Writing Prompt

spiders8

A friend gets married soon, and has been losing weight to fit into her dress. It's not something you can ask her about, the reasons, the history, the symbolism. Is she doing it for herself? For a photo that will be placed upon a mantel? Is she doing it for her fiancé? That he might love her even more violently and tender than before? Isn't that fucked up.

Likewise, the male tarantula foregoes food upon seeking his soul mate, sometimes the weight loss so drastic that he dies before the hour of fulfillment. And even upon success, rarely lives more than a few weeks following prima nocte. He certainly knows little of symbolism or mantels, but he may have some vague notion of history. It's difficult to tell.

What is fucked up is that all the weight loss serves to threaten the life-cycle of an entirely separate species, Pepsis formosa, the tarantula hawk. Because irrespective of how fashionably the tarantula's new body may fill the latest Karl Lagerfield line, it provides barely enough nourishment for the wasp larva growing and feeding within his paralyzed remains.

An entire pain index had to be developed to compare the most excruciating stings within the animal kingdom, and the tarantula hawk's registered at 4.0, just below that of the bullet ant. Among humans, the best advice for dealing with the sting is to simply lie down and scream. Those who have felt the stinger, sometimes one fifth of the insect's body length, believe that the tarantula is not paralyzed by any poison, but simply cannot move for fear it might rekindle memories of more pain than any creature has ever had the misfortune to endure. Pain so great that it extinguishes the desire to love. A desire once so great that it extinguished the need to eat.

The aforementioned bullet ant, however, has a sting so fucked up that screaming doesn't work. Recovered victims often write extensive missives describing in profane detail their anger at not having died. They sometimes address these letters to their former spouses. But that's not what's fucked up.

Indigenous tribal boys as part of their rites of passage into manhood stick their fragile little, brown arms into sleeves woven of bullet ants, with the goal of showing no signs of pain for ten minutes. They remove their arms, swollen, paralyzed and shake for days until they arrive across the threshold into adulthood. I suppose that makes the baby tarantula hawk's emergence into maturity, chewing its way through a spider's corpse, scratching through the darkness, picking through the debris, guided by a bit of sunlight, seem a little less fucked up.

Better, anyway, than little boys and blushing brides holding in their screams under the eager eyes of loved ones.