When Aliens Come

When’s the last time you looked an insect in the face? Mine, other than just now, was probably Bert, my preying mantis. He was only dimly aware of me, I think.


I’m sitting out on my deck; it’s overcast, warm. I watched it start to rain – bringing no relief from the heat – and stop. A dragonfly - they have been everywhere today – landed on one of the black wrungs attached to the metal railing next to me. He was on the far side, and I could only see his wings and a slight bit of his body. I saw two yellow legs; the rest of him was green like Kermit the Frog. Kermit-the-Frog green. I looked at him for several minutes. Zoned out. Focused again. He had tiny veins everywhere throughout his cellophane wings, dividing them (the four of them) into tiny panels. I wondered if they were made of living tissue, something that would heal itself.


I remembered when, as a kid, I found a dead dragonfly, its corpse in perfect condition, on the floor of my parents’ garage. It was blue and turquoise with light brown stripes on its thorax (my mom made me diagram it for educational purposes). I put it in an empty pencil box, pinned it to the bottom, and wrote “BECARFUL” on the inside of the lid. A warning, I believe, to myself. Dragonflies are very delicate.


I leaned forward, having decided to get a better look. As more of it appeared from behind the black wrung, I saw its head. It was not resting peacefully like I expected. It was wrenched sideways, pivoted on its non-visible neck. Its green bulbous eyes were directed towards me – cast on my face – and its matching green mouth lay tiny beneath it. When aliens come to Earth, we will be scared. Cognizant cephalopods that can (at least somewhat) meet our gaze: terrifying. I leaned slowly back, uncomfortable with this experience. The dragonfly, reacting to my movement, leapt off its perch with a click. I startled; my stomach dropped a little.


I kept the box in my roll-top desk. Later, maybe years, I took it out and opened it. There were little still white things next to my descendent of ancient creatures. I think they were dead maggots.

He kindly stopped for me --

I smashed a spider on my wall and left it there for years. Guts smeared onto a picture I had taped up of Lindsay holding someone’s baby. I had learned about the crosses on the roadsides into Rome, how they hung criminals there and left them.

Kris asked how old people were when they first got scared of spiders. He said that babies didn’t care. They play with mud on their arms. I answered with something I’d heard that wasn’t half as interesting.

In Annie's and my bathroom, spiders came out to die. Whenever we saw one alive, we knew that in a day or two it’d be on its back legs in a bundle. As if they wanted our company.

And when I died in the room with the tubes and white walls, the spiders held mass. They forgave me for my times of persecution, when I washed their cousins down the shower drain with hot water. They remembered me as a baby, playing with rolly-pollies on the driveway and putting ants in my hair. They folded their legs and bowed their cephalothoraxes in silence. Then the spiders started a solemn march, and they crawled up my nose.

It's odd that humans don't have exoskeletons

odd that they leave corpses instead of husks. It makes sense, of course, physiologically; at their size, humans’ legs would snap beneath the weight of their shells.

They might have come from insects. They smile without expression. Curl into wafers. Fly into bikers’ mouths.

But of course they didn’t. Insects are biologically perfect.

For every person there is an Olympic-sized pool of bugs. Invertebrates are the masters of the planet.

Except for lobsters. They don’t seem to have it so good.