Parasite

Watch her three-legged coil and pounce. Freeze. Her shake, flicking pendulant hound ears zinging into eyes blinded by kill drive, tells me she’s caught a bug—or to Milou, BUG! A neon lime flash between her chestnut and grey flews indicates a mantis she would (probably) relinquish if asked, were my thinly-soled foot willing to stomp its suffering. Instead, I shudder through her neck-snapping jerk. Chomp. Convulsive shiver against strange taste.

I watch a soul leave the fresh insect corpse in an unfurling black twitch, stiff like coarse hair slowly twisted from both ends. It is constrained until it flaps free of the mantis, shiny segments recoiling. Gathering. Seeking.

Milou curiously noses forward. I stop her, not yet aware it is Chordodes formosanus, which adopt only mantis hosts, whose nervous systems their psychotropic protein secretions control. The parasites pilot the insect to a final, fatal dive into fresh water to disgorge itself for aquatic dioecious reproduction and sacrifice its host, although mantis can swim.      

When I die, what will twist out of me? Shame, ambition, capitalist greed, puritan guilt, my parents’ dreams, my exes’ criticisms, algebraic equations, “Erlkönig” among other memorized poems, my great-aunt Bee’s crêpe recipe, aichmophobia, fantasies so repressed my living self has forgotten, earworms, bias, and patriarchy?

The river ebbs a few human steps away, across a field I now imagine springs with healthy mantis.