe it was a dare, and I earned a dollar.

You must understand, I never made a habit of it. I became a much less curious child after a mouthful of sinew and skittering insect legs.

My entomological spirit since passed, but sometimes I am afraid the beetle still lives, angrily crawling the lines of my stomach. Imprisoned for decades in a dark, digestive space, I imagine he is plotting revenge.

Of course, I could never tell anyone about this anxiety of mine. Not my wife. Nor my children. Nor my coworkers. They’d laugh, thinking it were some misplaced attempt at a joke.

I scarcely made jokes, however.

I’m not crazy! Don’t worry. I haven’t been walking around my entire adult life with this unsubstantiated fear of one particular beetle. It just so happens that the on particular beetle has just appeared in my kitchen.

It’s Monday today. I’m the last in the house. Remiss to leave for work, I sip on stale coffee from my wife’s mug, “World’s Best om,” which lost an “M” in the dishwasher. And a rather familiar beetle just shimmied its way out of the sink drain. I hover over the sink to observe. It’s zig-zagging across the countertop now, as fast as its six stick legs will carry it, as if evading some beetle sniper camped out in the fruit bowl. I smacked the heel of my hand against the granite, accomplishing nothing save a stinging palm.

I sigh and pour the remainder of my coffee down the sink; the black surface of the drink reminds me too much of an exoskeleton. Now, might that beetle have been a powder-post? Oh, that’d be fantastic. Eyeing the yellow pages by the phone, I groan at the thought of spending my evening flipping through them to find a decent (cheap) exterminator. I only hope the furnishing isn’t all chewed away by then. I’d never hear the end of it.

The steaming drink falls from the mug in a bronze stream. My morning slips down the sink drain.

Oh! But as the last of my bitter morning drips from lip of the mug, so spills something else…a beetle! Identical to the one currently idling on my counter. It lands silently on its back in the basin, scrambling and wiggling to turn over. Oh, grotesque! To think of those needly legs and spindly antennae rolling over my tongue. A lump grows in my throat, and I heave. Luckily I haven’t eaten, so there is no breakfast to toss just yet. Still, I hack and spit as if it may sanitize my mouth somehow.

My wife would call me prissy, making this big a fuss over the possibility of ingesting a bug. But she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t smash the pests; she just sprays them with insecticide and throws them out in a paper towel. It’s clean and easy. She doesn’t see the purulent, gushy insides that ooze out of an insect when it explodes under the sole of a boot. She doesn’t see the white and yellow guts that may spew across my tongue, from my lips, if I had taken just a few more sips of coffee.

I reach for the faucet. My head is growing light, and I’m more than a little desperate to wash these thoughts out of my mouth. I hold a palm beneath the spout, turn it on, but just one…two…three measly drips escape. Then, a few needly, black legs scramble over the spout. The third beetle of the morning plops into my open palm, and I let out a cry I’m not entirely proud of. I swat it to the floor. It scurries toward my shoe, so I crush it.

My heart flutters for an instant, and the floor wavers beneath my feet. The air in my kitchen warps into something stifling. It smells. That odor that people obtain when deathly sick, the kind that matches the pallor in their skin and the phlegm in their lungs, wafts about.

The hair on my neck and forearms stand up with a buzzing chill. Phantom bugs scurry up my back, and down my arms, and I scratch and cringe at my own imagination.

I now deeply wish my wife hadn’t left for work so early. Or the kids for school.

Do powder-posts bite?

As time spins around me, alone in the tiled cell of my kitchen, they grow in number. And variety.

They descend in true guerilla fashion.

From the sink, from under the fridge, from the cracks in the doors and ceilings and vents, they crawl. A flood of black beetles spread like a puddle of oil. Roaches hiss from their foxholes in the crown molding . Termites and fire ants roll forth in orchestrated files. No one critter is bigger than a dollar coin, but there must be millions. They paint the floor black and boil over. Dear God! An infestation!

What do I do? There isn’t enough insecticide in the city to wipe out this cross-species invasion. I shuffle around the kitchen, inching my way to the back door. Every step of mine is dampened by the crunching bodies of chittering bugs. I jump and swat wildly to keep them from passing the altitude of my ankles in their insistent mass crawl. But it isn’t enough.

They snake their way, en masse, up my slacks and into my socks. Through my drawers and belt and under my shirt. I drive my fists into my own torso, trying to kill them. It’s a lucky thing the insect poison is all the way in the garage, because I might just be tempted to douse my whole body with it under the pressure of a million creeping legs. I rip off my slacks, then my fresh button down and flap the clothes around to rid them of clinging insects. The floor is sticky with the remains of bug corpses. They keep dying and replacing themselves, the bastards.

The swarm is heavy now; it’s like hands and fingers pushing me. They paw and pinch at my skin. The bites and stings are by the millions. My skin morphs from that sick white pallor, to pink, to a fiery red. I can’t distinguish between the bites; it’s simply one, vicious heating of my skin anywhere and everywhere.

“Stop!” I cry hoarsely. “Get off!”

And they answer in their million whispers and chitters and laughs. They’re laughing at me because it’s a joke. It’s a funny, little happenstance, like when an unsupervised and over-curious kid sticks a beetle in his mouth to swallow it whole.

The esophagus doesn’t just let gravity pull your food down, you know. No, it’s a muscle. It squeezes and pushes your food down after it’s been chewed into bolus.

That’s what it does to the bugs, once they reach my throat. I pinch my lips into a thin, trembling line, yet the beetles slip in. Bitter over my tongue, which swells at the strike of their pincers. Some through my mouth. Others through my nose. The smallest ones creep into the corners of my eyes, pressing them against the bone of the socket, and I scream. Some creep down toward my stomach. Others venture into the bronchial path of my lungs, tickling the air away. They’re prying. They’re poring. They’re tearing me apart!

“Please!” I cry, and it’s the last intelligible word I can force out. The rest are like the yelps and howls of a dog.

I claw at my throat, and sink to the ground. I’m on my back and writhing under a hot, sweaty blanket of creepy crawly things; they all have pearly, black eyes. I kick and slide backwards until the crown of my head crashes into the bottom of the fridge. A flash of lighting crosses my eyes on impact, then it’s swallowed in the darkness of the swarm.

They’re in my stomach, eating me from the inside out, I’m sure. The irritation of their bites flushes my cheeks, then surges into my blood and seizes my chest.

My throat is pulsing and broiling with these parasites. Their volume swells until it crowds out my trachea. I suck in for air and only receive piles of chunky, puerile insect matter.

They wriggle just beneath my skin. Everywhere. Everywhere is a home, a hive, a host to them.

The darkness swells. The last rattling beats of my heart are drowned out by the happy buzzing of the swarm. And they taste like dirt.