#a77 :: Dying beetle

What possesses us?

We crawl to and fro on a world so vast we can’t understand it, pilule let alone navigate it. We consume, dosage we procreate, ask we fight, we recover.

If we’re fortunate, we create something useful – food, tools, homes, art, information. Then, whatever it was that propelled us around all those years deserts us – or is booted roughly from the meat vehicle in which it rode – by famine, disease, war, madness, neglect or simply age.I spotted this creature on the front steps around lunchtime. Hunh, I thought. Dead bug.

When I returned this evening, it was still there. Might as well shoot it. Miniaturized exoskeletons are quite wonderful.

And as I scoop it up, it twitches, then begins flailing its legs pitiably. I try setting it upright, but something’s wrong with its wiring – the legs go in all directions, but not the one that would flip it over. It reaches, strains, thrashes at the air, but not at the ground around it.

I carry it inside to the light table – black on black won’t photograph well enough – and start shooting. It stops moving.

Dead? I touch it. It struggles. Nope.

Hours later, I come back. Its legs are curled. I take another photo, and the lens brushes it. It moves.

A spirit so small clings to the only place it can exist, a tiny, broken carriage of nerves and chitin and goo.

How deep is its self-awareness, as it waits for the end? How deep is mine?

Waiting to see what happens next.

Footnote: The next morning, whatever was inside it seems to have gone. It’s now a dead bug. No, wait, it just twitched and wriggled and thrashed again. I put it in the shrubbery – it deserves to pass in its true home, not splayed atop some vast, flickering fluorescent plain of plastic.