by Aeon Authors
Flies rule the early colonization of corpses, but they are not the end of the story by any means. A large cast of beetles that will arrive now, utilizing unlocked resources from the maggot activity on the corpse as well as exploiting the maggots themselves. Predatory beetles attracted to a sudden surge in resources will lay eggs around the area of a body. Depending on the species, the beetles will feed on different areas of the scene, preying on other insects themselves busy at the consumption of carrion, or feeding on bits of the corpse itself. All the players provide their own clues to time of death. Burying beetles, carrion beetles and sexton beetles, with great handles all, arrive as the succession process progresses through predictable changes. Hide beetles, carpet beetles and rove beetles—no, not of White House infamy although with fitting namesakery—appear in turn to further reduce the remaining remains to dust.
One thing is certain: many other animals will recognize the increase and concentration of live prey at a site. Wasps, hornets and ants can both scavenge from the corpse itself and prey on others more directly about the work of decomposition. Spiders, centipedes, and other arthropod predators may arrive and remain in the vicinity while food is plentiful and easy to obtain.
So how does this work from a forensic point of view? Local conditions will affect the rapidity and specific pathway of insect-driven decomposition. Given known developmental rates of insect larvae and a timeline for species arrivals, we as forensic investigators can estimate time of death. Whether on a scale of minutes or hours based on early arriving insects, or windows as wide as months or more for remains in more advanced stages of decomposition, insects have stories to tell us. Of course as we get farther away from the moment of death, our estimates become less precise, and there are always other clues such as broken watches and smudged Broadway ticket stubs found in purse or pocket. But the predictability of biological succession in this specialized and dynamic insect community probably conveys more information than stopped clocks and validated tickets could ever aspire to.
So at the end of the day this column was about death. And the title conveys how I feel about that. But perhaps I should have called this column “Death, Bugs, and You,” because if someone whacks me I want to find some comfort in knowing that they will be treated to some degree of justice; and if insects are a part of that so much the better. So I could add a few commas here, a conjunction there, and voilà—an entirely new meaning. Thank you arthropods, thank you.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle on your snout.
They eat your eyes, they eat your nose,
They eat the jelly between your toes.
Okay, I guess I can be glib about it.
Her Box of Secrets
Lisa Mantchev
“We all have our own box of secrets. How large is yours?”
IN THE BEGINNING, she told him everything. She detailed her day with bright butterfly words that he captured with laughter and smiles and nods of acknowledgement. Picking up the dry cleaning was an anecdote for dinner by candlelight. They discussed the world over the plastic shower curtain, their words flecked with soap and toothpaste. At night, with the lights out, the butterflies collected in her dark hair, and he brushed them off with a gentle hand so he could kiss the nape of her neck.
Time passed, as it does, with a baby and bills and gray hairs and clogged toilets and light bulbs that needed changing. The conversations didn’t stop, but the words became moths that fluttered out of her mouth and onto the kitchen counter.
“The garbage needs to go out.”
He nodded and opened the newspaper.
“Time to get a haircut.”
Cereal and juice disappeared behind the printed pages.
“I might run away from home today.”
More moths, just moths; easy to ignore until they got into the sweaters and ate holes in the yarn. They collected in piles and twitched until they died. She swept them into a dustpan and dumped them in the garbage.
And wondered when she’d gotten old and boring.
One of her words (she thought it might be garbage, or perhaps haircut) landed on the linoleum, and the toddler promptly stuffed it in his mouth.
“Spit. That. Out,” she said, and reached down to swat him on the butt.
The child obeyed with eyes brimming.
“Have a good day!” His father folded the paper, waved an absent-minded farewell and scuffed over the worn path to the door and into the groove of his day away from the house.
The bedraggled word—it was run—staggered on the hardwood. She stepped on it, grinding it underfoot until the sole of her slipper left a mark on the floor and the word was nothing more than a smear of good intentions and guts.
They both began to cry: mother and child. Her tears were black and bitter creatures that scuttled away, ashamed and afraid of the daylight that streamed in the window. They took refuge under the baseboards and in the cabinets between the mixing bowls and the food processor.
She picked up her son and held him until he slept, looking just as he did only hours after birth, with his baby mouth like a pink bow on a present and eyelashes so beautiful it hurt her to look at them. She put him down on their big bed, imprisoned him with pillows and tiptoed downstairs to clean up the mess. She collected the tears with tweezers and popped them into an empty baby food jar.
Her hands shook.
There were hundreds of the tiny little bastards.
Either they’d multiplied, or she cried more than she realized.
The last one put up a fight, dodging between a glass baking dish and the wooden rolling pin, but she flushed it out and whacked it a good one with the yellow pages.
“Get in there, you fucker.” No more tears—she was afraid to cry now. She screwed the lid on and added a rubber band for extra security.
She planned on burying them in the yard or shoving the jar deep in the trash can, between blackened banana peels and dirty diapers, but the garage door opened and she panicked.
Why were you crying?
What’s the matter?
Don’t I give you everything?
She couldn’t face those importuning accusations right now.
Up the stairs, into the guest room, under the bed. Dust bunnies, rubber storage bins, the little wooden jewelry box her grandmother gave her on her wedding day.
“For your treasures.”
For my secrets.
It held only a yellowed muslin sachet of lavender tied with a pale green ribbon. She added the jar. Closed the lid. Turned the key.
She shoved the box back under the safety of the dust ruffle and heard feet coming up the stairs.
“Honey?”
What to do with the key?
His hand on the doorknob—
She put it in her mouth and tasted verdigris just before she swallowed. The metal sliver scraped all the way down her throat; she swallowed again and again, still feeling it lodged sideways somewhere in the middle.
“What are you doing in here sweetie?” She stood up and kissed him with closed lips. “Just cleaning up a little.”
She forgot about the tears, for a while. It was easy enough to be happy, with a beautiful house that needed cleaning and a darling child to chase and a loving husband who wanted to walk in the door to shower and dinner and a few hours in front of the television before sex and bed.
The rubies on her pillow surprised her, though. The desires started small: garnet chips like flecks of blood on the sheets.
Community college.
Night school.
Just a few units.
Easy enough to flick onto the carpet and sweep up later. But the one as large as a golf ball was too big to ignore—it would clog the vacuum for certain. Break the belts and kill the machine just as the dogs started shedding their winter coats.
She palmed it and eased out from between the sheets. Naked, because she always slept that way, but reaching for the baggy cotton sweats that were better than camouflage.
Steam poured out of the bathroom—she had five minutes at most.
It was tricky, getting the key back. It was lodged just under her heart and took some prying to extricate. Reaching into her chest was none too comfortable either, but it was that or explain why she woke up this morning wanting to go back to school to get her degree.
The tears were still there, tumbling over each other inside the baby food jar. The sachet was still there; her secrets would smell of lavender.
She added the ruby.
Closed the box. Turned the key.
It didn’t hurt—as much—to swallow it this time. But her breakfast tasted like metal, and even the coffee had an unwelcome aftertaste.
“I have to go to the post office today.” His words were moths now too, that appeared over the edges of the newspaper.
She could only nod. Everything she didn’t say were four-and-twenty blackbirds that hopped on the table and pecked at the toast.
“Anything you need from downtown?”
I want more from my life snatched the moth-words out of the air before they could even take flight. She shook her head no and tried to grab the bird mid-flight to the pot rack. Copper pans jangled and danced. Certainly he would peer around the headlines about the country going to shit and realize the same thing was happening here.
“Caw!” said Part of me is dying.
The little one crowed too, banged his spoon against a melamine plate and flung oatmeal against the wall.
Digesting the world, her husband kissed the air next to her cheek.
Do you even see me anymore? shat on his shoulder.
I think I might hate you followed him out the door, flapping after the truck all the way down the driveway.
She wiped gluey smears of cereal off the little one, who protested and slapped at her. You could use a spanking heckled her from the piano.
She left him in front of the television preoccupied with dancing bears and singing hands. She stalked the worst of the unspoken thoughts.
Through the dining room. Into the foyer.
I’m not sure I love you anymore sat on the frame of the wedding picture that hung in the stairwell. She grabbed at it, dug her fingers deep into the oily black feathers. She ignored the pecks and squawks of protest as she raced up the stairs two at a time.
She stuffed the blackbird fear inside the secrets box, next to the dream ruby and the black beetle tears and the vintage pomander.
The smell of lavender made her sick now.
But the key didn’t hurt at all, going down this time. She started to shove the box back under the bed, but it wouldn’t fit. The more secrets she put in the box, the larger it got.
She glared at it, still refusing to cry. She kicked it with her foot, just hard enough to hurt herself. Then she shoved it into the closet and covered it with a spare quilt.
The very first class, she sat in the front row with a new notebook and her favorite pen uncapped and ready. School supplies had always been important to her.
“More important than family?” he’d argued, baffled, angry that he and the baby weren’t enough anymore. Her class schedule lay on the counter.
Introduction to Warfare.
Fight Dirty 101.
“I’m not choosing school over family. This is something I need to do!” Still no tears…she was too angry for tears. Fury poked out of her in glittering spikes that warned him not to touch her.
He headed for the garage.
Good riddance mocked her from the top of the china cabinet and rattled their wedding dishes.
She heard scraping and the hollow ring of a gong. Bristling, she peered around the dining room door.
He’d retrieved an enormous golden scale from the rafters above the cars.
“You don’t need to do this!” she told him, hackles raised.
He ignored the warning and set it down in the middle of the room. “We’ll just see what the truth is.” He sat down on one side, with the baby in his arms. “Put school on the other side.”
“Asshole. Jerkoff.” She spat the words at him and they burned holes in the floor.
She stomped into the kitchen and retrieved her carefully selected school supplies and her class schedule. Every footfall shook the foundation of the house as she stormed back to the scales. She heaved them onto the other side of the scale and heard the weights jump, settle—
Her notebooks and pens were, inexplicably, heavier.
Told you so: the three words with as much power as ‘I love you’. Even unspoken, they reached out to slap her. Then he gathered up their crying son, climbed the stairs to the nursery and shut the door in her face.
She pounded on the barrier until her fists bled. “It’s not fair to punish me for wanting something for myself!”
He shoved a note under the door.
Fair has nothing to do with it.
“Really mature!”
Another note.
I know you are, but what am I?
Were they reduced to keeping track, weighing everything, trying to cut the last piece of cake exactly in half?
She went to the master bathroom, used a box of bandages to cover the wounds on her hands, and retrieved her car keys. Silent condemnation followed her down the driveway in a rolling black cloud.
It was probably against the rules for an instructor to ask a student out to coffee, but she was enjoying her first taste of freedom and didn’t want to see the harm.
“Your work is really very advanced. I’m surprised you’re not enrolled at the university.” His words were dragonflies, their wings iridescent in the half light of the café. Her butterflies were delighted with the company.
“I’m afraid I don’t have time. I have—” A million and one excuses.
They both wore wedding bands.
Father and son were both asleep when she returned on tiptoe. She found them curled up in the master bedroom; the television was on and an open copy of Good Night, Moon; was spread-eagle on the coverlet.
She watched the rise and fall of their chests, possessive of every snore and grunt.
She loved her husband and her son.
But another man waited for her outside.
She didn’t pack clothes or photographs or her toothbrush. She went instead to the guest room and pulled out the box of secrets. She pulled the key from her breast one last time and opened it.
She took out the jar of black tears, the crimson jewel, the blackbird, the prickly spines of her rage. She added her memories of tonight; a lovely white gossamer thing that was hot to the touch.
Together, they were like her skin and her bones, her floating dark hair and her aching heart.
Together, they made a whole other person; one filled with dreams and anger and regret and hope.
A single tear gathered in the corner of her eye. Not a black scurrying creature this time, but a magic wish for another version of happily-ever-after.
She let it fall.
Her doppelganger smiled and sat up, filled with purpose and youth and life. Black beetle hair streaming, she-who-could-have-been walked down the stairs and into the dark to meet a different fate.
She-who-was put the key in the box, turned it, sat back. Empty, it was a tiny thing no larger than a coin.
She swallowed it.
Then she joined her husband and her child in the family bed and slept with all her other secrets inside of her.
Fox and Chicken People
Bruce Boston
If fox and chicken people
were the world there would
be lots of barbed wire,
electrified fences,
towering stone fortifications
topped with jagged glass
to keep the hairy carnivores
from their feathered prey.
As each opposing civilization
advanced through the ages,
they would inevitably
intermingle and the lines
of battle would become
more subtle and refined.
The winning fox people
would be those who could
assume the convincing
guise of chickens until
they were ready to pounce.
The winning chicken people
would be those who could
not only spot such marauders,
despite the finesse and
charm in their performance,
but those who could summon
the prowess to gather
their fellows in numbers
sufficient to peck
the impostors to death.
If fox and chicken people
were the world it would be
a game of fang and beak
and explosive violence,
the amoral survival
of evolutionary design.
Moonlight on the Carpet
David D. Levine
“The first draft of this story was written at the bar at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, as part of the Two Beers And A Story Challenge. The rules of the Challenge were simple: write a complete short story in the time it takes to finish two beers. I can usually finish a novel more quickly than I can finish a beer, but with the cheering crowd shouting "Drink!" every minute or two, by the time I reached the end of this story I found I had downed a full pint of Sam Adams and two-thirds of another. Not to mention participating in the singing, trash-talking, telling of rude jokes, and other miscellaneous hilarity (including the mating call of the Giant Clam). I hope you enjoy reading the story as much as I did writing it.”
“VRRM, VRRM,” said Liam as he ran the little wooden car across the Persian carpet. It was summer, a hot humid North Carolina summer, and there was nothing else to do. Mommy and Daddy were away again.
The blue and gold pattern in the middle of the carpet, a thing the shape of the big black card in Mommy’s bridge deck, could be Laclede Island where they went every month at this time. Liam ran his car along the causeway—a long curve of blue and red and black—and through the stripe of bright white moonlight that crossed it. The babysitter snored in the armchair by the window; outside, in the darkness, seagulls called and the surf rumbled low.
