Dung Beetle’s Märchen

WARNING: PHYSICAL AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE, MURDER, AND GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF BUGS AND DEATH

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Here are our main characters: a dung beetle and his wife.

He is rolling his dung with his mate. A man dumps a pregnant woman’s limp body into the hole they’ve dug to bury their eggs.

Animals are not ignorant or maybe they are, but this little dung beetle sees the lump in her stomach and it clicks. She carries her nest inside her. He wonders if they’re mates and looks on her with the same pity as he would the mantises in their cannibalistic season of love.

His lady beetle humphs. They will need find another nest as these rude people have uprooted and usurped their claim to a pleasant nesting spot.

They are a young couple, these young lovers and perspective parents. They had picked a spot far away from their colony, safe from predators and strong-arming, rhino beetle-esque competitions.

A well-shaded, off the beaten path, the road less traveled, and the road not taken. This is where they hoped to make a home, but now it has been let and is occupied by something near beyond their understanding.

They are simple, earthy lovers, these two and at night, he lays down next to his wife and her tearful sighing. She is so anxious over getting the best start for her children.

Another day, he’s out bowling with the boys. Rolling some dung with his hard hat on, union mandated break that the boss told him to take.

He sees him again: the man. This time he’s dumping a body into the pit they’re carving out for the colony’s new maternity wing.

“The way some species treat their mates, man,” says his coworker.

“Yeah,” interjects another.

Our main, little beetle disagrees. “I don’t think that’s his mate. I saw him bury one yesterday.”

“Maybe he has more than one per season,” says coworker one.

“No, no. He’s right,” chimes coworker two. “But not because of the number. They’re like birds, they lay their eggs above the dirt. He shouldn’t be killing his lady, mates.”

They side eye the man as he burns his clothes and changes. As the man starts walking away:

“Hey,” his coworker says, tightening his construction cap in case things get rough. “I’m going to follow him.”

Our main beetle tightens his cap, “I’ll come with you,” he says.

“Me, too,” says another.

As they roll after him, others join. One by one, a silent marching of beetles begins to amass. At first, only his coworkers and himself, then the townspeople. He sees his neighbors and then his wife with his baby joins.

He is most disturbed at the sight of her leading the other lady beetles. They look exhausted, but somehow also like the Bacchae or ben síde: somehow more wild, more like furies with angry whispers chanted under their breathy voices like the wind catching on the sharp notes of a siren before the whipping gale blows it away.

She is bewitching to him now in a way that frightens him. She is a half-breasted amazon, nursing her child on her last teat, looking half the death mask of Baba Yaga and half the witch when she’s taken her make-up off. She looks both old and young depending on how the light shines on her through the tall grass. Almost like she’s had a fairy’s shimmering glamour cast its shadow over her face and with each sway of his lady beetle’s hips he becomes more hypnotized by her rhythm.

So much so that he could cry. He weeps with love and sorrow. She holds out her tarsi to him and he takes it in his tarsi. He walks along crying like a child.

He wonders how a man could do such a thing to any creature called woman.

Then, the men from the neighboring town join them, then the county, and then it seems to him that the whole of the continent has amassed into one great cry.

Still the man walked on with little thought on the rustling of shimmering wings gathering under the trees, the sound of which was drown out by the wind.

Dung beetles are not people, but this murderer had planted seeds of anger into each of their hearts, a whole crops worth throughout the swarm.

Cries through out the crowd of what he had left behind in their schools, their homes, their villages. Whom were these women he had left to the nibbling of ants? Whom were these women whittled down to bone?

Cries of grief for their communities’ losses and for the loss of these mothers, both for their lives and for the brood in their nest bellies.

Upon the dirt road, they’re crawling all over one another, braiding like waters do in the turbidity of flash floods, covering the forest floor until it flashes with the sight of many springs past and future: blooming and fading, faster than the years can leave fall behind them.

They go mad and fall into a locust: with hew and cry, the mob overtake the villain, rip him apart, and hurl his body down into the pit.

They bury him under their children and in the rainy season, when the cracked earth opened its mouth to speak life unto the land, his body birthed many beetles.

When that generation of scarabs die, their wings are carried off by termites to decorate the hair of their queen. They are part of her body in her cycle of endless birth and the beetles blend into the vengeance of her long, black hair and its green shimmer.

Her lips are red with the rouge of crushed rubies, poisoned with the jagged outer teeth of a spider’s death pinchers. A kiss of death from the spider-woman, the Jorōgumo consumes them all in her web.

All the men like him, in her own way, they’re all her little puppets. She pulls all the strings until the story is wrapped up as nicely as the man who murdered her is wrapped in the bed of his own making.