Kayla Monteiro

The first sighting was that of her dirty feet — how the mud caked soles were swallowed by the lake’s withholding surface, as if into oblivion. Not a bubble nor a ripple followed, just the black face of the water reflecting the starless night. Then came the rumor that she wears only what she was born in, crow skin and cockroach eyes, dark from the soil of dead things and all else she feasts upon. 

Others say that she paints herself in mud and the red sap of the hangman’s tree. Leaves of piss-eye-yellows and burnt-sugar-browns stick to the sap she slathers herself in, obscuring her three breasts and thorn laden vulva. 

Most only ever see her eyes, either from the heartwood hollow of the red gum tree or the withholding shadows of the wood itself. Only ever seen at midday in the place where no light dares tread, nor sound breach; a place of fungi worship, of those that come springing up from to the damp and the rot, where ancient moles and bats alike hold counsel with darker beings, known and not. 

Within those impenetrable depths, those eyes, unblinking, watching and waiting with a feral patience — not of trepidation, but of cunning. The whites of them gleaming like the mucus of raw eggs, only these whites do not go running; these stay, and they watch, and they wait. 

In the muted morning light, others have seen what they call Old Man’s Beard growing from her scalp, concealing her face. Combed by the wind, seeds like cotton make for a halo around her head, white feathers that give way to her flight from branch to branch. Even that image cannot hold for long in the memories of men, dissolving into a blur of wings retreating skyward.

 Her entire face has only ever been glimpsed once. A fist of lightning seared the sky at her back, doubling the harshness of her expression, a hard knowing, as if etched in a cliff face. The man who claims to have witnessed it will not say whether he saw a god, or a curse, or both. He doesn’t say much of anything anymore, for he is long dead now, and perhaps, the image of her face is buried along with him. 

Though tales of her vary, there is one credence agreed by all. You cannot smell her. She is neither the decay of the damp leaves that make her bed nor the musk of the brown hares that warm her feet at night. She is what’s left after the wind has ravaged your hair. When the day has been washed out by white light and acid rain, she is what remains.

The most popular of her tales is that of her green tongue. The way its flickering light lures fireflies into her open mouth, a wet cave for them to mate in. For that, she has been named Bug Eater, a fitting title, though decidedly misleading. 

Into her mouth, insects made for hiding find safe passage, and in times of drought, sip gratefully at her saliva. When the manmade poison salts the crops, they nourish themselves on her earwax and stubborn dandruff leftover from last winter. Even when she catches the November cold, it is a special treat of thick mucus and warm phlegm. 

Come summer, larvae of all kinds hatch and squirm in her hair, often feeding on one another in a wild tussle that tangles her hair in effervescent eyes and broken antenna. So much a part of her have they become, that on the odd occasion, a rogue pupae can be seen crawling around her retina, licking at her tear ducts when they threaten to spill over. 

Bug Eater: friend to all kinds of curious ladybird and proud dragonfly, mealworms, centipedes, and termites, blow flies, blister beetles, and bullet ants. The wolf spiders weave for her and the earwigs confess to her their secrets. Cockroaches promise her a long life and the lice and mosquitoes do not bite her. Bug Eater. What a fanciful title! For all that know her realize she does not feed on her own kind as the queer bladderworts do but on the sweet meat and warm blood from a large, fresh kill.  

It is she who turned the insects carnivorous when the crops curled and withered under the hot sun of a dying world. The other forests burned, casting their pinching patrons into her waiting lap. Only, even she could not fully bear their weight alone. “What’s that?” man used to say.

“The world is overpopulated. Not enough of it to go around.” 

There were too many bugs and not enough forest in a world which needed more of both. Mother and larvae devoured one another to avoid starvation. A thrashing world grew silent as the bees made their beds in the earth. All appeared to be lost. 

Then Bug Eater, who summoned her hundred eyed pupils, watching her own face contort in the reflection of their exoskeletons, the glossy sheen of an oil dump. Her breath smelled of melting plastic and designer pesticides, and her horde reared back in fear of her — of each other. 

She tore out the silver wrappers in her hair, which had tempted her to eat them only once, when they had twisted in her gut and come up red and gorgeous. 

With her small, crooked fingers, she showed the crowd how to wield the aluminum plastic like razors, teaching them the way of the man; the way of the beast. 

“First you must strike them down,” she told them, not so much in words, but in the high frequency of notes warbling in her throat — the whirling gestures of her neck, wrists, and glutes. 

Under her command, the biblical locusts of old struck down only the slowest and fattest of animals, eating well past the bone, leaving only horns and hooves in their place. 

“Feast,” she preached. “Gorge yourselves and your children, and your children’s children, and make a home of what is left.”

They stood clear of the two-legged one, the great destroyer for whom they owed their new diet, with their electric zappers and automatic swatters, sticky fly tape and nets that would starve their kindred dead; their end would come later. 

The animals that were spared dwindled away on their own. Bottle caps in their guts and disease foaming from their mouths, there was nowhere to go but in. Inside. Not a place for creeping or crawling, warned Bug Eater. 

When they too expired, only then did she turn her attention to man. 

Casting her voice over midnight fire, she wove her voice into tanzanite smoke that intoxicates the senses. 

Men and women of greed abandoned the steps of their private jets, plantation mansions, even their yachts to plunge into a sea that would crush them. Still, they followed her, their pockets full of dead trees, lured home. Strangers in their own skin, they retreated. Back. To the wilderness and the turning soil from which they came, into the stomachs of insects who now grow fat on their kin. 

It was there that they remembered one could not separate from the other. There they squirm, while inside them feasts their wigged foe. 

Syncing heartbeats, Bug Eater’s children pulse in time with that which devours itself.

Sometimes, from within her ring of fungi, Bug Eater pauses to listen to the forest’s gusts and groans of pleasure. With the trees at her back, she hums along with it until her eyes grow heavy and she lays her feathered head down to rest. 

She dreams in the language of hunger.