Lovebugs

TW: Sexual Violence, Disturbing Themes

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The air was heavy, charged with some esoteric and invisible force. Twin beams of light lanced the night like harpoons gouging the hide of an impossibly huge whale. Cold sweat and shaky hands. A man on the run.

But running toward his destiny or away from it, he did not know. The car was a time capsule, a pocket of present; and as long as he kept driving, he didn’t have to face the past or worry about the future.

Off-white stains flecked with black bloomed on the windshield intermittently as they drove.

“Fuckin’ lovebugs...”

Silence was the third occupant. The woman was a woman only in the loosest interpretation of the word, her world still small and her memories fresh. The stale smoke from her Virginia Slims still lingered in the fibers of the strappy black dress she purchased just days ago. The makeup she so painstakingly applied hours before now faded and receded by sweat. Her head seemed locked on the void outside the window.

The void was illusory though, for it was teeming with life... and rife with death. A black and green labyrinth filled with creatures that had outlived the dinosaurs. Reptiles from exotic locales staked their claims in a swamp far from their natural home; conquistadors of a new species and millennium.

“It seems like there used to be more of them... Lovebugs... You know, when I was a kid, I thought they were engineered in a lab at UF. Everybody thought that back then.” said the man.

Silence spoke; from the girl, not a word, not a breath.

“Of course, now I know the real story. Isn’t that strange? You probably don’t even notice it... Nah, too young. But I do. We live in an age of instant clarity, but I remember a time when what you knew was what you knew. Life wasn’t an open-book test.”

He drove on into the twisting dark as if the road spanned not just space but time as well. The road itself was the only relic of the present; surrounded by a primordial swamp. Outside, it could have been the Cretaceous period.

“They’re hell on the paintjob, but I’ve always thought they were kind of sweet, you know? Lovers bonded for life. You ever see when just one of them die?... The way they keep flying with their dead love until they die too? It’s like goddamn Shakespeare.”

Her shoulder was cold, her eyes fixed. Whatever future paths or final destinations, permutations of luck and will; her fate was now lashed to this car, to this road... to this man. She should have been in school, not some neon-lit honkytonk in the middle of a swamp barely tamed by human hands.

“I’m sorry I’m not much of a romantic, baby doll...,” said the man. His hand traced the familiar hemline of her dress before roughly squeezing her milky-white thigh.

“Truth is, I’m all thumbs when it comes to this sort of thing.... You know what I think? Lovebugs are lovebugs. And people are people. Lovebugs may be destined to find their special someone, but people? I don’t think we’re that lucky”

Crickets peacocked for their nocturnal paramours, playing their bodies like musical instruments. Frogs sang love songs in the fractured moonlight. The world around them was alive, but the cabin of the car was a mausoleum.

“I appreciate you talking to me at the bar... I never would have approached you on my own, you know. You might find this hard to believe, but I’m a shy guy. You were just so pretty .... So, so pretty...”

“I wish I was the type of man you were looking for... A good man. Someone that would be able to take care of you... I am not that man...”

“I think it’s a problem of confidence. I never had any coming up. By the time I started feeling good about myself, I think I was too bitter to put it to any good use. In the meantime, I used chemicals to balance my social deficit. Alcohol freed a side of me I didn’t know existed. Over the years, I experimented with other lubricants as well... I got a buddy that’s a horse doctor.”

“Dosing myself was one thing, but the real breakthrough came when that gal took my drink by mistake... Her name was Christine... I had never, you know....”

“God, why am I telling you this? But you’ll never tell, will you?”

The windshield was ground zero for a genocide of lovebugs. The wipers scraped helplessly at the sticky mess of tiny black and red carapaces. They had grown more prolific in the ebony sky as the man drove ever deeper into the labyrinthine darkness.

“Well goddamn now these lovebugs want to turn me into a liar. Fuck ‘em is what I say... And fuck love too. Sorry to break it to you, sweet thing, but it wasn’t your hopes and dreams that got my blood pumping...”

The man found his destination in the gloomy mire, guided by instinct or devil. He hefted the husk of girl onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. His free hand probed with lascivious intent. The warmth had not yet fully faded from her body.

She had been so preoccupied with the predators that lurked in the dark edges outside of that honkytonk; she was oblivious to the one that had been inside. She would be forgiven for reading sadness in those glassy doll eyes. His expression would almost have looked pensive. But he was no tortured artist, no somber soul. He was a torturer of art; the soulless shape of a man.

She should have taken her chances with the vipers. His venom was pharmaceutical, his intent libidinous. Her neck bore cruel mementos to his twisted passion; fermented resentment fueled by psychoactive alchemies.

His footfalls were slow, sinking deeper with each stride. He felt not just her weight, but something more intangible. Something that dragged not on his body, but on a hollow where his soul should be. It was not guilt that he felt. Does the windshield feel guilt for the lovebugs? But something weighed him down... the shackles of his hateful worldview, the chains of resentment. He had no strength left to bear the weight of love; not after carrying so much hate in the hollow where his heart should have been.

But as his path grew more taxing, his thoughts quieted. Blood filled his loins under the added resistance. His rage subsided, replaced by baser instincts. Her skin felt like porcelain in his hands. The clouds overhead shifted, and a sliver of moonlight cut through the darkness, illuminating the path ahead.

“It’s this goddamn consciousness.... That’s what got us all messed up. That’s what separates us from the lovebugs, sweet thing.... Consciousness....”

Finding it difficult to talk while carrying her and wishing to gaze upon her beauty before the insects laid claim to her body; the man found a tree sufficiently large to prop her up against.

“Sometimes, I wish I could turn it off, you know? No thoughts... Just being...”

He could almost convince himself he saw a glimmer of recognition in those eternally gazing eyes. As if she possessed some forbidden wisdom reserved for those who have pierced the veil between this world and the next. Like her soul still lingered in a state not unlike the one he so desperately sought.

Shadows danced across her face belying movement in her frozen physique. Besides the marks on her neck, it was only her eyes that bore evidence of his crime. Fine red capillaries bled into her sclera, tainting them pink; taunting him with their femininity. She was still warm in her core, still flexible. Was it thought or instinct that drove him now? That moved his hands to the straps of her dress? To the steadily cooling skin beneath?

In a dark corner of the Everglades, the reptiles watched a man lose what was left of his soul, exchanged for carnal pleasures of unspeakable morbidity.

His grievances were innumerable; the world was his tormentor. And he redressed those grievances on her body. When his sick deed was done and the demons were temporarily appeased, the horror of this most recent atrocity struck him. What kind of creature was he now? Even lower than the snakes and the salamanders that dragged their bellies in the muck. No better than the insects that would soon invade her body, touching her, tasting her, knowing her in ways they had no right to know.

Suddenly self-aware, he scrambled to his feet, only to stumble and collapse under the weight of his victim. He pressed and wriggled, but she clung to him still, still attached, still squeezing.

She was locking up, becoming a rigid, intractable thing, pressing him into the mud. He wrestled with the mannequin she had become until they were upright, though rigor mortis made their disentanglement impossible. He strained and pulled and hefted her weight, but her thighs would not budge, and her arms held him tight.

A shadow loomed overhead, faintly whispering with the flutter of thousands of tiny black wings. The swarm was drawn to his abominable act; drawn to the heat and the stink and the hate of it. Not drawn to love like their name would suggest. Love couldn’t live in this place, only lust. A lust that dehumanizes the object and subject alike. They descended on the intertwined bodies en masse, covering them like a blanket; shielding the world from their sight.

In minutes, they were legion, filling every square millimeter of available space. They filled his ear canals, drowning out the sound of the swamp. They covered his eyes, causing him to flee in blind terror; his victim still clenched to his body, her death grip now icy and rough. He screamed in frustration, but a black and red funnel filled his throat and clogged his lungs. Tens of thousands of tiny kamikazes sacrificed themselves. They took him by numbers alone.

They guided his movements subtly; step by tortuous step. What force guided them, they did not know. Was it instinct that drove them? Some scent of desperation and death? Some subtle signal too quiet for the conscious mind to register? Or were they the arbiters of vengeance for the god of love itself? A god who he had affronted with his unspeakably evil acts.

Whatever guided the swarm, their destination was clear. The clouds made room for the moon to light the path back. Back to civilization. Back to modernity. Back to humanity, as if this man deserved to be amongst their ranks.

If they hadn’t been in his ears, he would have heard the engine. It was the only sound other than the swamp. If they hadn’t been in his eyes, he would have seen the light. The high beams had been on for miles. He still screamed when the truck hit their bodies, but the sound was wet and alien, choked by sticky black bodies.

The lovebugs held fast to the coupling of the damned, for the windshield had always been their fate.