Many years ago, when I was only ten, I collected dozens of pill bugs in an empty can of peas, then put that can in the middle of a small fire and cooked the bugs to death. They burned with a smell like cinnamon. I blame Chris, my closest friend at the time. He was always into torturing things smaller than he was, though he often seemed as pained by what he was doing as the poor creatures he was doing the things to.
But the pill bugs, that was all my doing. I’d eagerly absorbed my friend’s tales of his experiments with nature, but I’d never killed anything myself, not counting the mosquitos everyone slaps dead without a thought except those monks in Asia who sweep their path clear for fear of crushing ants beneath their feet.
I was sickened by what I was doing even as I was doing it, but I was the one who picked up the pill bugs one by one, lit the fire beneath their many feet, and watched them burn and congeal into something like soup.
So I was expecting it when I woke one morning to find a pill bug the size of a sumo wrestler standing beside my bed. Its face was next to mine, the two thick antennae slowly waving in the air as though conducting an orchestra on Prozac. It noticed my open eyes and reared up a bit to reveal its can-opener-like mouth.
“I guess you know why I’m here,” it said, its voice deep and salty, with a cricket’s underlying buzz.
I say I was expecting this, but perhaps what I should have said is that I was expecting some sort of karmic payback. Maybe I’d be fired for someone else’s paperclip theft or hit by a piece of a falling satellite. My shoe would stick on a piece of gum littering the sidewalk, and I’d trip into the street directly in the unalterable path of a steamroller.
“Are you okay?” the giant pill bug said. Then, more to itself, it added, “With mammals I can never tell.”
It scuttled closer and its antennae folded down towards me. In a panic, I scooted back.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Good,” the pill bug said. It bobbed up and down as though nodding. “Are you ready, then?”
“Sure.”
“Well, get up and get dressed or whatever it is you do,” the pill bug said. It sounded both solemn and bored, like a judge trying his hundredth murder trial. “I’ll wait.”
It shuffled around to face the door, leaving me to some sort of privacy. In a moment, I was fully dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and ready to face my death. Because that’s what I was convinced had come for me. Why death was a giant pill bug, I understood. Why death wanted me dressed before it killed me was less clear.
I took a deep, shuddering breath. I thought about my ex-girlfriend and how she’d left the door open to getting back together. I imagined my parents finding my mutilated body and wondering who in God’s name I’d pissed off. I dreamed that I’d written a will and had the things of value one would need a will for. The light through the window was as clean as a blank piece of paper.
“I’m ready,” I said.
The pill bug lumbered around, nodding all the while, then disappeared down a giant hole in the corner of the room. “Follow me,” it chittered.
On my hands and knees, I followed. When the light died around me, I was sure that a hundred thousand pill bugs of the normal pill-size would swarm over me and take me apart into their tiny mouths as though I was just a giant piece of rotting lettuce. I waited there, motionless in the earthy dark, my breath caught in my throat as though I myself was a coffin, nailed shut. Then the burr of the pill bug’s voice echoed back to me.
“Don’t dawdle.”
My breath fell back into me with a vengeance. I had been ready to die, and I was still alive. I was still going to die.
I hurried forward and emerged into blinding light. A moment later, my eyes adjusted to show me my backyard and, in the midst of the yard, a large pile of logs and branches cradling an enormous pot. The pot was made from hundreds of tin cans pounded flat. A small container of lighter fluid sat next to a box of long-stemmed matches.
“Are you ready?” the pill bug said.
I nodded. My tongue was like glue in my mouth. The air cut my throat like sandpaper.
The pill bug nodded again, slowly bouncing up and down, as formal as a butler. Then it hurled itself into the pot. Water surged over the sides and stained the stacked wood dark.
“Hurry,” the pill bug said, its voice crackling with anxiety. “Light the fire now, before I lose my nerve.”
I wasn’t going to die.
I emptied the lighter fluid over the wood and lit the fire. Soon, the water was steaming, and the shell of the pill bug blushed beautifully. I held one of its antennae as it died.
