One crispy praying mantis lay on the hot concrete near the back door. All curled up and shrivelly. All dead too. Or obscenely good at playing dead. No, it was dead-dead.
You could dismiss it, Lex supposed, saying, “Karma, baby! That’s what you get for chomping off the head of your sex partner.1” Lex had some relationship issues he was still working through, maybe not quite as thoroughly as he should.
Or you could call a dead mantis “poetic” since, in the Egyptian book of the dead, the praying mantis acted as an usher to the underworld. The welcome committee to the afterlife.
Or maybe you just wonder how the strange alien-esque bug up and died right there. Was it old age? Did it get poisoned by the insect sprayer guy? Did it have a heart attack? Was it too hot outside and it suffered from fatal heat stroke? Or did it suffer like one of those Teen Girls Who Couldn’t Even—"OMG, Meghan, seeing Taylor in concert was amazing. I died!”
One dead mantis. Cause of death: unknown. So far.
Lex made his way down the driveway. No more than 10 feet away from the first, just behind his car, was a second dead praying mantis.
That? That’s a pattern. An omen. Biblical stuff. Panic in the streets.
Two dead manti2. Cause of death: End Times Stuff.
Lex was running late, though. He got in his Nissan Sentra and backed out, careful not to run over the creepy usher to the underworld on his way to the 6:35 showing of Expend4bles. He liked Stallone enough, but it was the ultra-buttered popcorn that he was really looking forward to.
Returning home, in the dark of the driveway, he went inside the house, some corn kernels still lodged in the crevices between his teeth and so he didn’t notice that both the dead mantises were no longer there. Whether they’d been eaten by a starving stray feline or blown away onto the neighbor’s grass by a gale or tractor-beamed back to their alien mothership by their cosmic family, they were gone.
Still gone the next day too, as happens with things that are gone. He didn’t notice then either.
A week passed. Lex forgot the praying mantises altogether. The weather turned with the leaves on the trees. Cold snuck in.
In the afternoon, Lex pulled his Nissan Sentra into the driveway only to see, in his peripheral vision, what looked like a slender fallen leaf but turned out to be a third praying mantis. Also dead.
He paused.
Stared. Squinted. Considered. Stared some more. Winced.
Looked away. Hands to hips. Up the street. Down the street. Back at the mantis, still there. Winced again. Sighed.
This categorically eliminated “heat” from the “cause of death” of the first two, that’s for sure.
Wikipedia had nothing about “praying mantis apocalypse.” Google showed no results for “praying mantis mass death” or “praying mantis death cult” or even “do driveways kill praying mantises?” Ha. The Google animation was funny today, though.
What could it all mean?
Who has ever seen three praying mantises dead on the same driveway? It couldn’t just be a coincidence. In the movies and books, things happened in threes. It was symbolic. It had to mean something. Foretell. Forebode.
And why Lex, of all people? Was this a coded message? A spiritual wake-up call? A foreshock of impending doom?
Lex wasn’t perfect. He had trouble with the truth, sometimes. Little white lies mostly, with the occasional little black lie. He had a potty mouth, too, which was a source of shame for him, having grown up in a strict evangelical home where his brother would read from the family Bible and, instead of saying the actual word as printed, say “H-E-double-hockey sticks” and smile at smiling Mother. Maybe this was a precursor to the wrath of judgement. Maybe God was trying to tell him something, to get through his preternaturally thick skull.
He squeezed his eyes closed. ”I won’t say that f-word no more,” he said to himself, and also to the sky and Whoever might be listening in, if Someone was indeed listening in. “Or the b-word.” He wouldn’t swear off the h-word, though. Too much multi-faceted utility.
Opening his eyes again, he half-expected the third mantis to be gone, poofed away—like the first two. Carried off to wherever, on the momentum of Lex’s promise.
It was still there. Had it grown?
It had not grown. Had it moved?
No, the bug remained in exactly the same mantis-y position as before, hunched, wild with angles, sickly green.
The same mantis. Still dead. Still a question mark dotting his driveway.
A dog barked down the street. Lex’s stomach growled. He wondered why Arnold Schwarzenegger had opted out of Expend4ables. Maybe Stallone is difficult. Lex remembered he’d left his 44-ounce Mountain Dew in the car. He began to salivate Pavlovianally in anticipation of getting his Dew out of the cupholder. He clicked the key fob. It chirped. He….
PRAY-ING! MAN-TIS! (clap, clap, clap-clap-clap)
Praying mantis!
Prayer!
Pray!
What else could it possibly be?
Of course. It had to be. Easy fix.
Car door still ajar, sitting down in the driver’s seat, he immediately bowed his head, folded his arms reverently, closed his eyes. Then opened them again, unable to resist reaching for the 44-ounce styrofoam cup and taking a grand swig from the turtle-murdering straw, feeling the cold on his teeth and the carbonated bite in his throat. Could there be a better drink in the world than Mountain Dew? Not likely. It was…
Oh, prayer, right.
He bowed his head again. Folded his arms. Closed his eyes. All quicker this time. Smash cuts.
He couldn’t think of the last time he’d prayed.
Via The Guardian:
When the female praying mantis is mating, she does not bite the head off the male with one swift snip: she chomps into it, like an apple. It appears to have the texture of a honeydew melon.
But it gets better, distilling down males of any species with brutal truth:
Her mate has tried to avoid this destiny. The male European mantis “uses his feelers to calm her down”, the BBC narrates. But it is already too late. Although chemicals in his brain have told him to stay away from her, the chemicals in his abdomen were more potent.
“The chemicals in his abdomen were more potent” is incredible.
Not the proper plural.
Fun