I Kill Bugs

That’s right, I said it. I kill bugs.

I can’t help it. I came from a long line of farmers. I grew up with fly-swatters in the house. My parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles — they don’t put spiders back outside, they step on them, so that’s what I’ve always done as well. If I don’t, it’s not out of any sense of compassion, it’s because I’m scared. If a spider is too big I won’t go anywhere near it. I once threw a suitcase at a spider that I was too scared to get close to but too scared to let crawl under my bed. I don’t kill wasps or bees because I know if I don’t get the job done they will come back to hurt me. And sometimes I’m just so grossed out by the thought of having to clean up a squished insect carcass that I will somehow usher it out the door. I once vacuumed up a junebug, then left the vacuum sitting outside for a week out of fear that the junebug was perhaps still alive and would crawl back out of it.

I didn’t realize until quite recently that most people around me don’t kill bugs. When people find out that I kill bugs they look at me as if I just said I kill cats. I’ve never thought of insects as animals. I think of them as insects. Disgusting, scary insects that will crawl on me in my sleep if I don’t eliminate them. But it turns out that a lot of people don’t share my feelings. So out of a new and very strong sense of guilt I’m trying to be more compassionate these days and just letting the bugs live. Today while I was sweeping my kitchen I came across a huge and ugly caterpillar of sorts. It was all squirmy and disgusting but I tried to get it into my dustpan to put it outside. Unfortunately I think I may have accidentally squished a bunch of its legs trying to get it out of the kitchen and now I’ve released it back into the wild all broken. Is that any better than if I had just stepped on it?