The Anthropology Student

Words by Kellyn Toombs

If I’ve learned but one thing in my entomology class, it’s that I’m certainly going to bug hell.

Not a hell for bugs, mind you, but a hell run by bugs. A place where I can be karmactically punished for all the carnage I’ve wrought in pursuit of an A+ worthy insect collection.

I think that it is only fair that in my next life or in an alternate universe, as I am doing my knitting or my museology homework on a picnic table, minding my own business and thoroughly enjoying the day, that a white veil should encapsulate me in an instant as a great moth swings a net over my body.

I’ll panic and struggle and entangle myself in the threaded fabric, trying to find the exit hole at the end of a maze of gauze. All this as the moth roughly kinks the net and finagles a clear plastic vile beneath me. He presses the vial to the section of net that I cling to and scrapes it along the fabric so that my handhold is interrupted and I tumble to the floor of the vial below. He swiftly wrestles the white cap through the net and snaps it on the container in a hurry, lest I should try to flutter away as my plastic prison is pulled from the net.

He holds the container up to his gleaming red moth eyes and sighs, realizing that he has captured yet another blonde, 20-something female, Western European descent. He already has three pinned and dried in his collection at home, so he offers me, still in the vial, pounding my fists and kicking against its rounded walls, to his friend, the wasp.

The wasp gladly accepts. She has not yet captured a single blonde, 20-something female, Western European descent. She places me in her canvas tote bag, filled with other humans in their own little vials (likely my entomology classmates, if we are all to suffer the same fate), and takes us back to the anthropology classroom.

There, she sits at a desk and holds my container up to her harshly-triangular face to admire her catch.

“Look at the beautiful coloration on this one,” she says to her friend, the cockroach, likely referencing the hand-knitted, marbled blue acrylic sweater I’m wearing (for should I get to pick what I die in, I would surely pick this, my knit-mum opus. But perhaps in true bug-hell fashion I’ll have no say, so the wasp is just as likely referring to an awful denim jacket or a tacky T-shirt instead). All the while, I am still making a fuss along the edges of the tube, running and screaming and begging to be let out. My captor does let me out, but I am not set free. I have been sentenced to death by chemical warfare.

“I’m sorry, little fella,” whispers the wasp as she flips over the vial, tears off the cap and shakes me out like I’m the last clod of parmesan in the cheese grater. I tumble from one container to another, this one with glass walls and a plaster of paris flooring, a flooring that has been soaked in methyl acetate. The cap of this jar is screwed on tight before I can even register this is a place I need to be escaping from, and the wasp watches in horrified fascination as I initially run at the glass walls in continued protest, then quickly fall to the ground seizing as the toxic gas enters my lungs. I twitch for a bit, flopping around the ground and foaming at the mouth, before crumpling into a sedentary pile of disorganized arms, legs, and blue acrylic (or denim. Or 100% cotton).

Seeing that I have croaked, the wasp shakes me, once again, like the last bit of parmesan, onto a styrofoam board. The professor, a kindly praying mantis, helps the wasp rearrange my limbs and shows her how to hold my corpse steady with forceps. My body in position, I am pinned directly through the thorax.

Once class is over, the wasp gathers her anthropology lab kit and goes to the local ice cream shop to meet her friends, the grasshopper and the cicada. Upon sitting at the picnic table with her net, boxed-up kit, and scoop of lavender-honey vanilla, the grasshopper asks her how her anthropology class is going.

“I love it!” declares the wasp, “We learned how to pin humans today. Wanna see my collection?”

“Okay,” says the grasshopper, not himself a big fan of humans (they give him the creeps) but still somewhat intrigued. The cicada is distracted, slurping his maple cinnamon milkshake through his proboscis.

The wasp opens the box and takes out her block of styrofoam. She’s just started explaining her favorite specimen, a young East Asian male with hair dyed blue and arms covered in tattoos, when she notices something terrible. I am not dead.

No, the acetate had just heavily anesthetized me, perhaps left me with severe brain damage, for the wasp had made the rookie mistake of not leaving me in the kill jar for long enough to ensure that I have been thoroughly killed. Now I am dazed, confused, but still slightly alive, wriggling my toes and fingers as I try to discern where I am and what day it is and why I feel as though a pin has been placed directly through my thorax.

“Oh, shit,” the wasp hisses, “Grasshopper, is my 20something Western European female moving!?”

The grasshopper leans his head over the board. His maxillae papillae open and close, tapping together as he examines me.

“No, I think that’s just the wind,” he concludes.

I begin moving my arms around my sides, feeling the base of the styrofoam. I half-heartedly lift my legs as my heavily-acetated brain feebly wonders why doing this isn’t resulting in me walking anywhere.

“Oh fuck, dude, that thing is definitely moving,” says the grasshopper. The cicada is still distracted, the next gulp of milkshake halfway up his proboscis. He has no interest in humans, never has.

“Oh shitshitshitshitshit!” cries the wasp as she desperately digs through her tote for the kill jar. It is too late now to unpin me and throw my writhing body back in the sealed container (my corpse would become unusable, and I will have been killed for nothing), so the wasp fumbles to unscrew the cap and shoves the opening of the jar into the styrofoam bed that surrounds my body. She presses the jar in place so firmly that it leaves a permanent indent in the styrofoam, all the while praying to Bug Jesus that the fumes from the plaster of paris will dissipate down to my level and finish me off.

The wasp never wanted to kill any humans, you see. She’s taking anthropology because she loves them, and because it filled a breadth requirement that she needs to graduate. And she never would have dreamed of making a human collection had it not been worth 25% of her final grade.

Lilyhead

Art by Kristine Villanueva

Ghosts in the Parlor

Art by Shane Baker