Dropping Like Flies
A short story that centers around a man whose obsession becomes destructive.
10/01/23
Happy Spooky Season!🎃🍂🕷️☕️
I wouldn’t consider this horror (I actually don’t have much experience with writing horror…), but it’s definitely not the most comfy reading material! Content warning for arthropods (bugs, and their relative creepy crawlies) and themes about death!
What coping skills have more negative effects than positive? Have you ever taken a hobby too far?
“The Hallucinogenic Toreador” - Salvador Dalí
His firstborn child had pretty green skin, like the plant that used to be on his windowsill. Although his child was from a different family (Tettigoniidae, to be exact), it entered with happy jumping legs and ear-piercing chirps that kept his girlfriend awake at night. That wasn’t the only thing – though, a noise 110 decibels loud topped the list. Joan never complained, so he never knew.
Just as he bought another plant – maybe pothos would be easier to keep alive – he adopted a mantid. This child demanded more; he added mealworms between ‘milk’ and ‘eggs’ on the grocery list. At least, Joan found this one more endearing.
The pothos quickly rotted into banana-bruise-browns much like his skin’s natural hue while the praying mantis continued to molt and thrive. Sometimes, one thing takes precedence, while all else suffers from the person’s incompetence. Humans aren’t built for multitasking.
A chime from the door interrupted his cricket’s song one Friday night. He had found himself with ten full insect terrariums and no free space. As he unpacked the new sturdy metal shelf, Joan supervised over his shoulder.
“Will that be enough room for them?” she asked dully, much like a quietly disapproving mother.
“For now.” He eyed the instructions before discarding them.
She hesitated and adjusted the locs falling to her shoulders. “Didn’t you say you were going to save your money? All of your pets must be… expensive.”
“It’s all good,” he replied.
He could sense the words gathering in her mouth, but she said nothing and returned to the show playing on the television. He could hear feminine voices arguing back and forth, intercepted by the thoroughly pronounced syllables characteristic of infomercials.
He couldn’t remember how his arthropod interest started, but now the weather was warming up and he was too engulfed to slip away. The insects would emerge soon.
He was cut from his second job on the summer solstice. Joan helped him readjust his budget for the time being. She heavily implied that he should abandon his “collecting hobby.” But his giant millipedes were in express delivery and their tank sat on his bedroom floor.
He awoke that night to Joan screaming in horror because his tarantula escaped.
In actuality, the spider’s large form and its elevated terrarium sculpted an eight-legged shadow the size of his hand on the carpet floor.
He turned on the light to reassure her. The quiet skittering from each tank paused, the crumbling of soil and moss beneath little jointed legs as the arthropods performed their nightly rituals.
Even when he held her for the next hour, she didn’t fall back asleep. Her ashen, swollen eyes indicated she never slept, at all. She likely laid awake, watching the shadows from six-legged gaits above her head, listening to dirt scuttling, wincing at each chitinous clank of one insect’s exoskeleton striking another. He could imagine it, and he could imagine the impending fate that awaited him come autumn.
By July, he left work early most days to visit his mother in the hospital. She required care for only a week, but his manager hesitated to accept his explanations.
The man would leave him standing in front of a businessman’s dream of a desk (authentic African hardwood, he’d emphasize), twiddling his fingers and adjusting his tie as if to cling to the remains of his spine. Each foundational twig of his life was getting plucked away, but he was building up, up, toward the ceiling of his bedroom, measuring his worth not in coins but in molted cuticles. Could he call this overcoming adversity?
And when he awoke to a totaled car one humid August morning, he could only respond by bookmarking ten vehicle auction sites and purchasing five additional pets. This meant another shelf, more food, a different kind of substrate– why were his beetles the neediest?
The second shelf sat across from the first, on the other waxy wall. It required a minor furniture rearrangement. Now, the displays stood tall on both sides like metal cages surrounding the bed in which the young couple slept.
The room came alive at night, in the most unembellished form of the phrase, as if a witch cast a hex and gave everything a soul to move and think, living and nonliving. The glass terrariums rumbled with each crawling effort to burrow, feed, mate.
He’d get in bed right as his children awoke. He listened to their movements like they lived in his stapes. They tapped patterns along the outer curves of his pinna, the folds of his eardrum, and it lulled him to sleep.
Tiny thunks like setting down a bottle too hard made Joan flinch; he would whisper that it was just the Hercules beetle exploring its space.
He could feel Joan wake at night, and he knew that the sensitive tympanums of his arthropod friends could hear, too.
The bed would creak as she stood, the worn wood floor shifted and groaned, and sometimes she would, too, but the room fell quiet each time. Each animal stopped, and held its breath until her silhouette vanished into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Then, the nighttime movement would begin again, and he drifted back to sleep.
One night, Joan’s midnight shriek had a purpose. His favorite grasshopper made it to their nightstand.
As she shouted and screeched, begging him to collect it, his first katydid replied by rubbing its wings like two hands in its enclosure.
Her terrified begs and the distinguishable “katy-did, katy-didn't” mended together and he accidentally detached the grasshopper’s leg in his large hands.
As he returned his friend to its cage (and tossed out the thin saltatorial leg, it wouldn’t need it anymore), he tuned out Joan’s blabbering at his right side. He could only hear katy-did, katy-didn’t, and his Madagascar roaches hissed and crackled like pop rocks at Joan’s every three words. He secured the terrarium tightly.
“You need to get rid of them,” he heard her say. “I can’t deal with it anymore. It feels like I’m trapped between all of these bugs.”
They weren’t all bugs, he thought sarcastically, that wasn’t even the correct classification for most of them. But he said nothing – or, at least, not very much, besides, “I’ll move them.”
“You better,” she replied, manicured nails digging into the dark skin of her arms.
An orchestra broke out, like a neighborhood of dogs barking and inciting the subsequent canine to bark.
The katydid’s stridulations grew louder, and the roaches’ hissing raised an octave. The wavelengths rippled to his fingertips similar to fish movements felt through a stagnant lake.
Joan walked out to get her normal glass of water. He was alone with the piercing calls of the pets in his reach, loud enough that he needed to plug one ear.
It took thirty minutes for them to settle into their typical nightly silence. Thus, it took thirty minutes for him to fall back asleep. Joan never did, and he entered the living room the next morning to find her in her favorite spot on the couch as if he were late for a meeting and she’d been waiting.
She stared through him, at the wall behind him, and said, “I don’t think this is meant to be.”
By September, her side of the shower caddy was empty and the only evidence of her existence was the brown coils he found in the sheets, no matter how much he washed them. The apartment was clean, though prickling remorse prodded at his chest like swallowed venomous stingers, like clothing pins down the wrong pharyngeal tube.
He knew many things were contagious, but he didn’t take Joan’s inadequate sleeping patterns to be transmissible. Yet, here he was, tossing and turning in his half-empty mattress until the witching hour – long past when his arthropod friends awoke, long past when he should have been asleep.
He listened to the bed frame croak and grunt from his weight, as well as the gentle footsteps in each of the fifty terrariums looming above him like anvils waiting for their cue. The tarantula actually managed to escape while he was at work, and he had yet to find it; he hoped he wouldn’t rouse from sleep with a furry abdomen on his face.
With Joan’s new absence, he added a few more insects to his collection. Soon, the glass habitats colonized each inch of his bedroom wall.
Everywhere he looked, there was fresh soil, a few hundred dollars worth of food, and loving compound eyes that peered at him as he completed his work.
Why did they appreciate him more than anyone else? Did they even know to appreciate him? Of course, they did. What made an arthropod’s brain any different than that of a cat, or rabbit? They had to be thankful for him, more thankful than his manager, than Joan could have ever been.
He reassured his friend that the gray scabs on his syrupy hands were not from an unknown illness, but instead just from his beetle biting him. Perhaps he’d been worse at handling his pets lately. The insects could probably tell when his hand was a bit rougher than usual, or a little too aggressive and quick.
No doubt, they could also hear his late-night rustling in bed just as they could hear Joan’s.
He visualized them listening to each movement he made, the vibrations reverberating from the mattress springs to the wooden bedframe, into the discolored jade carpet, and up through the various shelves, like a traveling tide. A rumble through the right legs meant he’d rolled to the closer half of the bed, a thundering in the front left leg and they could taste his sweat in the humid air.
Sometimes, he imagined them sweeping their antennae to the rhythm of his footsteps (speaking of, he still hadn’t found his tarantula) just to connect with his presence in the house. Was that the equivalent of a human and a dog releasing oxytocin upon locking eyes? What region of the brain activated when he made eye contact with the many eyes of his jumping spider? Did anything happen, at all?
Only when he stacked his bills into skyscrapers on his dirty kitchen counter did his friends attempt to intervene, much like Joan tried and failed to.
“I don’t think you need that many pets,” one said. “What if they all break out one day?”
“It’s no big deal,” he replied with a dismissive hand wave. “My tarantula escaped for a week, and I ended up finding it. Been there, done that.”
“Dude…” the other mumbled. “We’re just worried about you.”
“It’s not going to end well if you keep using these guys to avoid–”
“They give me a reason to get up in the morning,” he stated. “That’s all that matters, right?”
“Joan was right to be worried,” one of them said. “I see that now.”
But he couldn’t stop himself from buying another tank when he found a blister beetle at the bus stop one morning. He couldn’t handle the beetle, lest he break out into blisters from its toxic hemolymph, yet he planned to love it all the same.
So he continued to add shelves and display stands to hold the weight since he clearly could not carry weight like this.
The insect cages towered like shelter walls around the present, even obstructing the windows because he would surrender his natural light if it made the little crawlies sharing his rent happy.
His unkempt hair protruded like setae in multiple directions and molted on the shower floor, his entire orbital region developed a smoggy hue, and his muscle segments lost definition. He was sure his friends (and Joan) were right all along, but he was too far gone. He was a devoted father of 70, and not everyone was willing to take arthropods off of his hands like an average companion animal.
On the phone with his mom, he said, “I’m doing good,” and trailed a silverfish oscillating across his pantry with his eyes. He would use it as food for one of his carnivorous insects; he just wasn’t sure which one. His dedication to their wellbeing at the cost of his own was sacrificial in a way nearly biblical.
But how simple it was to please invertebrates! Any non-human animal had so few expectations, such simple perspectives. He could earn their trust by offering food and a safe place to live. If only human relationships were so minimalistic and easy to devote himself to, then he wouldn’t have burned so many bridges by now – his previous jobs, friendship fallouts, his dad, Joan–
That night, he had a magnificent sleep. He didn’t remember staring at the black witch moth on his eye level, nor dwelling on the many, many mistakes that led him to this bed alone with at least 100 eyes gazing down at him from the theater audience. His mom warned him that everyone reaps what they sow, and perhaps he could not control what was sown, but he distributed the fertilizer.
The apartment complex – or maybe the terrain outside? – shifted, and one of the unused shelves toppled into the metal display case.
The force alone did not shift the case, but it nudged the tarantula cage (the largest one) off its supporting beam. The weight imbalance made the shelf topple and – slowly, then fast, then faster – collapse atop his resting body.
He jumped awake just quickly enough to understand what happened, and that was the longest he could remain awake. The metal casing collided with his temporal lobe. His last realization before losing consciousness was that this outcome came about from his own meddling, just like everyone warned him.
He was not awake for the aftermath: the tanks on the left wall fell and scattered around the bedroom into piles of glass shards, substrate, waste, uneaten mealworms.
Freed from their captivity, the arthropods spared in the accident began to wander aimlessly, on the sheets, the carpet, the remaining shelves, brushing past one another, tapping along the bone-white blinds with tiny appendages. The insects made a terrarium out of the pitch-black night. Finally unbound! He would have been thrilled to see it.
Authorities were unaware if he was dead at this point, but the yellow swallowtail butterfly initiated the feast by landing beside the wound on his head from the display shelf’s impact. Blood and hemolymph carry nutrients that many insects crave, so it was not shocking to find the butterfly proboscis clinging to the injury upon inspection.
Next, the predaceous insects – the mantids, the wasps, and one spider – showed interest. Finally, the flies discovered the crime scene and took over operations. They made a Thanksgiving feast out of their parent, the caregiver that he believed they owed all of their joy to. Maybe it was better that he died accepting that story, rather than finding himself an incarnation of pet owners’ fears.
When investigators arrived upon reports of a foul smell and increased pests in the complex, they found him still curled on his side, in bed, buried in soil, the wound and surrounding bones deteriorating in a nauseatingly unhealthy way due to the flies’ work. Tiny mites and gnats tangled in his dreads like chewing gum severed into tiny pieces. His skin appeared even duller than it had days prior to his death, rapidly losing its natural glow and heat from the current lack of circulation. The weather was cold now, and there was no doubt that he was, too.
Although his posture still accounted for a normal sleeping position, the rigor mortis exacerbated the curling inward of his shoulders and arms. It mimicked the stature of the dead millipedes and flies buried in the substrate around him. The remaining insects and spiders continued to roam the walls and floors, some squashed beneath the officers’ boots as they entered.
Pitiful yet tranquil as he appeared, the man had begun to decompose in the bed of dirt with help from his insect pets.
They only did what their instincts instructed them to, but perhaps he would have believed they were acting in his best interest. Maybe he would even argue that the tarantula granted him a favor by tipping over the shelf, freeing him from his lifetime of disappointing others while also freeing them from their zoo-like confinements.
He would never be able to prove such an attached relationship, nor whether this development was meant to be or simply occurred as an unfortunate sequence of events. Some people are prone to always learning things the hard way, and he once considered himself to be one of those unlucky souls.