June Bug

It was on an unseasonably warm early-May evening, several years ago, when I first saw one, attracted to the welcoming glow emanating from the kitchen window of our one-story rambler. Six-year-old me looked up at the open window with curiosity, hearing the mechanical, clicking buzz of its scarab wings as it tried to come into the light. It was nothing but a black, flickering sight across the screen of the window, but the sound seemed odd.

“What’s that daddy?” I asked, slightly afraid, but mostly curious.

“That’s a June Bug,” he smiled, “don’t worry, they’re harmless.”

I’m sure that June bugs had been around before, but that was my first memory of one. Every year thereafter, I considered the official end of Spring and beginning of Summer to be the first sighting, or more appropriately hearing, of the first June bug of the season. I would run to the window screen and watch them dance menacingly along the wire, trying in vain to reach the light. I would wait till they landed on the screen and flick them off with my finger, listening to their scaly bodies bounce off the ground outside. I would come inside from playing baseball in the evenings and see a few skittering around the porch light of my parents’ house.

I was ten years old in 1995. As the school days wound down and the spring rains subsided, I became excited at the prospect of a summer of baseball. It was on May 5th when the first June bugs appeared.

In my childhood bedroom there was one window, directly above the headboard of my bed. My mother usually shut it and put on a fan in my room when I slept, in order to help with my hay fever. After brushing my teeth, kneeling beside my bed for my evening prayers, and pulling the comforter around my Spiderman-pajama-clad body, I closed my eyes to sleep on that Friday evening, thinking of baseball.

Some time later I awoke to what sounded like hail hitting the glass of my bedroom window. I was terrified of storms, and especially tornados when I was a child, and the sound woke me instantly. I glared around the room in my bleary-eyed drowsiness and fumbled for the light on my nightstand, missing the switch and nearly falling on the floor. Again came the slow sound of hail from the window: tick... tick.. tick-TICK!

I sat up in bed, heart-trembling and was suddenly confused. I didn’t hear thunder. I could hear the frogs and crickets outside, even through the closed window. It wasn’t raining. As I sat in bed frozen by fear and the confusion that comes from trying to make sense of stimuli that doesn’t register as familiar, I heard the continual ticking of hail against the window every second or so, sometimes accompanied by multiple ticks at once.

After what felt like five minutes, but was probably only 30 seconds, my adrenaline began to subside and I turned around and pulled up the blinds of my window. The clear, moonlit night came through my window, and bathed the dark room in a strange glow. The ticking sounds came again and I quickly recognized the source – of course, June bugs – with their hard shells bouncing against the window, merely small, dark shadows with wings, trying to find purchase for their legs against the glass of the window. I felt instant relief that the house wouldn’t be consumed in a tornado that evening, and reached over again to turn on the light, which suddenly awoke the room.

Within seconds, what became ticking sounds turned into a full hailstorm of June bugs attacking the window, the moonlight blighted by hundreds of tiny flying insect bodies. My eyes widened as their bodies slammed against the window, slid down and piled on top of each other forming a black blanket at the bottom of the window as their wriggling black bodies stacked up, slowly moving a dark sheet of shimmery, writhing insect carcasses from the bottom of the window to the top. The sound of their bodies slamming against the glass became a deafening roar, drowning out the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears.

I fell backwards off the bed as the window finally blacked out completely, and in that moment of falling backwards, I looked up at the black window, a dark entrance to some terrible world of squirming legs, pincers, and slimy shimmering bodies, and realized suddenly the sound had stopped, replaced by the flickering of a million wings, and the faint cracking of the glass under the pressure, like the ice on the lake in winter. I sat up on the floor and opened my mouth to scream, but found my mouth as dry as a desert. Then, with the decisiveness of flipping off the light, my consciousness faded and the world disappeared before me.

I awoke in the backseat of the car as my parents sped to urgent care. Remnants of their conversation floated back to me as I drifted in and out of consciousness.

“Maybe it’s a condition?” from my mother.

“He looks fine, probably nothing to worry about,” from my father.

Later on, from the overly-cologned doctor, “Probably nothing to worry about. Fainting is common and often not serious,” and after describing the June bugs attacking the window, “Probably a hallucination, nothing to worry about.”

When I returned home that evening, my mother wringing her hands, my father annoyed by the lack of explanation for the fainting episode, I refused to return to my room and my parents let me sleep in their bed, although I didn’t get much sleep.

The next day was a Saturday. I cautiously approached my closed bedroom door to fetch my favorite stuffed bear. As my hand reached up to the doorknob, I felt electrically drained by the mere act of trying to enter my room. My sweaty fingers slipped on the knob and shook. As I finally unlatched the door and it slowly creaked on its ancient hinges, the room was slowly revealed to me from right to left.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw nothing out of the ordinary. Sun streamed through my window, with the dust dancing on its beams, and once again my bedroom felt like my sanctuary. Even so, I ran in to grab the stuffed bear from my bed, my ten-year-old imagination afraid of whatever might be lurking under my bed. As I reached the bed I looked out the window tentatively. On the outside ledge of the window was one small June bug, writhing leg-side up in the summer heat, slowly losing its life force.

I jumped off the bed, bolted out of the room, slamming the door, and never spoke of it.