Bugged
A story by Eve Marx
I’m that person unafraid of bugs. I’m your guest who corrals and carefully relocates the spider who spun a web in your bathroom and sets up residence in your house. I will capture the grotesque and loudly buzzing green-head fly flinging itself against a window and release it safely outdoors. I’m an admirer of Ladybugs which are really beetles.
As a young child, I spent hours face down on the sidewalk studying ants. I would settle myself near an ant hill and watch them going about their ant business. I enjoyed placing tiny obstacles, toothpicks, match sticks, tiny pebbles, in their path. I was fascinated how they carried their dead and fallen members, some who I crushed with my own finger, to subterranean graveyards deep in their ant burrows. In second grade I convinced a friend to help me collect dozens of furry caterpillars which we dropped in glass jars. We later set them loose in her house. Her mother was extremely upset and punished both of us.
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In a summer sublet on Jones Street in New York City, just after I’d finished grad school, there were so many cockroaches in the kitchen I took to smashing them with my open palm. I’d come in late at night and flick on a light and the cockroaches ran wild. At first I smashed them with a shoe but that meant looking for a shoe; smacking them with my bare hand was more efficient. A couple of years later I abandoned an otherwise wonderful apartment on Charles Street after the old guy upstairs died and for a couple of weeks, nobody noticed. Then the maggots appeared, crawling on my ceiling and wriggling down my walls.
My bug Waterloo took place in the winter of 2013 when my home in a New York suburb became infested with stink bugs. Brown marmorated beetles, as they are properly known, were first sighted in Pennsylvania in 1996, but they invaded Westchester for the first time that winter. Their arrival made headlines. Said to be one of the most invasive insects of all time, stink bugs are far more than a nuisance. They emit a most obnoxious chemical when squished so you want to avoid killing them. One morning I woke up to dozens if not hundreds of them living inside my drapes. I went on a frenzy of vacuuming, sucking up the little buggers, but my efforts were futile.
A friend who works in pest control advised prevention as the best way to deal with stink bugs. You want to stop them from entering because once they’re in, they’re in, and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. She recommends having all doors and windows sealed by an insulation company; if you can’t do that, at least hire a pest control professional to spray those areas.
For several years I’ve been working with a fiction author whose sole subject is insects. So far he’s published numerous installments of a trilogy of sci-fi novels set in the far-off future where it’s man against bug. His first two novels are action-packed dramas centering on an insect alien invasion including and in his second book, there is a complex and strange relationship between a horny old man and a luscious bug queen. Even with an abundance of grisly scenes of war and death, one might call it a love story. I asked my client why he’s so obsessed with bugs. Why not make the aliens sentient machines, or birds, or just plain old Martians? Bugs are resistant, he said. Insects are evolution’s great survivors. They’re millions and millions of years old. They’ve survived mass extinctions. Scientists say it’s likely insects will be feeding on the last vertebrate carcass on the planet. He said we would be wise to prepare for a long and arduous battle every time we compete with a bug for resources. Check out his work at https://www.robertliddycoat.com
But back to my brown marmorated beetles, aka stink bugs. After several seasons of infestation, I decided to call a truce. I pledged to make peace with their presence, in part because I already felt defeated. I did some research and gleaned that from a spiritual perspective, stink bugs represent rebirth and persistence. Some people believe they carry a spiritual message of eternal life. So instead of vacuuming them up or flushing them down the toilet, I say little prayers. I chose to think of them as lucky bugs. It was either that, or kill them, and when you kill them, they stink and you’ll never get the smell off your hands.
