September 9, 2024

Parasite

By L. Acadia
Photo by Владимир Кондратьев on Pexels.com

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.

About the Author

L. AcadiaL. Acadia is a visiting professor at Heidelberg University, an assistant professor at National Taiwan University, Taiwan Literature Base  2024–2025 Writer-in-Residence, and best-of-the-net-nominated member of the Taipei Poetry Collective. She has published in New Flash Fiction Review, New Orleans Review, Strange Horizons, trampset, and elsewhere. Connect on Twitter and Instagram @acadialogue

Related Flash
selective focus photography of yellow petaled flowers

The Foal

By Lorette C. Luzajic

“I did everything they told me, but still, I got smaller. And everything hurt, even the sunlight on my skin. I didn’t tell anyone what was going on in inside of me, how lonely it felt to know you were going to die when you were just a colt yourself.”
Revolver against a red background

When Are You Going To Land

By Michael Tyler

“She used to skinny dip in the ocean, her swimsuit at water’s edge. I would keep my shorts on and earn her daily jibes.”

graveyard on forest covered with grasses

Again Oblivion

By Nan Wigington

“History vanishes beneath our mausoleum’s gray rubble, the wedges of marble. No one knows anymore when Aunt Lydia was born, who primogenitor married, when Baby Thomas died.”

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This