ISSUE V

bug days

There was no prelude to the summer of
insect swarms. The heat was like a movie
scene from hell, if that sort of thing existed.
I speared silverfish in bathrooms, dipped millipedes
in kitchen drains, brokered June
beetle legs at the weekly farmer’s market. It didn’t
matter, not by the tenth week, when it became apparent that
a thousand corpses
worthed less than a murderer’s mind.
After a thunderstorm mid-summer, I texted my landlord,
the door is broken. He fixed
broken things, most of the time. At work, I fixed the air,
which is like the earth, or so I told myself. The beetles
escaped indoors, and I bathed them
in chemical cleanser. Asian lady beetles release a noxious
odor when crushed: removing them necessitated this
drowning. I gave them little prayers, hoping they’d go
quick. Or, at the very least, quicker than the passing of
my workday. The first time I went into my office,
there were no beetles, spotted orange or otherwise. Well, no other
ladies either, I soon found out, since everyone worked from home.
Every day I sat in the sweltering house
and thought about home, more bugless than the one I was ravaging.
It was the epilogue of summer
when I learned to make killing into art.