Jeremy Packert Burke
Glittering Dark The insects revolted that summer. No one knew why. Grasshoppers, locusts, beetles, and bees, buzzing and chirruping, jumping from the grass. The houses of Holloway watched them come in chitinous hordes. Crawling from the earth and shaking the dirt from their gossamer wings. We would crunch and squish across a half-inch layer of locusts, ladybugs, and Hercules beetles to get the morning paper, only to discover it had been eaten clean through by moths. We wore flu masks to keep the airborne creatures from burrowing into our mouths, goggles to protect our eyes. We didn’t allow the children outside, afeard by rumors of entomic masses carrying kids off and stripping them of their flesh, leaving only pure white skeletons. Those were only rumors, but the insects did strip a whale that way. It washed up on the shores of Lake Hesperus, beached and moaning in the breeze, surrounded by thousands of flitting, scuttling, green-gold shapes, until – like a magic trick – it was reduced to a gargantuan white nightmare. In the cage of its ribs, a large nugget of ambergris, which Travis Gehry stole and sold to Bucky Foucault, the perfumiér. Sunsets were incredible that summer. We all stood on our porches and watched the red-speckled dusk sink towards full dark, rays of sunlight bent through the wings of insects, disco-balled in the many facets of their eyes, so that patches of every colored light imaginable danced over the woods and the walls, over our upturned faces. Sweeping over the town as if it were a roller rink. And even at night, the moonlight caught their many shifting carapaces. The leaves fell, red, along the paths of the forest, the roads of the town.
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