Insect Justification

SJ, Guest Writer

My mother says she doesn’t want bugs in our freezer. I tell her, “Only the Banasa calva is a bug; the rest are hymenoptera and coleoptera.”

She gives me that look that says it’s not the right time to be a pendant. She knows there’s something up with me, with my obsessions and tirades and late nights spent researching. She doesn’t make me take the insects out—I’d just find a worse way to store my collections. She only tells me not to let them get in the riced cauliflower. The cold paralyzes them, and they go dormant before dying, so I don’t think her vegetables are in much danger.

Nothing’s in much danger from them. I picked them all up with my fingers, looking over their exoskeletons, testing each hair-fine leg. Ever-careful not to bend an antenna or fold a wing the wrong way. As I ease them into the kill jar, I note how the setae brush against the plastic lid and how the eyes seem to go blank. Maybe those eyes have always been blank, lifeless as the flies belly-up on the windowsill.

I leave them in the freezer for longer than I’m supposed to—I’m always hesitant to touch their cold bodies, in case I snap them into chips of ice.

When I get out my pinning supplies--a cardboard fruit carton, a napkin, sewing pins, forceps, and fancy entomology pins--the kitchen becomes a laboratory in the back of a museum. Once the specimen is thawed and rehydrated, I cradle it in fabric while I pierce the thorax, careful to line the pin up perpendicular to the midline. That’s the hardest part. Then the legs get positioned, the antennae propped up, and the wings spread out. Like tissue paper, the damp inner wings rip at the lightest touch. I leave the body to dry and harden in the cool shade where nobody will scream when they see it. Then it gets placed next to the rows of brown marmorated stink bugs I practice on, or, if it’s a special one, with the wasps I risked my fingers to catch.

All my specimens are ugly. Most are invasives, because I don’t feel as bad about capturing those. The others are ants, wasps, moths, and beetles, which nobody wants to see in their house, let alone in their freezer. In the darkness of the freezer, in the shelter of the kill jar, they are not seen. Maybe creatures like these are not meant to be seen--their mottled shells speak of generations spent hiding. As a display case, I use stained foam that was used to house plastic test tubes and has a bite mark in one corner. It’s a fitting frame for my botched pinning, the torn wings, and broken legs. When people hear of my collection, their intrigue is dismissed by a photo of the ordinary, depressed specimens. It’s been suggested that I make art from them, but I’d rather be a lame amateur entomologist than a creep. All artists are creeps, in one way or another.

Next time you open the freezer to find jars of dead and dying insects, remember that they’re not bugs, and they’re not going to get into the food. They’re my little scraps of nature’s intricacy, ready to be preserved. I’ve written an entire essay here explaining what’s going on; I’m not being a creep, despite the accusations. It might just be because my mother finally got fed up, and I needed some storage room. Thanks for lending me your freezer.