Bugsplat

“You don’t see that so much anymore. Not like you used to.”
“What?”
“See that? Bug impact on the windshield.”
“Huh?”
“Bugsplat. When we were kids you used to see it all the time. Drive anywhere, the lil’ buggers would be caked all over the glass.”
“Oh yeah... I remember now. Yeah, that was a thing, wasn’t it?”
“Don’t see it much these days.”
“Guess not.”

He was thinking, as he sometimes did: Harriet drives confidently, so directly. Kind of like a racing pigeon with a strong sense of going somewhere definite.

Freddie loved that about her. It was why he was so happy to ride shotgun. Twenty-eight years before, before they were even married, he excused his lack of manliness, his eschewing of his rightful place in the driving seat, by saying that he was better at reading maps and could shout out directions. A co-driver, what they say in rally racing.

Now we have GPS calling out all the turns and Freddie didn’t have that excuse any longer. But still.

“Another one.”
“What?”
“Bug on the window.”
“Freddie, you don’t need to call out every time a bug hits the windshield. It’s distracting.”
“How, distracting? Anyway, it’s something of interest. You don’t see it so much these days.”
“You already said that.”
“Not like before. Before when I was a kid it was like ‘splat’ ‘splat’ ‘splat’.”
“Yes, you said. Distracting.”
“You hadda, I mean my dad hadda, pull into the gas station. Not to fill up so much but to get a glass clean. Full service them days, ‘Yessir right away sir, shall I check your oil sir?’ Lotta bugs back then.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not so much now. I mean not so many.”
“Maybe your dad killed them all with his crazy driving.”

Freddie knew that Harriet wasn’t truly distracted by the bugsplat callouts. Not at all. That was just an excuse. Really it was that she preferred to avoid unpleasant topics. The mass die-out of the insect world, the depletion of the fauna all across our environment, that was just something she would rather not think about. That was why she made him shut up.

He switched the music, hoping it would heal the wounded ambience in the car. David Soul: “Don’t Give Up On Us Baby”. We’re still worth one more try.

“That one was bigger. Did you hear it go splat?”
“Freddie, please?”
“No but seriously. I heard it, like really: SPLAT. Like the old days.”
“Distracting. Really.”

David had a pleasant voice. Don’t give up on us baby, Lord knows we’ve come this far, Can’t we stay the way we are? Whatever happened to him? Didn’t he become a cult leader, commit mass suicide? Alien abductions, skinshifters, babybrain drinking?

“Hey, was he Starsky or Hutch?”
“Who?”
“This guy singing. David Soul.”
“Is that a real name?”
“Starsky? Or Hutch?”
“Hutch maybe? I think Starksy was Jewish, and he doesn’t look it.”
“Did he become a cult leader and commit mass suicide?”
“Uh, I don’t know. I think maybe it was Starsky? Or maybe Kojak?”

Did Kojak lead a cult full of devotees through an orgy of self-annihilation? Poisoned lollipops? Didn’t seem like him somehow. Too cool for that. David Soul on the other hand. Just look at the mustache on his album graphic…

“SPLAT! You must have heard that one, Harriet.”
“Don’t distract me, Freddie. Yes I did hear it.”
“Then I couldn’t have distracted you, could I? You had the bug splatter do that.”

Really, though. They were getting bigger. This one was like a small taco in dimension. Greeny-gray guts and fragmented dark brown chitin. Legs with little hooks that curved back round on themselves. Harriet hit the spritzer and ran the wipers. The big bug got oozed out across the windshield. It was like in biology class: smear the sample across the microscope slide. Peer at the revealed secrets.

“Hey, do they still have microscopes in high school?”
“What?”
“You know, we had microscopes. Blood corpuscles. Prick your finger. Hair scales. Do they still do that in school?”
“Maybe not. They have apps for things like that now.”

The angel and the dreamer, who sometimes plays a fool. Don’t give up on us, I know — we can still come... through.

High note, very pure. Like a girl. So pure.

David, why did you suicide all those people?

Thunk

The glass cracked.

The thing was not real.

“This thing just isn’t real.”
“Oh my God! What a shock!”
“How about pull over, Harr?”
“What for?”
“The glass is cracked.”
“You’re gonna uncrack it?”
“No, but... we can examine it.”
“Examine it? You’re an entomologist now, Frederick?”
“Never seen the like, not even in the old days.”

Part centipede, with segmented body sections the size of a child’s fist, legs jerking on either side, part winged creature like a dragonfly, the impacted bug sat in a crater in the left side of the windshield, short fine laminate cracks radiating outward on the glass.

Directly facing Freddie.

Pink and green-yellow ichor splayed out in an impact pattern, a tracery of goo and chunks like lime marmalade. There were fibrous white strands of something.

Freddie could see its mandibles opening and closing: large, bladed, like a stag-beetle’s. Its eyes, its many eyes, looking at him while it tried to snap snap snap.

“You know I really think you should...”
“What, Fred? You know you can be a royal pain in the fuckin’ tits sometimes.”
“Harriet, it’s a living thing, like a new strange thing unknown to science.”
“The fuck you know about science, Freddie? You’re a retired accountant.”

These eyes, boring into his. The spastic repetitive motion of the mandibles, those hooked black blades, snap-snapping.

“But you know Harriet I think we should slow down at least before we get -”

WHOOOMP

All is turned over, the world is turned and turned again, time slows itself and then rushes forward in a wild spurt.

Over and over, the noise and the silence. The shattering and the creaking and the crunch that is metal buckle and crack. Then silent and black.

Black and black and black. Time passes.

No time has passed. Freddie is here, again, in the shotgun seat, strapped in, the airbag pressing against his chest, cushioning his chin. Something’s wrong, something’s not right, he’s... He’s blind, blurred, he’s panicblind and this world is a blur.

He’s upside-down, snot and blood seeping out of his nose and dripping into his eyes. He lifts his fingers and cleans his eyes and finds that he can in fact see.

Windshield wrecked. Steam rising from the buckled hood before him. He hears a snap-snap.

“Harriet, are you okay, I think we-”

Turning he sees her. He sees it. He sees Harriet’s body strapped in, held in place, airbag pressing her torso snug into the driver’s seat. Blood smoodged across it wantonly.

Her head is gone. Harriet’s head is gone. In its place is an insect head, twisted away almost from the broken wreckage of chitin and mess of legs that hangs downward, drooping in an unthinkable ooze assemblage from the impact zone. But the creature’s head is there, hard, occupying the place where hers should be.

The mandibles snap snap as the black bead eyes zero in on Freddie’s yelling. Can it hear, he thinks, strangely detached from his own panic.

Dissociated as he is from his fate, the last thing he thinks hanging upside-down in his self-bound web, right before the sharp spasms of the blade jaws slice into his exposed neck: maybe they’re coming back.

Maybe the fauna is returning now to its home.

---

==== // BUGSPLAT // ENDS // ====

---

FURTHER READING

For anyone curious about the phenomenon underlying this little vignette, here are some articles and studies:

WIRED: A Car ‘Splatometer’ Study Finds Huge Insect Die-Off

THE CONVERSATION: Fewer insects hitting your car windscreen? Here’s why

BBC: ‘Troubling’ fall in insects, says new bug survey

WIKIPEDIA: Decline in insect populations

Remember Hitchcock’s The Birds (based on a Daphne du Maurier story)? If birds can get upset at a little ornithological squeeze-out, what are the bugs planning collectively to do in revenge/self-defence?

One thinks of William T. Vollman’s literary monster You Bright and Risen Angels, and the potential for popular horror fare seems limitless.

Prophetic too, perhaps.

But there have been forerunners, warning us of insect vengeance to come…

---