Ok, maybe it was poor judgment on my part to bite the fellow. He tasted ghastly anyway. But that was no reason to throw me on the dissecting table!
Well, a shoddy semblance of a dissecting table, at least. The humans had failed to prepare by investing in a microscope, and their scalpels consisted of mechanical pencil leads. Enough must have broken inside me to write a novel, or at least a college entrance essay. Their “table,” if one can even glorify it with that name, was an empty matchbox printed with vaguely glowing propaganda for “Mitchell’s Restaurant!”. The boy suggested taping me down so I couldn’t fly away, but the girl found this idea unpleasant (for her own gastroaesthetic reasons, I’ve no doubt.) So instead, they tucked me in using a band-aid — the mercifully-stickless bit directly touching me, the sticky flaps on each side holding me down to the matchbox. I tried to visualize one of those infuriating dentist’s-office videotapes with the flowers, the gray-water piano music, the running water and the iMovie crossfades. Just get on with it, I thought. I’m ready for a new incarnation anyway. Something big, and spiky, and venemous.
Of course neither of them was gifted with endemic telepathy (or they didn’t speak East Brambleville Garden Fly dialect 9), so I had to endure a long wait as the girl kept changing her mind about the whole thing: “This is just plain animal cruelty. He can feel pain, you know.” “But you’re the one who said we had to find out whether the blood he swallowed was real.” “Yeah, yeah, I know.” “Don’t you love me more than some bug you’ve never even met before?” “Painter, it’s not like that! I just… look, he’s got like a little face… it almost looks like he’s scared of us… and also, this will be really gross, and I just ate…” “You want me to do it?” He picks up a heavy-duty mathematical compass from the desk. “No! No, I can do this.” “Or can you?” “I… ugh. I don’t know.”
When I squirmed within my prison, the boy said, “Isn’t it even more cruel to keep making him wait while you decide to cut him open?”
“Perhaps.” After a pause: “Oh, I can’t do it. You do it if you want, but I can’t look at this.” The breeze of a large body leaving, the click of a door closing.
“All right, buddy, it’s just you and me now.” The tip of one of the compass’s spindly legs nears my lower abdomen. “And I’m gonna do what it takes to find out what’s going on here.”
Screaming pain, a waterfall of fluid and tiny diamondlike things I don’t recognize surging out of me from the initial incision. The nerves in the top half of my body are short-circuiting, stupid insect nerves, thrashing my 4-centimeter body as if there was any way to escape at this point and not be so damaged I’d be better off dead.
“Damn,” the boy said, and drew back the bloodied instrument. Get on with it! I screamed in East Brambleville Garden Fly dialect 9. His image shattered into the hexagons of my compound eyes as they seemed to separate in the blackening space of my vision. And I felt him remove through what had once been my anus, the tiny blue box that serves as my central power source, or what those feeble humans would call a “heart.” As soon as the Blankbox was cut free from all the entraily things that had held it in place, my soul was free from that ruined Schizophoran body and the pain roared to a catastrophic, world-ending tirade, my wholeness was raining into the upward ocean…
and then I. Was. Free.
The boy’s gaze continued to scrutinize the irrelevant object on the operating table — good, I thought, he can’t see me. I swirled to a more comfortable size — about twice the dunce’s length — before repixellating through the closed door and swimming in air down the stairs. I peeked into the kitchen, where dirty dishes from the fajita episode still smirked on the stove and on countertops et cetera. The girl sat at the table, clenching her jaw and fists, staring into space. I flattered myself she was wracked with regret over my unsanitary and unanesthetized dismemberment. When I reached the big window, I stopped, realizing I had not yet taken an object from my most recent place of transition. It’s not a stipulation or anything, it’s just a little tradition we have, myself and I. A quick glance around the room permitted my eyes to catch on a framed photograph that sat on the bookshelf: a wedding photo, the ugly bride flashing a grimacing excuse for a smile at the ugly and inattentive groom. The girl’s parents, no doubt. Judging by the blanket of dust on the thing, no one would miss this. Ah well. Can’t have everything. I extended a few tendrils to capture the trinket, and then I reeled it into storage in the cabinet of my upper chest. Yes, this form is much more useful, I mused. If only I could find a way to stay inbetween instead of having to find another meatspace being to possess.
In the snap of a noiseless finger, I was out the window and soaring high over the town, watching all the meaningless banter of traffic lights, car trails to anthills — oh, excuse me, I mean skyscrapers — the families and couples giggle-gaggling down the sidewalks with their shopping bags and their disposable frozen-yogurt cups. You’re all disposable, actually, I said to them in my head before rising past the barrier. In the empty pink inbetween-space, I unleashed from my throatless throat what the human kids would term an “evil laugh.”
A Seaworthy Frigate 