Ephemeroptera
(continued)
Manny didn't seem to see him or his brown ball either. "But I don't
understand," said Manny. His exoskeleton was losing its sheen, and
his voice was growing weaker. "Why were we gifted with this consciousness,
if our bodies were destined to be so temporary?" He climbed over
a small, smooth pebble. "It's a cruel joke is what it is."
Old Dan shook his pronotum. "It's a mystery," he said. "But if it's any comfort, you two are the only ones who have this gift." He climbed up on one of his dung balls and rested his aching femurs. "Look at them," he said, indicating the millions of mayflies who had clotted the skies. "Most of them will end up on a windshield somewhere. Or piled up in drifts on some porch, or heaped in a doorway. They will fly mindlessly, thoughtlessly, as they have for billions of years. None of them have your gifts."
"Darling?" said May. Manny's color was fading fast. He could no longer stand. May caressed him with her filaments, with her antennae, with her vestigial mouthparts. "My love," she cried. Then she looked at Old Dan squarely. "Gifts? You mean curses, don't you?" Her voice was ugly with bitterness. "Why should we know about our futures if we haven't the power to change them?" She watched Manny's filaments soften. "He is dying already, isn't he?"
Old Dan nodded.
"Then I defy you, stars!" May said, shaking a tiny tibia at the heavens. She trembled then, and walked in circles. "But surely there is something I can do to help him? Breathe life into him for a little while longer? What if I do good deeds? What if I fly up there right now and warn my sisters and brothers? What if I can get them to rise up with me to fight our terrible Fate?"
"Pretty May," said Old Dan. "There's no bargaining with Fate. We each have our job in the world. Consider, for a moment. If you could really choose to live another creature's life, would you? Think about it. Which would you prefer: to live a long, scarabed, protected life eating, breathing, rolling dung? Or to live an ephemeral but shimmering life filled with flight, lovemaking, procreation?"
But May had stopped listening. She was huddled at Manny's side, losing some of her shimmer herself. "Do not go gently into that good night," she whispered.
Manny stirred, flicked one of his terminal filaments. "When I have fears that I may cease to be..."
"Sshhhh," said May. "Don't tire yourself. I'm here beside you." To Old Dan she said, "It seems like just this morning that we met, and loved, and..."
"It was,"said Old Dan.
"And I will go next, won't I?"
He nodded. "If you have laid your eggs."
"I have." She lay down beside Manny then, closed some of her eyes. And she would never see her babies either. She thought of them, bright nymphs already, and already moving toward their own breathless flights and loves and shimmering sorrows. She'd keep that sadness to herself.
Manny's words were quiet as the moonlight. "And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, that I shall never look upon thee more..."
"Look on me now," said May. "I'm coming with you. Oh, speak again, Bright Angel!"
Old Dan looked on, sadly. "Shit," he said, when it happened. He'd known it was coming — again — but that never made death any easier. Always a shocker, no matter how prepared you think you are. Always a kick in the gut. And it had been his fate to outlive hundreds of generations of his glittering mayfly friends. It had been his fate, also, to impart, to a select few, the hardest type of wisdom. And May and Manny had not, in fact, been the only ones to be gifted with an understanding of their own mortality. That was a lie he'd told to flatter them in their final minutes. There'd been others, scores of others. And each time Old Dan had wrestled again with his dung-covered self, debating the complex pros and cons of whether or not to forewarn them of their futures. And each time, ultimately, painful knowledge had triumphed over blissful ignorance. Rightly.
He rolled his perfectly round dung balls proudly, one by one, to encircle
their faded, splintering corpses. "Merde," he said kindly, in
lieu of a blessing. Then he left them in peace and went back to his work.
He'd done all a dung beetle could do.
