"Fly Away Home"
A Small & Scary Story
“Where’s the first aid kit?”
Under any other circumstances, that’s not a phrase you want to hear on a Sunday afternoon. In most households, the response to “why do you need a first aid kit?” ranges from “I was out getting in 20 miles on my bike and I hit a speedbump while going down a hill” to “I was juggling the bagel slicer with my dick” to “goddamn Dallas Cowboys!” Our household, though, wasn’t “most,” and Ken had come back inside. From the garden. Whoo boy, the garden.
“It’s in the kitchen, by the stove.” It made sense. The way I cut, burned, sliced, and mandolined myself when fixing anything more complex than a packet of ramen, you’d think I was a soux-chef for Erzabet Bathory. “Do you need help?”
The silence told me everything. Ken usually bragged about his garden injuries, especially his battles with nearly-successful tree roots and the occasional wasp sting. I came out of the bedroom and down the hall to find him at the counter, flipping one-handed through the selection of bandages in the big “All-Emergency” kit. He wasn’t getting one of the big gauze rolls, the tourniquet was still in its plastic wrap, and he hadn’t turned on the stove to cauterize the wound, so we were coming up ahead.
“Yeah, a little.” Ken grinned at me, with that chagrined “Oh, we’re going to laugh about this in twenty years” expression that summed up so many of his gardening adventures. “It’s kinda hard to tape up gauze with one hand.”
He stuck out his middle finger, not out of an expression of his feelings for our marriage but to share the damage. Compared to what could have happened, the wound was not that big. A small divot was missing from the end of his saluting finger, about the size of a ball bearing, and as soon as he released pressure, blood started welling up again. Time for Nurse Stacy to assist and make it all better.
After having Ken wash and dry his mortal wound in the sink, I picked through the first aid kit, noting that it may be time to restock this one or get a new one, and got out a patch of gauze and a roll of bandage tape. While I was never going to get an MD, I could manage well enough. Gauze folded over twice, more pressure applied while I whipped the tape roll around the offended digit, and he was good as new. We both stopped to take a look and approved the task, and signed off on it.
A spot of blood, about the size of the wound, popped up on the gauze. Well, it wasn’t dripping, so we’d keep an eye on it.
I looked at my husband, hoping for a really good story. If you get a good wound, you should have a good story. That Sunday was too good a Sunday to be spent in an ER, particularly for stupid human tricks. “So what happened?”
“Well, I was in the garden…”
Oh, here we go. I loved Ken with the fire of a million suns, and with one exception, he was perfect. Blond hair, sunny disposition, the patience of Job, steady employment, no interest in kicking kids or small animals, no waking up at 3 ayem to find him burying carpet-wrapped parcels in the back yard, saying “please” and “thank you” and “that mistake was on me” to waitresses and customer service reps…with one exception, he was absolutely perfect.
But.
Every relationship has one big issue, a point of contention that either calcified over and turned into a pearl or burst forth as an abscess. It could be shopping or cars or football or barbecuing. For us, it was the garden. Ken wasn’t just a typical gardener, hyperfocused on growing tomatoes the size of Oklahoma and pumpkins big enough to sublease to small families of 37. No, he was an organic gardener, with all the insanity that brought out.
For the record, my husband wasn’t stupid. Anything but. On any other subject, he rarely expressed an opinion that wasn’t carefully researched, cited at least four references, and came with formal written apologies if he was informed that his citations were obsolete or retracted. On the subject of organic gardening, though, he was like a 10-year-old watching television ads for a toy that he KNEW could fill the vast aching abyss in his little boy heart and that you KNEW would break three seconds after getting it out of the box. Every November, he looked over the dead expanse of growing area and took notes in a spiral notebook on what was going to be different next spring. Every February, he already had every last millimeter of growing area mapped out and planned for tomatoes, peppers, squash, radishes, cool-weather and warm-weather leafy vegetables, and a gigantic plot for sweet potatoes. To be fair, the sweet potatoes were for me: Ken couldn’t stand them, but knew how much I loved baked sweet potatoes in winter, so he carefully harvested and cured them every year just to keep me from having to buy the pithy ones from the grocery store. And all between that, he waged war on every potential pest that threatened to take away the garden’s bounty.
But.
I had a history professor who argued that magic may have started in humanity’s hunter-gatherer days, but it reached its present high popularity when we gave up wandering after herds of mammoths and settled down for a life more stable. Well, that’s what those first farmers told themselves. Flood, drought, hailstorms, grasshoppers, blights, fungus, parasites, birds and rodents, the occasional bear or bull…and that’s before gathering, drying, and storing what little you got. There were probably a lot of Mesolithic farmers who looked out after a day of cutting grain with a sickle sharpened with flint chips, gazed over the portions of their fields they couldn’t reach that day because harvest day was only twelve hours long, saw storm clouds on the horizon, and really got nostalgic for the days of being trampled by mastodons or bitten by cave bears. Even today, with all of the technological advances to minimize crop losses and gauge impending weather trends, you still have farmers who lunge at each year’s Farmer’s Almanac like an office drone lunging at their daily horoscope. At this point, it’s baked in, and so many tillers of the soil have switched affiliations from Tlaloc and Ceres but still go through the same rituals, the same prayers, and the same sacrifices. Just tell me that most Nebraska corn farmers wouldn’t clonk their firstborn in the head and bury them in a bog for a good year’s crop that might get them out of perpetual debt, if only they could find a bog.
Ken, love him, was a different breed. He was an organic gardener. He wasn’t one of those “food not lawns” fanatics who cosplay at being farmers, but someone who looked at fertilizers and pesticides as somehow cheating. Fair enough, but he also jumped on any glint of a device or a technique that could fend off the squirrels and snails and Canada geese, amp up the nitrogen levels in our admittedly crap back yard soil and boost the next soil analysis from “sure hope you like making flowerpots, because that’s all this is good for” to “could grow hair on a bald man’s head,” and encourage tomatoes to give more than a handful of misshapen fruit half-devoured by hornworms. He went through garden catalogs and review sites and Reddit forums looking for shortcuts the way other people tried to square the circle or prove The Last Jedi was a financial failure, and after a few years, my only request was that Ken didn’t spend all of the kids’ college funds, if and when we had kids, on specialty tools and treatments.
Again, it’s a good thing he’s cute.
Again, to be fair, it could have been worse. I actually took a couple of elective courses in horticulture back in college, so I could argue from a reasonably informed background on the realities of integrated pest management and soil augmentation. This meant that when Ken went to local garden club meetings, I stayed home if I didn’t want to be “that spouse.” It really came out when one of his fellow club members regaled everyone with how, after he saw a handful of ants at the end of his driveway, he was going to have a pest-free yard by building a big berm around his property, planting $2000 of Venus flytraps all over the berm, and watch from his porch as every insect in the time zone obligingly hopped into the flytraps’ traps. By the time I noted (a) Venus flytraps don’t catch insects too big or too small for their traps, (b) a lot of insects going for his yard had no interest in a flytrap’s alluring nectar, (c] our local soil was all wrong for growing flytraps or indeed any other carnivorous plant, and (d) flytraps needed water close to distilled for their survival, our municipal water was best described as “crunchy,” and watering flytraps with our local water was a step up from spraying them with napalm and Agent Orange, our genius was sticking his fingers in his ears and screaming, other members of the garden club were crying (they were hoping that the berm trick would work), and we had our first big fight in four years of marriage. Well, second: Berm Guy called me a bitch and I decked him. After that, we both conceded that I was now about as popular as a GG Allin impersonator at a proctologist convention and let him go to Garden Club by himself.
Ken was more than just cute. He was the only guy I knew who looked good in cargo shorts, which was a reason I put up with the garden. Hell, he’d have looked good in a Utilikilt. Some weekends after he finished mowing, I was amazed we didn’t have fourteen kids already.
Anyway, back to the core sample taken from Ken’s finger. We return to our program, already in progress.
“…I was in the garden, checking on the ladybugs…”
Oh, Elvis help me, there we go. I forcibly kept my eyes from rolling so far in my head I could drop my pants and look out my own anus. The goddamn ladybugs. We kept peace during garden season by my not ragging on him too badly about the things that were “great for the garden.” Coffee grounds are NOT good for the garden, at least if you want to do something other than feed the local worms: caffeine may be great for us, but it inhibits seed germination, and can remain in the soil for up to five years. Black Leaf 40 was a completely organic pesticide that didn’t contaminate root crops: it was also nearly pure nicotine sulfate, so toxic that it was finally banned for use in the US because it was used by half-assed contract killers as a contact poison. If you want biological controls on garden pests, don’t bother with praying mantis egg cases, but instead encourage wasps. And ladybugs…well.
Every garden center in spring, especially the ones selling to organic or organic-enough gardeners, has big containers for sale full of hundreds of ladybugs. The logic is “Hey, ladybugs eat aphids, so let loose lots of ladybugs and they’ll eat all of your aphids!” Well, they might, but then they run out of food and fly off looking for new food sources. If the aphid population crashes before the ladybug larvae metamorphose into adult beetles, they starve to death if they can’t find anything else to eat, usually pollen and other things. Either way, with the ladybugs gone, the aphids come back, and without anything else to attract a ladybug return, you have as much of a problem as before. For $10, you’ve not only watched your money literally fly away, but those harvested ladybugs introduce parasites and diseases to your indigenous population. And that’s not counting that all ladybugs aren’t created equal, either. The Asian ladybug is a nasty little invasive spreading through the US in a misguided attempt to do for North America what the cane toad did for Australia: Asian ladybugs were bigger and presumably cuter, but they ate the larvae of indigenous beetles, tended to augment their diets by gnawing on fruits such as grapes and raspberries, and bit the hell out of kids who picked them up.
“…and one of the little bastards bit me!”
That woke me right up. “BIT you?”
“Yeah. Landed on my hand and bit me.”
Ken wouldn’t have joked about this, even in the slightest. Other guys might have claimed something weird like that to save face on doing something dumb with the nail gun or angle grinder, but not Ken. If he told me that he came across a sasquatch table dancing on the patio to Sisters of Mercy’s “This Corrosion” and waggling its nuts to every “Hey now, hey now now,” I’d just follow him outside with a baseball bat selected solely for a Bigfoot scrotum going into the stands off center field. If a bug bit my sweetie, not only would I take that at face value, but I wanted to see it myself.
I must have scared Ken with my intensity, or he really wanted to prove that he wasn’t imagining things. Either way, one “Show me,” and he grabbed my hand to take me out back.
We lived in a typical tract house in a typical suburb, an older suburb so we had bigger trees but not so old that 300 pounds of silverleaf maple branch came down on the roof during thunderstorms. I wanted a house reasonably close by to work, back in the days before “return to office” was a justified profanity, so I wouldn’t be stuck in traffic any longer than humanly necessary. Ken wanted a house reasonably close to the local arboretum. Considering that his especial career aptitude was with entertainment law, he couldn’t justify getting a job at the arboretum, and he couldn’t bear to take a volunteer space away from so many kids fresh out of high school and college who really wanted to grub about in the dirt all day, so he made his own satellite garden, occasionally showing it off to friends, cohorts, and those very same volunteers. I hadn’t been in the back for a couple of weeks, and the scents and colors smacked me in the head as I stepped out onto our back patio. You know, I thought, this would be a great place to renew our wedding vows. AND raise fourteen kids by next Tuesday.
Ken took my hand again once I stopped reeling and led me along a small footpath, lined with hand-crushed and hand-tumbled bottle glass, all scavenged from his and my office parties. Big dragonflies buzzed past my ear, and bumblebees rooted around in squash blooms. The only thing off, barely noticeable, was the lack of birds, or even the lizards that usually greeted me with crushed-ruby dewlaps to tell me “This place is MINE.” The world belonged to the arthropods, and we were just tourists.
At the end of the footpath, along the yard’s back fence, were several large blueberry bushes. “Pink Lemonade,” the garden catalog cheerfully labeled them, and the solar yellow plastic tags around the base were still attached. It was too early for fruit, but the leaves were full and green, and pink-white blooms all over the bushes were attracting their fair share of honeybees. Ken led me up to one and pointed, and I leaned in, attempting not to aspirate any bees while doing so, and saw one of his ladybugs.
Whatever this was, it wasn’t any ladybug I’d ever seen. It didn’t have the red-orange wing covers (“elytra,” a voice from college told me, and I was amazed that I still retained that fact) of native ladybugs, but it wasn’t the yellowish of Asian ladybugs, either. This one had elytra the color of old blood, with more black spots than I’d ever seen on a ladybug. The blueberry branch shifted in a breeze, and I could have sworn that the spots suddenly flared in the change of light, like flashing a black light in a nightclub. It was larger than an Asian ladybug, but not too much larger, but I could swear it was looking at me with an air of detached curiosity. I’d watched kittens following chickens with the same vibe: “You’re too big for me. Right now.”
I looked over at Ken, who was entranced by something else on the next blueberry bush. “Is this it?”, I half-whispered, suddenly not wanting the ladybug to get too interested in me. Ken didn’t say anything, but pulled a branch out of the way so I could see. I looked over his shoulder and saw a critter.
Superficially, it looked like a typical ladybug larva. Like other beetles, ladybugs go through a complete metamorphosis from larva to pupa to adult, with the larvae looking nothing like the final form. It was the typical shape of the ones I found in my grandmother’s back yard when I was a kid: a slightly flattened cone, with crinkled segments and two big eyes and mouthparts coming from the base of the cone. It was the typical color: black with orange-red highlights on the crinkles. This one, was easily two or three times the size of a typical ladybug larva: this one was the size of my thumbnail, and its six legs were the only way I was sure I was looking at an insect instead of a lizard. The rear pair seemed to be oversized, but I wasn’t sure why that mattered. It was slowly climbing down the stem to the base of the blueberry bush, not caring in the slightest about our presence.
We were so busy staring at the larva that Ken’s jump and exclamation was a surprise to us both. He jumped back, reaching down to slap at his ankles. He refused to wear flipflops in the garden (“I don’t want to lose a toe if I have to run power tools out back”), and his formerly white tennis shoes, now well-stained from grass and dirt, had little flecks of fresh blood from where he’d slapped his ankles. He pulled his hand away, and he had multiple pecks of blood just above the shoe tongue, just like the one on his finger.
As he hopped back, he and I both looked where he had just stood. We weren’t the only vertebrates in the back yard, but we were the only ones moving. The other had once been a rabbit, with only its eyeless head recognizable as such. The body was roiling with ladybugs, with larvae crawling over for a taste. Some of them changed course and started moving toward us.
That’s when something landed on the back of my neck, just below my ponytail, and took a chunk.
I responded the way any one would. I reached up, smacked it hard, and grabbed it to see what had done this. My hand came back smeared with blood and mashed bug, with just enough to recognize one of the ladybug larvae. Those strange hind legs were now unfolded, looking like a grasshopper’s.
I admit that I was too freaked out to scream, and I thanked Ken profusely after he half-dragged me to the patio door and shoved me inside. He said nothing, but led me to the first aid kit and he reciprocated the whole procedure I had done for him not five minutes earlier. Hissing through his teeth told me all I wanted to know before he finished with the tape and looked back out through the sliding glass door.
“Okay, WHAT THE HELL?” We were in stereo.
My turn. “What the hell happened? Are those your ladybugs?”
Him. “Yeah, but…but they weren’t biting before. I put them out in the yard myself.”
Me. “Where the hell did you get them?”
“One of the volunteers at the arboretum gave me a pack. They’re doing plant trials for new varieties, and they were trying new biological controls for aphids. They wanted to know how these did over here.”
“Do you know anything else about them?”
“They’re supposed to be bred not to want to fly off.”
“Which means…?” My eyebrows were so raised that they almost detached and buried themselves in the ceiling.
Ken went pale. “They go after other food.”
I must have gone pale at the same time. “Pollen. Or something.”
That’s right about when we started hearing the screaming, from the general vicinity of the arboretum. We rushed about to close windows, just in time to find ladybugs landing on the screens and chewing holes to get inside. The general cacophony from the arboretum cut off, only to be replaced by closer screams from neighbors who had been mowing lawns and weeding flower beds. One last look at the patio door, and larvae were crawling slowly on the glass, with the adults slowly but methodically gnawing through the weatherstripping. We didn’t need to look for the ones doing the same with the windows, or the ones gnawing through the duct tape sealing the air conditioning vents, but we could hear them.
This was part of the Small & Scary/Big & Beastly collection. Go give the other entries a read: you should be delightfully surprised.
- Paul Riddell hosts the Annals of St. Remedius Medical College, an ongoing serial about the famed exonormal investigative institution that disappeared under mysterious circumstances from near downtown Dallas, Texas. “Fly Away Home” is Paul Riddell’s first piece of published fiction, but used to be well-known for commentary and essays in a large array of now-obscure science fiction magazines and weekly newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s. Paul Riddell has been interviewed in multiple print, online, and television venues, including appearing on the front page of the business section of the Dallas Morning News in 1995. Paul Riddell has an FBI record from allegedly selling government secrets to the Daleks. Paul Riddell was a zombie extra in George Romero’s Day of the Dead, and can be seen eating guts in at least two scenes. Paul Riddell took a 20-year break from writing to run a carnivorous plant gallery thanks to Jeff VanderMeer, and proudly displayed a poster for the movie adaptation of Annihilation in the gallery in tribute. Paul Riddell has a singular superpower of accidentally scaring the hell out of his childhood heroes, including Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Harlan Ellison, and Ray Harryhausen, and Johnny Rotten once nearly jumped through a plate glass window in response to an offered handshake. One of these facts is a lie.
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.