The Wastepaper Basket

I’m getting used to the taste of ladybugs. They’re not really ladybugs, everyone says, but Asian Lady beetles. It’s the same every summer, when the days get warmer and the bugs appear, a firework of springtime fornication. Every year the beetles multiply, and they do it in our house. It starts in the warmer places— behind our thick yellow curtains, crawling all over the sun soaked glass. You’ll going open those curtains and the noise will overtake you— a buggy, humming, buzzing sound. After that it’s basic addition— beetle meets another beetle and makes baby beetles. Flying polka dots migrate from the windows to the curling, the walls— they fly through the air, grasping at your neck, your legs, bumping into eyelashes, noses, bookshelves, tables, dishes, cups of coffee— they stumble and crawl and keep multiplying. The hum goes on at night— like moths, they swarm to the lamps in my room, buzzing and muttering and whispering to themselves, their oily rings rubbing together over and over— they’re everywhere.

They’re not just breeding, too- it’s a life cycle, and they die. The dead beetles are everywhere. If their crisp bodies aren’t littering the surfaces, they bury themselves alive wherever they can. I’m trying to prevent it— while I write this, two beetles have flown into me for shelter, one going for the neck, the other my feet. I’ve gotten to be an expert at flicking them away, slingshotting their poor buggy bodies to anywhere by my skin. I wish they’d go, but they smell the sweetness on me— passionfruit black tea, lemonade and grenadine, vanilla earl grey and sugary black coffee. I fuel myself like a hummingbird, and they dive into it with an idiotic, spellbound suicidal tendency. I’m paranoid about my drinks, checking three times already to see any beetle movement. I’ve drank enough ladybug bathtubs to leave me permanently anxious. If no one has ever told you, they leave a taste behind— maybe it’s the taste of death. When I’m battling them off, flicking them away, I’ve got to wash my hands. If I don’t, their oily, acidic taste is left on my fingers. Only a brush of a singular wing in my teacup turns it rancid. So I watch carefully to save them the trouble of drowning. Neither of us are happy with the result.

I remember the beetles visiting me on my birthday. When I turned eleven, it wasn’t a very big affair. I remember it rained that morning- Missouri in September is a sheet of rain in my mind. My parents said it was a good day to work on the house– the house where they live now. Same people, different bugs. I thought a birthday was supposed to be some sort of big celebration. Chores should get pushed aside for birthdays– anything un-wonderful on a birthday didn’t make much sense to me. 

They piled all of us into the car– in those days, the fifteen minute drive into the country felt like an hour. The rain dried up, the car parked, and we set to work. 

Dead ladybugs formed a carpet under our feet. It was the first time that their signature scent dug into my memory. From now on, whenever I think of a Missouri summer, I think about the carpet of bugs. We scraped and swept, but it felt useless- their colonies flocked and swarmed still in the windows, their urine dotting the glass in brown freckles, layer after layer.

I think I cried a little. I also got a butterfly necklace. Pink rhinestones in a velvet box. I have the picture of that moment- on a night before, or after wednesday night church. My few minutes of fame, where I knew the camera as on me, knew my family was around me, that this moment was mine. I don’t have it anymore, the pink velvet box or the necklace– what I have now are the memories of things. The smells- the crunch. The idea that maybe I was not as wonderful as I had thought before. 

The thing is- those ladybugs didn’t know it was my birthday either. Summer was ending, and their lives soon would too. Maybe they knew that my mother would come in with orange oil, spearmint and clove, and the terrifying big nosed vacuum.