“Dad, you are the worst! You always say no!”
A slamming door. His friends invited him to a camping trip, but I could not let him go. He didn’t understand, but how could he? How could anyone know and believe?
I, myself, am not sure how it happened. I woke up one night to thousands of specks on my bed, like a lucid nightmare. I can still hear the grotesque sounds: clickings, creaking, swooshing and hissings. The Court of Arthropods had assembled on my bed while I slept to judge my crimes. It had happened once before in another such lucid dream and the court had given me a chance. Not this time. I had killed too many of them with purpose.
I explain, but they don’t care. I remember when I first saw a black widow. Except, at the time, I didn’t know better. I thought black widows were large. They’re not. The spider I saw was small with a brown hourglass pattern on its bulbous back. We do not have black widows here or so I thought. Turns out the urban legend of the mother who found one sleeping off the effects of refrigeration in the grapes she was washing was true.
At the time, I didn’t think much of the said spider, since the hourglass wasn’t red. I went back inside and checked online only to discover the hourglass could be brown or beige. I went back outside to capture it – harmless to adults, it can be deadly to children and dogs. I never found it again.
This might explain why, more recently, when I found a brown spider in the garden with a black streak on its back and a white bulbous shape, I took no chances and killed it first. With my luck I would let it go and it would be a brown recluse. So I killed it first and identified after, only to realize the brown mark was not the fiddle of a brown recluse. I had killed a wolf spider carrying a sack of her eggs. I felt guilty, but brushed it aside.
Later, I would also start finding dead decomposing grubs in my garden, their colors unsightly. The nematodes I had introduced were hard at work. I was happy.
How many bugs had I squished without an afterthought?
How could I know that the speaker of this court would actually be a brown recluse. My mind still rails from its infernal speech – images sent right in my brain as they connected me briefly to a hive mind. I had killed too many of them and they had decided that I would be sentenced to death by a thousand bites. They administered the first one. An ugly thing on my leg that would never heal.
999 more bites would follow and with the last one, I would breath my last breath.
From that point on, I lived in terror. My heart palpitating every time I see a dust particle move. Had it come for me?
After this nightmare, I was working in the garden. I came inside and noticed five red bumps that would grow painful. I had been bit by chiggers. 994 bites left.
Once, I was cleaning off my library and a little speck of white fluff was crawling on a dictionary. It looked like a piece of white lint, slightly fuzzy. It had six legs with a round and flat body. I thought maybe it was a mite, but it turned out to be a masked hunter, which gets their names from a slime they secrete that harden with debris from its environment to form a hardened camouflage. It’s part of the assassin bug family, named as such because of the way it uses an appendage in its mouth to pierce through its prey. Did you know that its bite is extremely painful, more so than a bee? I didn’t, not until it bit me. 993.
I brushed off a stink bug from my shoulder. Later that night, I turned to look out the window as I was having dinner. In the screen of the window, a stink bug stared at me. Can stink bug even bite? 992.
A ladybug, 991.
A praying mantis, 990.
A centipede, 899.
An earwig, 898.
Ten red ants, 888.
One wasp, three bites, 885.
…
I lost count, I do not know anymore. And now, always, I hear their fluttering in the dark. I feel them crawling on my legs when I sleep. They bite when I garden. Cast webs around me. I chase them, yet they always return. Thousands of eyes on me. I dare not go out anymore, but they are everywhere. I dare not stay inside either, there are too many things that crawl in the dark even as I share my tale.