“As she turned the corner I edged out of bed, trying to be quiet. My plan was to get dressed, sneak out of her apartment, and flee without notice. I managed my underwear and one sock before she called out to me from the other room. “Come look,” she offered. “I’ll show you.”” // HEADER PHOTO: Lifeforce © Cannon Films, 1985

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fiction, nov 24

From start to finish, the date went well. The conversation flowed, was interesting, and easy. Her smile was genuine—I’m sure of it. She even laughed at my jokes. At the restaurant, the food was excellent—a burger that transcended meat and bun. Later, at her place, the sex was fantastic, neither of us having been left unattended. Up until then, the evening had been perfect. It was afterwards that things got strange.

“I’m going to check on my eggs.”

I thought she was offering me food. “I’m still digesting my dinner. I couldn’t eat another bite.”

“You misunderstand,” she was off-put, but patient. She managed that same, genuine smile I’d seen at the restaurant. “I’m going to look after my ootheca.”

“I’m sorry, your…?”

“Ootheca,” she sounded it out, which didn’t clarify anything. “My egg capsule,” she went on. “It carries my young. Protects my brood.”

Sitting on the edge of the bed, still naked, my expression must have shown I remained oblivious. My date shook her head and sighed. “I’m a mantis, Michael.”

“Um, you’re a…”

“Mantis,” she said, sounding out the word just as she had done before, but unlike ootheca, I knew exactly what mantis meant.

“Oh.” It was the best that I could manage. I mean, what else could I say? The girl was an insect.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” she said, turning to reveal a perfect backside that for all the world looked feminine—and human.

I cleared my throat, stalling for time, for the right words, for my brain to catch up with the surprise that had rendered me dumb. “Not at all,” I offered. “I love bugs.” I’m hopeless when under pressure. I winced at my indelicate choice of phrasing. If she was offended, my date didn’t show it as she walked away to “tend to her ootheca.”

Never before had I knowingly met a mantis—let alone gone out to dinner with one, had sex with one—but their pheromones were known to make humans see anything they liked, men see a beautiful woman in place of an insect.

I remember the diagrams I was shown when the insect race first invaded earth, the images of what was actually there, the real faces and bodies beneath the layer of biochemical magic that made someone see a pin-up girl or a tall-dark-and-handsome, whatever variation of human titillated the soul. I recall the eerie, pupilless eyes, milky white and overlarge. The angled arms and legs, serrated like steak knives. The gleaming chitin and wet mandible. The banana-shaped abdominal segment. The genital chamber located at its tip, wide and predatory, like the open maw of a hungry wolf.

As she turned the corner I edged out of bed, trying to be quiet. My plan was to get dressed, sneak out of her apartment, and flee without notice. I managed my underwear and one sock before she called out to me from the other room. “Come look,” she offered. “I’ll show you.”

I had seen her naked from head to toe. What else could she show me? A hidden tattoo? A birthmark in an amusing shape I had neglected to notice? Her true form? Her emerald, armor-plated body? Her mandible that could stretch wide enough to engulf a cat or small dog, my own head? Or—what was it again?—her ootheca? I wondered at my options, relishing none of them but the door.

“We’ve had such a lovely evening,” she—it—called from down the hallway beyond the kitchen. “I know we come from different worlds, from galaxies divided by hundreds of light years. But a bigot is a bigot, Michael. Both here on earth and on my home planet Mantodea, on every world between. And really, is there anything less attractive than a closed mind? Come, Michael, and open yours. Come, and see my babies.”

In principle, I agreed with her. No one likes a bigot. But in a pinch, I could think of a few things less attractive. Six legs, no matter how shapely, are four too many.

I walked toward the front door, paused as my hand lingered on its brass handle. I considered my date with the mantis: the free-flowing conversation, the dynamite sex, the amazing burger. Maybe I was being small-minded after all. Or: maybe those pheromones were pulling at my puppet strings.

“Are you coming?” She called from around the corner, humming a song that held notes both among and beyond the human register.

Yes, I was being a bit close-minded. But I was also curious. I had, after all, never seen a genuine ootheca. I removed my hand from the doorknob and followed the rich timbre of her sexy voice.

At the end of the hallway, I entered a small room about the size of a walk-in closet. It was bare of shelves or coat rails, bare of furniture, bare of everything except a space heater on max power and a scaled object the size of an ostrich egg, which lay propped up on a cushion.

“Jesus, it’s like the Amazon jungle in here.”

“The heat accelerates my babies’ development.”

“Is that so?” I fanned myself with a hand, glad to be dressed in nothing but my underpants and a single sock. I looked at the insect orb, a lime-green rugby ball, and couldn’t help but notice its beauty. “So, that’s your… egg thing?”

“My ootheca,” she confirmed. “Inside are over 100 eggs, over 100 baby mantises nearly ready to emerge.”

“Over 100!” Such was my surprise that my eyes went nearly as large as the ootheca. “That’s quite the population spike.”

My date chuckled, a strange, alien sound. “Not really.”

For what it was, her nonchalance was striking. “Some people freak out when they find out they have twins,” I said. “You know, expecting one and getting double.”

“Some humans, maybe.”

“Right,” I nervously laughed. “Some humans.” I looked at her long legs and luxuriant hair, all her contours, slopes, and curves. She was perfect. A perfect woman. “Because you’re a mantis. An insect. Six legs and all. And we just went to a five-star restaurant and had sex. No, really, it all makes sense.”

“Why wouldn’t it make sense?” She turned her attention away from the egg capsule to challenge me. “You had a good time, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I admitted, studying the grain of the wooden floor, avoiding her accusatory eyes.

“We had pleasant discourse, no?”

“We did.”

“My dinner was delicious. Was yours?”

“The burger was out of this world.”

“And the sex?”

“Also out of this world.”

“So what’s the problem, Michael?” She asked. “Is it that I, too, am out of this world? Is that what’s wrong? Is it that I come from a planet whose star is beyond your world’s night sky?”

“It’s not that,” I tried to explain as delicately as possible, as tactfully as I could manage without revealing that intercourse with an arthropod simply wasn’t my kink. That I’m just not that type of guy.

“Well, then?”

How was I to say it? How to let her know without offense? That I would just as soon fuck a tiger, a gorilla, just as soon exchange sexual favors with a porpoise or an American bald eagle, as a mantis from the far-off planet of Mantodea, which is to say, of course, I would not fuck any of these creatures. It was a simple matter of compatibility, and more explicitly, a lack thereof.

“It’s false advertising.” I complained.

“False advertising?”

“Think about it,” I argued. “You show up, all smiles—human smiles—and laugh at all my jokes. Girls never laugh at my jokes.”

“But I’m not a—”

“I’m not finished,” I was determined to get my point across. “You walk in the door, pheromones up to your ears—do insects have ears?—hijacking my brain, making me see the ideal woman. A Homo sapien woman. Then, after dinner, after we walk home hand-in-hand. After we have sex. Sex! Then you hop out of bed and casually tell me you are an insect from the far reaches of the cosmos.”

“Was it too much, too fast?”

“It was too much, too late. You should have told me from the beginning. The deception was immoral. I mean, had you been a man disguised as a woman and revealed the fact after sex, that could offend certain people. I swing both ways, so I’d shrug it off, but I don’t swing in the direction of insects.”

“I see your point.”

“Then you tell me you’re expecting. That 100 babies are asleep in the closet. I mean, you could’ve mentioned that over dinner. At the very least, you could’ve mentioned it before I agreed to a second date.”

“It’s just the one ootheca, Michael.”

“Over 100 kids!”

“By human standards it’s a lot, isn’t it?”

“You bet it fucking is! Most couples start with a dog.”

“Is that what we are?”

“What, dogs?”

“No, a couple.”

I buried my face in my hands and sighed. “Can I see the real you?”

“My mantis form?”

“Yes.” I braced myself. “Show me who you are.”

My date agreed, slowing the excretion of pheromones. She went to the bathroom to wipe her lithe, human limbs free of the insect oils that simmered from within. She polished her grass-green exoskeleton and arranged her antennae so they were perky and erect. She expunged the plush, human lips and long-lashed, almond eyes. She discarded her mask and shroud of velvety skin. In place of a beautiful woman, an upright ape of the human distinction, from out the bathroom emerged a tall and elegant invertebrate from space.

She walked past the kitchen down the hallway towards the small room where I waited for her to arrive. From within, I listened to her six feet tap upon the hardwood floor, as if she wore three pairs of stilettos. As the rhythm of her steps grew louder, I backed myself into the far corner of the walk-in closet that was a makeshift mantis nest. Nervously, I huddled, hands hugging knees, beside a basketball-sized egg capsule, an ootheca, that vibrated with more than 100 insect infants.

Her face popped into the aperture of the door frame, its hammerhead bulk swiveling on the spindly axis of her delicate neck. Her froth-white orbs stared in space, at nothing, at me, at god-knows-what, and her ocelli shimmered, beady and black, a triptych of smaller eyes, her secondary visual system nestled dead center between her ballooning, compound monsters.

At first, I gaped. I stared. I winced, maybe even whimpered. But as my date stepped further in, revealing the thorny, tibial spines protruding from her forearms, my interest piqued. I perked, wishing to see more. I studied the allure of her graceful prothorax, mesothorax, and metathorax in place of a cumbersome spine. Then, the pièce de résistance: she shuffled her ample abdominal segment through the door, leaving me weak at the knees. The coup de grâce: She spread her wings, an alien angel, rendering me hopelessly in love.

But was it love? Or was it pheromones? There was something in the air.

Without thinking, I held her hand, which dwarfed my own. Scissor-like, they could amputate a man with ease. I didn’t flinch, but squeezed them tight. I leaned into my date, my mantis lover. Looking upward, I was lost in her beauty, lost in her eyes—both sets—beach ball big and golf ball small.

“You are beautiful as you are.” I told her, and she looked down at me from above, offering a warm smile that parted her sixteen-inch mandible.

At our feet, the ootheca quivered, then cracked. “Look,” my date pointed at the ruptured egg capsule. “My babies are emerging.” The oblong object oozed and gurgled slime onto the floor.

“Have you chosen their names?”

“Only about fifty of them,” she told me. “Let’s choose together, you and I. Let’s think of names for the other one hundred, or more.”

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