Fred Hannah Beresford

Fred

Mud curling cooler around him, Fred cast off his night cap with a grumble, kicking fourteen pairs of slippers from fourteen pointed feet, and scuttled under the walls of his home to venture into the moon-puddled night.

He ignored the incessant chirp of the crickets – attention-seeking bastards, he griped – and the low thrum of rogue bees loitering on the hedge corner, remembering their stingers as he cast a wary eye. Those ladybirds that had emigrated from the allotment down the road were even worse, he thought to himself, quickly distracted from the bees as he climbed onto the rotting flesh of a nearby apple to feed. He didn’t trust their new-fangled clothing, their garish polka-dot jackets in tacky shades of red and yellow. Between all their ideas about ‘colours’ and ‘flying’, you’d think they’d gotten confused, figured themselves birds, or something equally ridiculous. If you were born a bug, you stayed a bug, that was how it had been back in his day. He tutted loudly, and the bloom scattered.

Glutted on acrid fruit and self-righteous indignation, all seven body-segments plump with satiety, Fred clambered back to the rock he lived under as the first dashes of sunlight breached the fenced horizon, squeezing underneath just in time to hear the back door being thrown open. Footsteps flattened the grass, before small hands with fat fingers lurched his roof into the sky, and he waved a cranky fist, blinking blind eyes at the young-faced eclipse. A shriek, and the rock fell back. Fred wiggled comfortably in the crush of it. Satisfied, for now, he rolled back into the cool damp of the dirt’s embrace to sleep.