Grasshoppers
April 27, 2007
This week’s fiction story, Grasshoppers, is printed in its entirety. As the final fiction story published in the spring semester, it is not serialized.
I know this grasshopper. He’s a good one. I squish him in my fingertips and his guts squirt out all over my hand. They’re green and white and really look like boogers.
Grasshopper small, grasshopper tall. Low-key clicking all through the wall. I knew he was in there. I put him in there. The radiator was probably a bad idea. Steaming grasshopper, fried grasshopper, suffocating grasshopper.
I tack them all to my poster-board, little pins pinning them exact inches apart. This is organized death. Typed causes below, like cemetery markers. Death by Stomp, Death by Hammer, Death by My Teeth, Death by Radiator, Death by Drowning, Death by Ten-year-old-Boy Finger Strength.
Show and tell is what makes Thursdays worth waking up for. You had to bring in something no one had ever seen before. Parents became important allies on Wednesday nights, scrounging through closets and drawers. Shoeboxes with ancient beloved trinkets were mussed over, fingers stirring memories, searching. Attics became occupied suddenly, basements lit. A four-nut peanut, a helmet from World War II, a beauty pageant sash, a human bone. Dead grasshoppers.
Insects I am obsessed with. Particularly grasshoppers. I love grasshoppers. They are all over my sheets, their green cartoon legs folding over each other against cotton-blue. They are my calendar subjects, my last three Halloween costumes, my life. My parents are both biologists. They are proud of me. They practically feed me grasshoppers.
I decide to add one more marker to my poster-cemetery. Add one more body to the rows. This one reads Death by Long-Suffering. He is still wriggling hours later, his body dying the white poster-board an orange tint. Rub, rub, rub, he fights. The pin is through his abdomen, he’s achieved a pretty impressive spinning radius around the skinny silver pole. Orange circumference, Death by Torture.
They left, some conference. I had forgotten about a box of grasshoppers that I had put in my closet. I had forgotten that it had fallen over and I was going to clean it up later. When my parents got back we three opened my closet together after I told them I couldn’t sleep at night for the noise. They had bred. They had started a nation. They were everywhere.
The yellow, dirty-looking airport-looking van pulled in. A matching man got out. He was yellow and hairy and talked a lot and looked around often. He looked scattered. My bugs were scattered. Harold Zimmerman, The Zapper. This was going to be much better than show and tell. Mom said eighty bucks a job. Dad said never forget the box of upturned specimen. Could lead to loss of job.
Harry ZZ was a maniac and cool. He let me watch him, and the burned spots on the hardwood floor I got to cover with the carpet. I had taken a picture of my closet every three hours since the birth of this army. He wanted his own series of Polaroid pictures of a closeted developing ecosystem, uncontained, uncontrolled, untampered. He wanted mine. No way. Plus, they were already glued to new poster-board. Project of Large Life I was calling it. He told me he would come back and I could take more pictures, make a new series, as long as I helped him. He was a maniac. And cool. I helped him.
Show and tell was a hit. The sitting stool was tall and I was king over everyone’s raised hands. My servant friend held my board. I explained how each bug, smashed, squished, intact, came to look that way. Mrs. Marblebump looked whiter. She tried to hurry me, but there were too many ooos from the boys and ewwws from the girls to hush me. Hush me? Hurry me? Dead things prevail.
ZZ came back for my grasshoppers again. The parental units didn’t get it. How could…anyway, I told them, ZZ was needed. The air vents, they had found themselves in the air vents, blowing their grasshopper carbon-dioxide breath through the slits and into our passing ankles. I was in heaven. First, dead-insect heaven, and now, too-many-insects heaven. Mom and Dad, they were on the fence in terms of heaven. Another eighty bucks. Another ice-tea for ZZ. Another slobby moustache of talking and talking and eyes darting to corners. Another son running up the walls, a Polaroid camera bouncing.
Bugs crisping to a fry. Die, die, die. Fourth grade doesn’t believe the tricks ZZ told me. Tricks to bring them back. Fourth grade doesn’t believe my Polaroid series, the crazy things I’ve learned. How they need only a puddle of concealed orange juice to thrive, dive, into abysses of circulated air moving through ceilings and walls. How he once dealt with a tribe of roaches feasting at a funeral home. How grateful he was for the new series of Polaroids; they’re framed, hanging in his kitchen. They don’t believe? I’ve seen it. Bugs crisping to a fry. Die, die, die.
When the biologists found out that the need for ZZ’s return had been planned, strategized, executed, and not accidental, I got an extra-silent dinner. Dad said that next to the most recently added “Death by Zapping” grasshopper, he would draw in a little stick figure of me onto the poster. My demise would be described as “Death by Cold Turkey.” I told him I didn’t get it. I told him Turkeys had nothing to do with my project or ZZ or grasshoppers or anything.
I love grasshoppers. They are my life. But now they are my secret life because Mom and Dad threw away my cool sheets, switched my calendars, and have already decided on my next Halloween costume. I mean, I’m allowed to choose it, they just have limited my available category of disguise. My options are: a mode of transportation, a bird, or a vegetable. So I have a lot of time to think about it. I’m not worried. I am, in fact, the opposite of worried. Which is, not worried. There’s this to think about: my box of churning chirping chittering grasshoppers that I keep under my bed, breeding me another nation, guaranteeing more business for ZZ and a chance to get more advice about my planned house take-over. Grasshoppers will win the day.
Julie Furbush is a junior majoring in English.