My Zoo (standard:horror, 1946 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Dec 27 2009	Views/Reads: 3104/2050	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Insects! What will you do when they come to get you?

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for its attacks without provocation.  Able to leap three feet and 
inflict a venomous bite that left a cruel, painful welt.  And the 
Mother of All Arachnids was sizing me up. 

Despite its enormous size, this one didn't look too hungry.  Eye to eye
we locked wills, motionless.  My brain churned furiously to remember 
where I might find a handful of live flies to keep it sated while I 
went about my life.  Of course, I remembered, on the balcony, breeding 
in the bird-droppings.  But how to get there?  The spider now crouched 
between me and the door.  I watched it slowly settle onto one of the 
tiles, preparing to lay siege.  I was its prey.  The eyes looked me up 
and down while a foamy white froth began to bubble from its spinnerets  
Gently, ever so gently, the spider began to sway from side to side, 
lifting first one pair of legs, then another, never leaving the tile 
centered on the only path out of the bathroom.  My turbulent feelings 
ricocheted from admiration (what gorgeous symmetry! what elegant 
aplomb! what a marvel of engineering!) to abject terror (one bite from 
that eight-inch terrestrial octopus could mean a lingering, painful 
death, an indeterminate span of throbbing, festering torment, while my 
hamstrung immune system churned desperately to eject its poisons!). 

Leaning forward, I could just grasp a half-bottle of rubbing alcohol. 
Looking down on myself out-of-body, I picked up the bottle with my left 
hand and slowly screwed its cap off with my right. An alien 
intelligence probed my brain to foresee what I might do, but I was too 
fast.  My hand arced with a lightning stroke, splashing the 
intoxicating fluid over my vulnerable feet, and flooding the bathroom 
floor with isopropanol.  The spider carefully withdrew before the 
advancing flood, moving one exquisitely articulated limb at a time to 
keep ahead of the rising tide.  Now it perched on the threshold. 

I had hoped that the fumes might make it giddy and careless, but that
was expecting too much.  Rampant upon the bronze divider, my nemesis 
rose half-erect on four legs, waving the remainder jerkily in a voodoo 
ritual.  It flashed ebony orbs at me and stepped up its dance of death, 
making it more menacing than ever. 

We sat there, the two of us, at an impasse, choking in alcohol fumes. 
It was a standoff: I had no way to put the spider off, and it had no 
way of crossing the Sea of Intoxication to gorge on my plasma.  Ten 
minutes passed this way, and I noticed here and there some dry spots 
forming, where the liquid had evaporated. I was giddy, to say the 
least, and could only hope the spider was the same.  One step towards 
the door convinced me otherwise.  The arachnid left off swaying and 
began to do push-ups, as if it were preparing for some Olympic event. 

I remembered. In the cabinet was a small bottle of hairspray, the
territorial marker of one or another long-lost paramour.  Without 
removing my eyes from the spider, I felt behind me and probed the 
cabinet until the bottle was in my hands.  Hairspray is simply lacquer 
dissolved in solvent.  Hard, stiff, gummy lacquer.  Slowly I brought 
the canister before me and bent over, aiming its nozzle with great 
care.  Six angry black pupils analyzed every move, discerning what I 
had in mind, poised to leap and kill. 

But I was quicker.  With a blast of spray-net, I filmed over the bright
eyes and froze the exquisite articulations of each leg: it took only an 
instant.  Amid misgivings at such brutality, I felt like a boy scout.  
Stepping over the harmless spider, I went straight for the waste-paper 
basket and recovered a sliver of shirt-cardboard.  Scooping up the 
menacing arachnid I placed it gently on the avian guano of my balcony 
rail, where light rain could wash away the invisible prison.  The 
beastie returned to its natural insect world and would surely spin a 
thankful, iridescent web to entertain me at sunset. 

Like other folk, I'm squeamish about inchworms, lice and bedbugs, having
shared many a bed with them during my travels.  Ticks and chiggers made 
my flesh crawl.  But the most innocent denizen of my bizarre menagerie 
was a faery moth that emerged one evening from a Mexican jumping bean.  
Beneath the inverted jar it wriggled out of a pin-sized hole, perched 
on a denuded grape-twig and stretched its parti-coloured gray-and-ash 
wings until the wrinkles faded. 

Unwilling to fly, the pallid tender midge hopped shakily around its
wasted birth-nut, resting now and then to catch its breath.  Perhaps it 
was listening for the mating-call of another Mexican Bean-Moth, 
dreaming primitive erotic dreams.  Perhaps it was meditating on the 
obligations and rewards of motherhood.  I fed it tiny scraps of 
lettuce, bay leaf, pulped celery, shredded dogwood buds, banana slivers 
wrapped in nectarine skins -- nothing worked.  Each day, my moth 
diminished as the evanescent tissue of its personality peeled away and 
vanished.  For three days I was gone.  When I returned, so was my 
Mexican moth.  It may have simply shriveled to a wisp, but I prefer to 
believe that the Good Fairy Moth came and spirited it away to the 
eternal joys of moth heaven. 

It took a Praying Mantis to jolt me out of my shell.  She turned up one
Saturday about a month after the cicada infestation.  How I loathed the 
noisy things!  School children were eating them on television.  A local 
hamburger palace added them to its menu, as a french-fried novelty -- 
with the blessings of the Health Department! 

The mantis was silent, pious, perched on the plastic stem of a faded
silk gladiola.  When I saw her one bright morning, she instantly cocked 
her head toward me.  Her eyes followed me around the room.  I felt a 
passionate appeal radiating from those praying forelegs, and went over 
for a closer look.  A barely discernible buzz arose from her swaying 
abdomen -- a love song, no doubt, appealing to lesser members of the 
insect world.  This probably included rogue mantis males. 

For a long time I stood very still.  A tiny white bug -- an aphid?  a
baby silverfish?  an albino midge? -- climbed slowly out of the silk 
flower and made its way down the plastic stem.  A flash of movement -- 
barely visible -- and the bug was gone.  Only the mantis remained, 
chomping happily away, rolling its huge bulging eyes and rubbing its 
prayer-legs together, bowing and curtsying its grateful little dance to 
the Mantis-Goddess of Providence. 

That day, I captured many flies on the balcony.  After clipping
half-a-wing with my cuticle scissors, I fed them one by one to my 
mantis.  How egotistic!   My mantis indeed!   Like any woman, I 
realized, she was her own self: untameable, indifferent to my 
ministrations, independent, enticing, fascinating, ardent, vulnerable, 
sincere. 

And as I turned away from my ungrateful predator, a great light burst in
my shuttered mind: beware the mantis who mates and dines upon her 
consort.  All my long-gone consorts and house-mates had eaten me alive! 


Cincinnati, July 16, 1989 - Gerald X. Diamond - All rights reserved 


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