Savior Invader

By Carrie Cogan

The night we met, you needled your way in through a tiny rip in the screen. I was so alone I thought a river loved me back. It would boil over or drag me under if I didn’t swim its longest unbroken section end-to-end, two hours palming and kicking green light. The antique glasses on the windowsill looked at me through dusty lenses. Some chunks of flint developed eyes too. I talked to birds, bugs, deer, armadillo, trying to follow them. I felt bad about the armadillo. Even armored they appeared too naked, and they covered rocky ground myopically, frantically, like they were being kicked.

I was reading under a bare bulb when you dropped. You loved the light, let’s say, and that must be exhausting—wanting to be right inside it, to become it, without setting your thorax on fire. You had extra spring-loaded powers, so if you fell on your back you could click yourself upright. But no one saw you. No one cared enough about you to call you any one thing.

You landed on my cheek. Its hairy rubber give, lonely energy and terrible musk sent you scuttling for an escape route.

You found my ear.

Your clicks then, as you crawled down to my eardrum, roared loud as gunshots. If the bullets were meant for me. I bounced on one foot, slapping my tilted head with the meat of my hand. This worked to drain river water. But you inched on, toward my brain. People had always told me bad things could happen to a woman who lived alone. The people who said that, though. I knew they didn’t like their own company.

It took you. Spindly, mottled, just two centimeters. It took you trapped, reaching the end of my eardrum and then deciding—with all six outraged legs—to start digging. And isn’t that the way? The only one, the golden one, who can drive a fool like me back to her people won’t be some regal, calm king. It will be you: dirt dweller, day hider, eater of decay. Your segments long gone to soil smithereens. My snapping beetle, spring beetle, click beetle, skipjack. My elater.

About the Author

Carrie Cogan lives with her sons on Salt Spring Island, BC. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, AGNI, Bennington Review, Nimrod, Louisiana Literature, and elsewhere. She won the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Prize and the Kenyon Review Nonfiction Contest. Cogan is at work on her first novel, which has received support from MacDowell, Ucross, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She follows bugs.

For more from Carrie Cogan, try “Ballet for a Castaway”!