SUMMER CHILLER CONTESTANT
Unlike my neighbors, I’ve always been rather fond of insects.
In June, they begin to reveal themselves. By the end of the month, the entire street is lit up on warm evenings by citronella candles and electrified zappers, attempting, mostly in vain, to stem the tide of long-legged, winged invaders.
Mosquitoes tend to leave me alone, and bees steer clear of my head and arms as I sit on my patio with my books or journals. I hear them, their onionskin wings beating in the stillness of the air, the buzz of their bodies as they touch down upon blooming flowers.
This year, I noticed a change in my garden. On an early summer evening, I lugged my pen and journal out to the patio table. As I sat down in the stiff, metal chair, something immediately tugged at me. A feeling of wrongness, subtle enough to defy naming, surrounded me. It took a moment to realize what was tugging at me wasn’t a sense of something out of place but rather a sense of emptiness.
The air was still, without sound. There were no insects.
I spent the evening jotting my thoughts down and ignoring the lack of movement. In the distance, I could hear a neighbor’s zapper popping off every half hour or so, though nothing like the rapid-fire staccato I’d become accustomed to. The azaleas that lined my back wall were motionless, so strangely opposite to the rush of life that was normally housed within.
I didn’t see so much as a single fat-bodied bumblebee. It was unnerving.
When the light grew too dim to write, I dropped my pen into my pocket and tucked my journal under my arm. I slipped my sandals on and, pretending to water my potted plants, I made a circuit of my garden.
I felt silly, childish. I doubted anybody else in the neighborhood was concerned with whether or not the insects had gone, and the eagle-eyed old widow across the street was surely peeking out her window as she did every night. I didn’t want to have to answer her questions at the mailbox in the morning. I didn’t want the neighborhood assuming I was crazy.
The first creature I found was a spider. It was large and covered in tiny hairs, resting on its back in the mulch between plants. Its long, delicate legs were splayed out in several directions. I poked it with a slender twig, but it did not move. Spiders can sometimes play dead, but this didn’t feel like one of those occasions.
I backed away and scanned my yard, searching for any signs of life. Still nothing.
Luna moths have always congregated in amongst the trees that border my property line. On warm evenings I often wander close to them, spreading out my reading blanket and enjoying a few hours of a novel while watching them out of the corners of my eyes. Wings of crème de menthe, antennae like a kindly grandfather’s mustache, these may be the most gorgeous moths on earth.
On this night, however, I could see none of them clinging to the trees or flitting from branch to branch. As I grew closer, I spied something at the bottom of a birch that tore the breath from my lungs. I couldn’t even muster a single gasp.
Wings. Hundreds of them, piled atop one another, torn from their bodies. Antennae scattered several feet in every direction, wingless bodies heaped together in a crumbling pile, dry as husks, falling apart.
I took a step back, tears forcing themselves out of my eyes, hot and wet and streaking across my cheeks. This was absolutely wrong. Something was destroying my garden, killing my visitors. I wiped at my face with the back of my hand. What had done this?
There was one last place I had to check, though I didn’t want to confirm what I already suspected.
I crept to the azaleas, watering can in hand, and brushed aside a few branches. Beneath the vividly purple blossoms, resting on the moist earth, was a pile of bees. My bees. The creatures that had traveled from flower to flower, graceful despite their soft, round bellies, were collected in a dry pile of sunken black and yellow abdomens.
I was suddenly struck with the feeling of not being alone, of being watched by something I could not see. I whipped my head around and squinted into the gathering darkness, desperate to find the source of my awful unease.
I heard, or rather felt, a soft humming coming from my rose bushes. It felt like a whisper tinged with the odd thrumming of insect sound. With all of the creatures gone, I felt a twinge of suspicion. Nothing felt normal now.
Beneath the roses, in between the individual bushes’ stalks, was the strangest creature I’d ever seen. It looked much like a spider, though though there were only six legs, and dark, leathery wings curled up on its back. The wings themselves were longer than the body, and its belly bulged out from underneath them, round and gluttonous, quivering. It was the size of a kitten, much larger than any insect I had ever seen before.
It had only two eyes, and they were closed behind what appeared to be eyelids. It rolled and its mouth sagged open, revealing two rows of tiny needled teeth. I could see mint-green dust in the corners, and I gasped softly.
One eye opened and fixed itself on me. It was strangely human, with pupil and iris, and tracked me as I began to creep backwards. As I moved it pushed itself up on its legs, the humming growing louder. It stretched, tossed its head as if popping its neck, and yawned. I could see now that there were not two rows of needles, but four.
The other eye opened, and the wings began to unfold.
I dropped my watering can and ran, sprinting in the darkness around the corner of my house and to the back door, the one that led onto the patio, the only one I left unlocked. I could hear the humming behind me, and it sounded close, though just how close I couldn’t tell. I threw the door open long enough to hurl myself inside and slammed it closed. As I drove the lock and dead bolt into place I could hear the humming on the porch, on the other side of the door’s glass pane.
I curled up on the couch, staring at the door, waiting for the sound to subside. After a few hours I lost consciousness, dreaming of insects I would more than likely never see again. I woke with tears drying along the curve of my nose, my eyes swollen and unwilling to open. Something had destroyed my garden, and nothing would be the same in my yard again.
When I found the nerve to come out again in the morning, the creature was gone. Without my moths and bumble bees, without my spiders and other winged cohabitants, I feared it would move on to bigger things.
©2009 Jessica Brown
Jessica Brown is a thirty-year-old fan of horror and dark fantasy whose work has been featured in Shadow Feast, The Nocturnal Lyric, Bloodfetish, Horrotica and The Harrow. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and can be found online at http://jessicarbrown.blogspot.com
