Bugs

Bugs

“Something, just isn’t right with that girl,” Josephine said, as she brought her friend Ruth a fresh glass of lemonade. They both sat in old dilapidated rocking chairs on Josephine’s front porch. Ever since Ruth moved into the neighborhood back in the nineteen eighties, they often gathered here to indulge in their favorite pass-time; gossiping. The two white haired ladies glanced across the street at the subject of their conversation.

Jazmine, the small girl across the street was sitting in her mother’s garden with her legs crossed. Her blue jeans and tee shirt were covered in dirt, and her coal black hair was tied back into a messy pony tail.

“I told Diane the other day how improper she was raising her,” Ruth said. She had a raspy voice from a lifetime of smoking. She took a sip of her lemonade, and then followed it with a drag off of the cigarette in her left hand.

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it, I mean, bless her heart, I hate to say it, but she’s a strange little girl. I never see her have any friends over. Why just the other day, I went over there to talk to her mother, and I caught the girl playing in the dirt, and talking to the bugs like they were people,” Josephine remarked, letting her disdain for the girl color the tone of her voice.

“Now that just aint right, if my mother ever caught me, or any of my sisters playing in the mud, we woulda had our hind ends torn up.”

“Exactly, these new moms just let this new generation run wild.”

Ruth shook her head in agreement, and as if Jazmine could sense that she was being talked about, she turned her head towards them, and stared directly at them a moment before returning her attention to what was in front of her.

“Alfred, I have a feeling that those old birds over there are watching us,” Jazmine said to the dung beetle sitting on a stone in front of her; “I think we should go somewhere else to talk.”

Before she could make a move to go elsewhere, her mother stormed out of the front door with a hectic expression on her face. Her mother Diane had on a pair of baggy scrubs which hung crookedly on her body. Strands of black hair escaped her pony tail, and batted at her face.

“I need to go into work, honey, they have an emergency at the hospital. Your Dad will be home soon; I want you to go inside and lock the doors until he gets here,” her mother ordered.

“Okay mom,” Jazmine replied.

She got up brushing the dirt off of her clothes. Jazmine lowered her hand down in front of the beetle, and allowed it to crawl onto her hand, and then up her arm. The black beetle came to a rest on her left shoulder. 

“I can’t wait till you outgrow this phase. You know the rules, no bugs allowed in the house,” Diane said sternly.

“But Mommy! They’re my friends,” Jazmine whined.

“Make some real friends. Look Jazmine I don’t have time for this, just put the bug down, and get inside the house.”

“Yes Mommy,” Jazmine said feeling defeated.

Jazmine carefully put Alfred back in the dirt, and then walked up the front porch, and stood in the doorway. She waved goodbye while her mother pulled out of the driveway. Once she was out of sight Jazmine returned the beetle to her shoulder; and then they went around the house and entered the wooded area beyond the old wire fence in the back yard.

“Nobody understands me like you do Alfred, why do people have to be such dummies?” Jazmine said to the beetle.

“Don’t let them bother you, Jazzy, none of them are special like you, why you’re the only human I have ever met that can talk to us. They don’t understand your gift, is all,” the beetle said. The words didn’t seem to come out of its mouth; it seemed as if it transferred these thoughts directly to Jazmine’s brain. Jazmine had had the ability to communicate with bugs for as long as she could remember.