Libby found herself on her son’s street for the third day in a row, this time just after a night shift at the hospital. Her chance of getting any sleep was slipping. A heavy fatigue settled in her eyes and dragged down her thoughts. The haggard face in the mirror startled her, a sad and tired woman: dry skin, swollen cheeks, droopy lips. Her hands on the steering wheel slackened and her head nodded off. She fell into a passive, blank feeling. There was no name for it, this feeling, but it carried her to sleep until the sudden glimpse of a dream. A large bug landed on her neck and bit her skin. She woke in panic and placed her hands on top of her blonde hair. It felt like the hair of an old doll. She sat there, too tired to sleep, and felt very old, as if she aged a decade overnight and finally hit her sixties.

Idling in the car, still wearing her nurse scrubs, Libby watched the other houses in the gray wet stillness of the early morning after a storm. The neighbors were backing out of garages and driving off to their days. Her son’s garage door remained shut, his windows dark and empty. When the rest of the street had settled into the stillness again, Libby opened her car door and hurried up to his house before another dream could appear.

“That ant’s as big as your hand,” she said.  

“It’s not an ant,” Todd replied.

It sure looked to Libby like a large brown ant. In the kitchen, Todd was examining another odd creature in a glass case. He had been collecting more and more of them ever since Christian, her husband, died. The cases now covered all parts of the house, walls and shelves and counters, an infestation, a museum of tiny monsters. She had to brush the skin of her arms and neck anytime she found their strange faces. Even the butterflies displayed in the main hall touched the nape of her neck with a chill stroke of their wings. 

Todd bought the house a few months before Christian died. She thought it was too big for one person, but Christian encouraged him to go with his gut and put in an offer, the neighborhood was too nice to pass up. Most rooms, like the kitchen, were unfinished with boxes and crates left unopened along the walls. She was hoping to find him opening one of those boxes today instead of looking at another ugly thing in a case.

“It’s not?”

“It’s a spider,” he said. He opened the glass case and ran a pen down the length of the shiny body. “See the eight legs. It’s a kind of spider that mimics ants to stay undetected by prey.”

“A spider,” Libby said.

She hated most insects, especially ones that found their way inside. Alive or dead was no matter, they simply didn’t belong in the house, and Christian was the one to get rid of them. He never smashed or stomped anything. Instead, he caught things with a black shoebox, and he would always ask her if she wanted to say goodbye before letting the little guys loose in the driveway. It was how Todd became so drawn to the small world of insects and bugs, a realm of the living so grotesque and menacing to Libby it was incomprehensible. Christian would open the box, and her son, only a toddler then, would cry out in rapturous joy while Libby would shield her eyes and tell Christian to take it away and to stop laughing. She missed that shoebox and she missed that smile Christian gave her when he showed Todd the box like it was all some kind of magic trick.

“Your favorite,” Todd joked. “I got it just for you.”

“Keep it away from me, thank you,” she laughed. “It can stay here with the rest of these things.”

“It can stay,” her son repeated. “It can stay here.”

And she might stay here, too. Her own house kept her up at night when she was alone. She had met a man online and went on a few dates and stayed at his house on her free nights for sleep. The sex helped. A thick liquid of languor released and settled in her bones. Nick would hold her and talk about his children, his recent divorce, his thoughts. He was younger than her, not yet in his fifties, and she wondered if she or Chirstian were as innocent as Nick when they were younger. Libby told Nick she was also divorced, and her husband moved away, and her son was getting settled in his new house without the strange displays of creatures. It was another life she created with Nick beside her in bed, almost like a dream that carried her to sleep, only the dream was chased away once she stopped speaking and shut her eyes, chased away by the ugly creatures in her son’s house.

“A spider’s not really a bug, right?” she asked.

Libby first called it taxidermy, but Todd said the correct term was mounting. He had become so absorbed that it was now consuming him, swallowing him whole, a large invisible maw. She couldn’t remember the last time he left the house. Boxes, packaged bags, and glass cases crowded the halls and piled up in the corners. She pictured him inside one of the cases on the wall, pinned to the black felt, his eyes wide with fear. Even his face had taken on insect qualities, his eyes large and dark, the heavy bags hanging below made her think of a tarantula.

“Arthropod,” Todd said. He hadn’t looked at her yet, his attention fully devoted to the spider between his hands.

She said that was interesting and glanced around the kitchen. A few ants were on the walls. She remembered what he said about the giant red one with angry eyes and terrible pincers, something that might’ve crawled out of hell. The Bulldog Ant. Found in Australia, dubbed as the deadliest ants in the world, they were aggressive fiery beasts unafraid of humans. A few stings could kill a grown man in fifteen minutes.

It was all so strange and unnerving to her, this fascination of pure ugliness and near evil that her son and husband had shared. The dreams came and left in sudden glimpses, scenes too quick to fully form. Moths fluttered from the mouths of her patients. Scarabs crawled out of the shower drain. Ants swarmed the floors and walls. One dream lasted longer. She found the old shoebox Christian would use to catch bugs. Inside was a severed hand. She picked it up and locked her fingers, then she dropped it. The hand belonged to Christian.

Todd set the case of the spider aside and pulled up a yellow-green insect. Three long threadlike tails stretched up from the end of its arched body, the wings impressively tall and transparent. An elegant, graceful posture for a bug. Fragile. Delicate. Libby looked harder. She had seen it before, a picture of one.

“Is that a Mayfly?”

Todd finally looked up, his eyes large like the Mayfly’s, and said yes. Libby saw them on the news, how thousands of Mayflies swarm the small towns along the Lake Erie shore in June, covering cars and roads, forcing towns to turn off streetlights to prevent swarms.  

“An adult Mayfly only lives one, maybe two days,” Todd said. “They fly off the water and live their entire life in one day.” He turned back to the Mayfly. “It’s exactly that for everything else, isn’t it? Today is your life.”

Libby touched his hair and let her hand rest on the back of his neck. She was tired, the weight of work settled in her, heavy and finished, and yet she didn’t feel done with the day. There was much to have and to hold before it was over. His neck felt frail, delicate in her hand. Everyone was so fragile, she thought, and some things were so large they could smash you, toss you out the window and brush you away, and you were so small, and the day was always too short.

– Tom Roth