“Oh gross!” I say aloud to pine tree and cabin, bright day and sky. “No, no, no,” I add, startling butterflies and quail. “Say it isn’t so!” A ripped-open long envelope from my twin sister Joyce flutters off the porch into the dry yellow grass. Usually mail from Connecticut brings me cartoons she knows will make me chortle or a photo from the internet of Bears in Unexpected Places. But quivering in my hand is a newspaper clipping that features a far too vivid color photo of a praying mantis with its head buried into the skull of a hummingbird. “ICK” my sister wrote under the headline: BIRDS BEWARE OF THE VORACIOUS PRAYING MANTIS. Brain eaters? Those slips of green dinosaur-looking insects I find on my window screens and porch each fall? They eat…BRAINS? “No, no, no…”
We are not easily bugged by bugs. As free-range children in Arizona we kept company with lots of creepies and crawlies. Red ants bit our toes when we played outside in thongs. Wasps surprised us when they chewed on clothes pins. “Come see! Come see!” A strange walking-stick bug on the window was always a hit. We swatted flies, captured spiders in jars and picked up horned toads and caterpillars for a closer look. We even had a friend with a pet tarantula. And one of the Brownie Scouts made our eyes big with descriptions of fish in tanks that ate guppies. But a praying mantis chewing on brains? Had I mistaken the name all these years? Was it preying mantis, not praying? How sweet the cute clasping of mantis hands, hands that grasped flies and spiders, grasshoppers even, but birds?
It is a thought horrifying enough for Halloween glee. I wasn’t planning to dress up as a monster this year, but maybe I should explore insect ideas for Halloween, the night on the lip of winter that promotes acting out the latent character that begs to ooze out of your psyche. Have fun, be what you can’t bear to be most days. I recall gawking with astonishment to see a sober, well-spoken mouse of a fellow in San Francisco giggling in a pink costume: he’d wrapped his legs in foam then pulled on flesh-colored nylons so that robust legs would look elephantine emerging from under a tutu. With ample cleavage, rosy cheeks and sparkling wand in hand, this fountain of fairy twinkled with delight as he paraded down Castro Street. And I don’t want to forget that woman dressed as a continental soldier with multi-buttoned blue frock over tight white pants. Didn’t she turn heads at a lesbian bar on McDowell Road in Phoenix, rattling her saber and peering out austerely from under a three cornered hat. Though I am too shy or too lazy to dress up, I like to gawk, and I appreciate wit. Like that fellow at a loss for a costume who taped a leaf to a piece of string and attached it to the bill of his ball cap. When asked, he puffed to make the leaf lift and said, “I’m a leaf blower.”
At Halloween we twin girls rarely dressed as a pair. Inventing our own costume was a chance to individuate. I wanted to be a cowboy or a robber or Daniel Boone in a coonskin hat. I wanted to be Calamity Jane in leathers and fringe like Doris Day singing from the top of a stagecoach, rifle in hand. But one year Joyce was a sweet angel in wings and white, and I was a devil in red tights with horns on my head and a pitchfork, a match that made people laugh and point so they gave us a prize at a carnival event. Another year she was a Daisy Mae to her husband in farmer overalls; I went as a mime which solved my party shyness. By dressing in black with suspenders and white face I didn’t have to talk! I was as goofy as a Hopi clown that night.
This Halloween, a continent apart from my sister, I want revenge on my twin for sending me the picture that spoils my delight with an insect that prays. Surely there is time enough for Amazon or eBay to help. Yes! I’ll have a $69.99 praying mantis costume sent to my sister’s neighbor Sally down the road. I’ll ask Sally to take the scarecrow from the garden under her arm and on Halloween eve she can creep to the porch where the big windows of the dining room give a good view of dusk. When my sister and her husband sit down to dinner there will be a giant green praying mantis chewing on a head, smacking its mantis lips with the taste of brain. Take that, dear sister. “ICK” indeed!
Then when she goes to bed still shaking her head at her twin’s revenge, she’ll stretch herself under the quilt, yawn, put her hand under her pillow and YIKES! There’ll be a praying mantis finger puppet winking its big bug eye. About then her husband will peer around the corner, toothbrush in hand, to say, “What’s wrong dear?” And she’ll shriek again because the $31.84 Praying Mantis Adult Costume Latex Mask on him is truly bizarre looking.
And maybe I’ll get her daughter to teach her how to use Facetime on the cellphone. Because when I call to ask how her Halloween went, I’ll want my twin to see my t-shirt; it says: THIS IS MY HUMAN COSTUME. I’M REALLY A PRAYING MANTIS.
Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.
