Death of a Stink Bug

I killed a stink bug the other day. It was unintentional. The bug was flying around in my sister’s room, and my sister was running from it, shoe in hand, calling my name. I was sitting on my bed, math homework on my lap, and my computer beside me playing Portlandia. I rolled my eyes and yelled, “What?” 

“I need your help! It’s an emergency!” she shrieked. I heard the loud flapping of the stink bug’s wings and a whimper coming from my sister. I swung my legs off my bed, got up, and dragged my feet as I walked down the hall to her room. It’s a stink bug, seriously. The bug started flying again when I walked in, its little hexagonal brown body zipping from wall to wall, with a halo surrounding its body of flapping wings. She was holding her shoe over her head, simultaneously ready to attack and run. She looked as though the stink bug posed a real threat to her safety. “Are you going to kill it?” she asked, as she slowly backed out of her doorway, almost the way you would walk away from a bear.

“Of course I’m not going to kill it. It is just a bug, it hasn’t harmed me or you at all. I’m sure it has a family somewhere, and if we kill it, its family will never know where it is and miss it for the rest of eternity.” 

“Okay, whatever, just deal with it,” she responded.

“Uhhh, how about you don’t talk to me like that?” I walked to her bathroom to get a tissue so I could pick up the stink bug and throw it out the window. Just as I was reaching for a tissue, the flapping of the stink bug’s wings picked up again. The harsh, amplified buzzing made me flinch.  I turned around to look where the sound was coming from. Directly in the middle of the bathroom door frame was the stink bug, flying towards me. I swatted at the stink bug with my tissue-covered hand, thinking that this was the only time I would be able to reach it. It stuck to the tissue. I was disgusted by the fact that there was a stink bug in my hand, and it looked so comfortable just sitting on the soft Kleenex. For some reason, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at the bug, so I moved my hand closer to my face. Its six thin legs suspended the rest of its tough, brown body. Its back was speckled with black and white dots. It only had its left antenna. By the time I noticed I was picking up on details as small as its antennae, I realized it was too close to my face. Then it started flying and I almost had a heart attack. My vision narrowed to the bug, only the bug. I took my hand, caught the stink bug, and slapped it on the counter, a little harder than I wanted. I felt the creature squish between my fingers. I heard the harsh sounds of its skeleton cracking. When I opened the tissue, I saw the flattened bug, its tiny legs spread apart, wings still open. I shivered as I dropped the tissue in disgust. Then I told my sister it was dead and walked back to room, sat back down on my bed, and resumed the TV show. 

“Are you just going to leave it dead on my counter?” she yelled down the hallway.

“It’s your problem now,” I said. I couldn’t stop thinking about the poor stink bug for the rest of the night. It was more than sorrow for its loss of life, it was guilt. I couldn’t cope with having been the reason for its death. I was annoyed that I couldn’t get over it like I get over most other things. For God’s sake it was a stink bug! It’s not like it was always in my room and I had grown to accept it, or given it a name. It bothers me that I killed it. I lost control in that moment, frightened by a small bug, and it ended up dead. I should not have left it on her bathroom counter. It was disrespectful of me.

That night I had a very odd dream. I had a dream that a stink bug the size of a truck flew to my house, and for some reason my whole family was outside, as if we were expecting it. The huge stink bug picked me up and held me in two of its legs. It started to fly away while the rest of my family smiled and waved to me from our front steps. I wonder what it means.

A few months earlier, at the end of summer, my cat delivered a dead mouse to the door. She looked so proud of her present, and I was not mad, just disappointed. I knew cats killed mice, but I never thought my cat would kill anything. She is a chubby, little tuxedo cat named Boba. She came to the door that day and meowed so that we would let her in. I walked to the door, and when I opened it I saw the mouse. Its head was partly severed from the rest of its body, and there was blood clotted around its neck. Boba ran in when I opened the door, leaving the mouse outside. “Mom, Boba killed a mouse!” I yelled to my mom in the kitchen. 

“What do you want me to do about it?” she responded. 

“I don’t know, I’m just telling you there is a dead, decapitated mouse on our doorstep.” When my mom saw Boba, she told her what a good girl she was because I guess that is what you’re supposed to do: congratulate a cat on a killing. 

I don’t particularly like mice, but I also don’t have anything against them. There was no reason for this mouse to be laid to rest on the steps to my front door. After a few days of walking past its empty body, I decided to do something about it. I put on gloves, went outside, and picked up the mouse. I couldn’t look at it, so I cupped my hands around its body. I put it under a tree that my cats and dogs never go to so it could rest peacefully. Then I threw enough dirt over it to completely cover it, walked back to the house, and threw away the gloves.

I’m not a religious person at all, but I do believe that every being should get whatever it needs to rest in peace, just in case there is something after this life. In this instance, it was easier to bury it just because I have no idea how to cremate a mouse. I don’t know why that mouse needed a burial, or why I even cared enough to pick it up, but I had to do something for it—although I think some animal found it later and ate it. So much for that. 

A few years earlier, when I was eight, my sister got a pet frog. I am almost certain she got this frog to scare me. For as long as I can remember, I have had an irrational fear of frogs. My dad likes to tell me that that wasn’t always the case, and that I used to play with them all the time. My mom gave us an option of getting insects or amphibians, which now that I’m thinking about it, was a pretty odd selection. My older sister chose butterflies, I chose ladybugs, and my twin, whom I shared a room with at the time, chose a frog. 

She didn’t like frogs, but she had to get an animal that I hated. While my sister’s butterflies grew from caterpillars to the magnificent butterflies that they are supposed to be, and my ladybugs changed from larvae to real bugs, my twin’s frog sat in its cage in the corner of our room. I changed the water in my ladybug’s cage every day, I brought them new leaves, and I took them outside, in their cage of course, as often as I could. But I never remember my sister doing anything with her frog. The frog stayed in the corner of my sister’s and my room. My sister didn’t care for it. I almost felt bad for the poor frog. It never asked to be taken into an unwelcoming home where its only use was to scare. 

One morning, the frog didn’t hop to its food bowl. My sister tapped the plastic; it stayed very still. Then she took off the top of the cage and touched the frog. It didn’t move at all. It was dead. It had a terrible life. It was never loved. Still, my mom forced my sister to give it a proper funeral. She picked up the frog. It lay limply in her bare hand while she took it outside and walked it to the top of the driveway where she started digging. She dug a shallow hole just so the frog could fit, then let the frog roll off her hand into the hole. She covered it over with dirt. The poor frog was soon forgotten. My sister got over it the fastest. I was mad at her for not caring at all about her frog, not caring that she is the reason it was dead. I don’t think she ever even named the frog. I wasn’t upset that it died. I didn’t like the frog at all. It was gross and slimy. But its life was one of the saddest lives I have ever known. The only time it went outside, or ever felt the ground, was when it was plopped into a one-and-a-half-foot grave because my sister was too lazy to dig a bigger hole. 

I can’t bury every animal that falls dead across my path, but I felt responsible for these three. I try to respect every animal’s death with a moment of silence. And, kind of oddly, animal deaths make me more upset than human deaths. It’s not that I don’t care about people, it’s just that in most instances, people find out if a loved one died, but with animals, they have no way of knowing. I don’t know if animals and insects lead family lives the way people do, they probably don’t. I know bears care about family, but do frogs? Or mice? Or even less likely, stink bugs? 

I haven’t had dreams about the mouse or the frog. My cat hasn’t brought any other rodents to the door since then, and I hope she never does. But I think about these little deaths more than I’d like to admit. Death doesn’t particularly scare me—at least that is what I have told myself many times— or maybe it does, because I obviously think about it quite a lot. What I am afraid of is being forgotten. I don’t want any of these deaths to go unnoticed. These animals didn’t do much to begin with, and if no one recognizes their death, then who knows that they ever even lived? Maybe each one did its part to make sure the world kept spinning, and the sun didn’t blow up, and each day came and went just as it was supposed to. Maybe the flapping of the stink bug’s wings kept an asteroid from hitting earth, and when the mouse scurried from one bush to another, it kept a black hole from passing through our solar system, and the one time the frog hopped from one corner of its cage to the other ensured that one of the volcanoes in Yellowstone didn’t erupt. But maybe not. Maybe they did absolutely nothing. In which case, it would make it worse if their death were forgotten because that would mean they had no effect on anything; their entire being and the few days or weeks they were alive were completely worthless. That’s what’s scary about death: that this was all for nothing.