Praying Mantis

My grandmother believed that when she died, she would be reincarnated as a hummingbird. So after her funeral, I drove out to a gardening…

My grandmother believed that when she died, she would be reincarnated as a hummingbird. So after her funeral, I drove out to a gardening center and bought myself three cherry-red hummingbird feeders and a bottle of bright red nectar to fill it with.

I hung the feeders in the garden behind my grandmother’s house, in front of the window by the breakfast nook. My grandmother had left the house to me, her favorite grandson. I was a graphic designer, self-employed and basically broke. None of my cousins could give up their lives and move out to the country where she’d lived. Nobody else had the patience to clean out the old antiques and boxes of junk in her spare rooms and attic. Hell, nobody else had the time. So leaving the home to me seemed the natural choice.

Every morning, I rose to feed the cat and fix my breakfast, then I’d eat it in the nook while watching the hummingbirds. My grandmother had always been a pack rat, so the house remained stocked with food for months after her death. I always ate one toasted English Muffin, smothered with jam, a mug of tea, and one poached egg sprinkled with pepper, not salt. Grams had suffered from high blood pressure, so she kept no salt in the house.

In my grandmother’s house, I learned to live a slow, peaceful life. I spent most of my time alone, or playing with Nemo, the old tabby cat. After breakfast, I would step outside, water the plants in the garden, refill the hummingbird feeders, and find a shady spot to pull up a chair and work from my laptop. I had a number of clients, all of whom lived back in the city. Mostly I helped them by drawing logos and reworking their websites. It was simple stuff. It did not pay well.

My grandmother’s yard was dense with flowers and thick bluegrass, and a winding stone path that led to a shallow pond beside the fence. Frogs and crickets croaked and chirped and bees floated lazily over the flower blooms.

Occasionally I would see Nemo in the window, watching the birds lustily, meowing to be let out. When my grandmother had lived there, Nemo had been an outdoor cat. But I wanted gram’s garden to be a welcome refuge for all manner of birds, especially hummingbirds. So I kept Nemo locked up. I figured he would get used to it.

I worked from a chair in the yard all day, every day, only rising to move my seat into a new stretch of shade as the sun cast its light down at a new angle. Every few minutes, I would find myself looking up, to watch the fluttering hummingbirds gathered around the feeder. They were so fragile as they darted from feeder to feeder, filling their tiny stomachs with sweetness.

It made me think of my gram, and the way she would daintily eat a piece of pie at Thanksgiving. It made me think about my dad, sitting across from her at the dinner table, frowning and not speaking. I wondered why we visited his mother so rarely, when I was growing up. My heart stung to think of all the time with my gram that I had lost, all due to his pride.

My father hadn’t even made it to the funeral. Told me not to go, not to take gram’s house. He said it came with strings attached. I couldn’t figure him out. Gram had always been so sweet. More than sweet — genuinely loving and giving. You could tell that just by looking at the ecological bounty of her yard.

After two weeks living at my gram’s, I’d gotten into a regular routine. I filled Nemo’s dish, dropped my egg into the warm water, toasted my English Muffin, and poured my tea. Then I took out to the breakfast nook, and sat in the chair nearest the window. But this time, as I bit into my English Muffin and turned my gaze through the glass, I did not see a shimmering, iridescent hummingbird. Instead I saw a massive, squirming, green-bodied, red-eyed thing.

It was a praying mantis, standing tall on the lip of the center hummingbird feeder. It was facing the window directly, and working its strange green arms around the crumpled, desiccated body of a tiny male hummingbird.

I let out a gasp and ran out into the yard, shouting, “Shoo! Shoo! Shoo!” Throughout the yard, all the other birds and squirrels and frogs scattered, until all that remained was the mantis, standing firm on the edge of the feeder, unperturbed. As I came up to him, I swear to God he turned his head slowly and locked his beady eyes right on me.

The mantis’ eyes were large and blood red and shifting, with wide, dark pupils like tunnels bearing straight into his brain. It made me freeze in place, being stared at like that. I know it sounds stupid, but there it is. That little monster’s piercing glance bore a hole right in my chest and filled it up with ice and terror until I could not move. I shivered in place. My arms hung limply at my sides. I swear, I might have even backed up a step or two.

Mantises have always creeped me out. Something about their slow, robotic movements, coupled with the massiveness of those red, knowing eyes. They appear so rarely, and yet when they do, they drive total fear and trepidation right into the center of my heart. That one had killed a perfectly innocent hummingbird right before my eyes certainly did not help matters.

The mantis, apparently satisfied that I was not a threat, turned its back on me and returned to its meal. With its long, scythelike claws, it scrambled to push the whole limp corpse of the hummingbird into its gaping mouth. Its mouth became huge suddenly, a huge grey maw that had once just been a slim line on its triangular head.

I could hear the crunch of bones and the sloshing of organs in its shockingly powerful jaws. Feathers flew everywhere as it ate. The process of destroying and eating the carcass was laborious and painful, yet it was also over in an instant. All that remained, then, was a narrow little beak, a few bloodied feathers, and a pair of twitching, disembodied legs, lying limp in the dirt. Done with its meal, the mantis turned and cast one last long glace at me. Then it flew off.

All day I sat sentry beside the hummingbird feeder, ready to ward off any other mantises that might come near. Not one came. I got absolutely no work done. I stayed out by the feeder until late into the night, when the lightning bugs came and the streetlights clicked on. Then I stole away to my grandmother’s bedroom and crawled into her bed, where red eyes and squirming green legs filled my dreams.

In the morning, it happened again. I tried to follow my usual routine, hoping superstitiously that if I had acted as though everything was normal, I could un-do the terror that had interrupted my habits. I fed Nemo. I toasted my muffin. I poached and peppered my egg. And when I sat down before the windows, I saw a mantis yet again, feasting on a tiny helpless bird.

Except this time, the mantis was sitting on the windowsill, looking into the kitchen, the bloodied body of the bird pressed against the glass.

I cleaned up the mess and took the feeders down. I couldn’t bear to see another of my gram’s favorite creatures be so needlessly massacred. As I picked up the latest dead bird’s disembodied leg, I swear to you, it started twitching and kicking. I swallowed a deeply immature shriek and stayed there, kneeling in the flower bed, waiting for nausea to subside. The mantis watched me from the sill, glaring down the whole time. He did not move an inch until I rose to swat at him. Then he flew away.

I put the hummingbird feeders in my gram’s garage, and covered them with a tarpaulin. Then I changed into my exercise clothes and went for a run. I thought that maybe I could sweat the terror out, and put my mind at ease. It was just a bug, I told myself. Just a big, mean bug. And the hummingbirds were not my grandmother. This was just one of nature’s disgusting realities. That was all. As I ran, I kept my eyes pinned to the road, never glancing into my neighbor’s yards or gardens.

After my run, I stood over the kitchen sink, drinking cool water straight from the faucet. Then I bent down into the basin, letting the water rush onto my neck and face. Nemo came up to me, meowing, and rubbed his body on my legs.

I said, “Whassa matter, Nemo?” but he just kept mewling, then turned to the window and arched his back.

The mantis had returned. He was staring at me from atop the bird feeder, which had somehow been returned to its place in the yard.

I am not embarrassed to admit that I shrieked like a frightened child and flung my hands back, knocking over and breaking a glass that had been sitting on the counter. Shards of glass sprayed my feet. Nemo darted away just in time, and raced to the back door, hissing and spitting. I felt the same way. I pushed him aside, opened the door just a crack, and stepped out.

The mantis traced my path with its huge, soul-sucking eyes as I walked across the lawn. I took the garden hose in my hand and stood a few feet from it, poised and ready to spray. But then a gorgeous hummingbird floated over the neighbor’s fence and into our yard. It lilted across flowers and dove playfully above the grass, then rose up, light catching on its green feathers, making its way to the centermost feeder in my grandmother’s garden.

I screamed out, “NO!” but the bird didn’t hear me, or didn’t care, and made a beeline for the feeder, its wings buzzing with excitement. It didn’t stand a chance. In a matter of seconds the mantis had plucked its slight body from the sky, and crushed the bird’s frail, hollow ribs between its thick green claws.

I couldn’t take the sight of that. I opened the door and released the cat, who went running for the mantis at breakneck speed. With the ferocity of a lion in pursuit of a gazelle, Nemo sprinted across the lawn and darted into the air, swatting and hissing. The mantis flew off its perch, its eyes wide and seemingly terrified, but not without pausing to gobble up the slumped, bleeding body of its latest victim. Then the cat I stood there, staring open-mouthed at the villain as it disappeared across the fence and into nothingness, its deep red eyes never looking away.

Nemo was irritable the whole rest of the day and night. He stalked around the house, mewling and swatting at things that were not there, staring out the windows and crying for me to release him to fulfill his life’s purpose. I offered him food, but he would not take it. At night, I shut the door to my grandmother’s room to block out the sounds of his meowing, put on noise cancelling headphones, and went to sleep.

The next morning all was eerily quiet. As I rose and peeled off my headphones, I detected no meowing, no crickets, and no frogs. There wasn’t even any traffic, and certainly no birdsong. I looked all around the house and could not find Nemo. I went out into the yard and there was no mantis to be seen, which was good, but there was no other life detectable either. No flies or bees. No ants working their way up across the pavement. Even the neighbor’s hound dog was nowhere to be found.

After assessing the yard, I noticed that the bird feeders were missing again. I approached the flower bed and found them, lying smashed in the dirt, the nectar seeping like blood into the grass. My stomach churning with dread, I turned and went back inside.

“Nemo?” I called, but still I heard nothing. I hoped that he’d just tired himself out and found someplace quiet to sleep. Or perhaps he had gotten out somehow, and had terrorized all the creatures in the yard, which would explain why everything was so still and silent. With any luck, he’d launched a surprise attack on the mantis, and would appear at any moment to drop the evil insect’s brutalized body into my slipper.

Trying to distract myself, I opened up the fridge and reached for my eggs…and there he was.

Nemo had been cut open, a jagged, dark bloody line running from his throat all the way down his belly to his rectum. He’d been gutted, too. His organs spilled out onto the shelf of the fridge, and dripped over the edge onto the milk container. Retching, I grabbed the cat’s body and pulled the gaping wound open. Inside, as I suspected, there was the mantis.

A bit of Nemo’s intestine dangled from its mouth, smeared with purple, coagulating blood and flecks of shit. As I drew back, fighting the urge to vomit, the mantis sucked up the rest of the intestines like a noodle into its massive, darkened mouth. It gave a wet, satisfied little swallow and crept, slowly and robotically, over the cat’s body to the edge of the shelf.

I screamed and went to slam the fridge door shut, but it didn’t matter. It was too slow. The mantis flew out, red eyes locked right on mine, sending shivers up my spine and radiating out, into my legs and arms. From its perch in the refrigerator it shot out at me, like a bullet, and planted itself steadily on my arm. I moaned and tried to shake it off, thinking of poor Nemo’s final moments, but it was no use. The mantis dug into my flesh with the sharpened barbs on its hind legs, then scrambled up and around my shoulder, finally settling in place at the back of my neck.

I twitched and tried to slap it away, but it caught my hand in between both of its front claws. It pushed my hand away effortlessly, slicing the flesh open as it struck. I shivered again and nearly fainted at the sight of my own blood. Then I dropped to my knees, sobbing and retching, my head swirling, my body already going cold.

I couldn’t fight it. The same thing that had drawn in the birds and the cat had taken ahold of me. As I felt the mantis’ jaws wrap around my neck and its teeth shred through the flesh and sinew that connected my head to my body, as I let out a scream and plea for help that was cut short as its claws sliced through my windpipe, as I crashed to floor and watched my own blood pour out from my decapitated torso, my very last thought was that all-powerful, all-knowing “it” that was destroying me wasn’t really an “it” at all.

It was a she.

Originally published at erikadprice.tumblr.com.