Author: Jessica Reilly-Chevalier

It was the grasshoppers that were the most noticeable.
In the springs of her youth, Julia could remember the annual infestation of these grotesque creatures. They would inundate the garden, growing fat and long on her mother’s irises and catnip. When she would walk through the greenery, they would leap from every direction to escape her footsteps, dozens of them flying in every direction.
Grasshoppers were gangly and uncoordinated, leaping into the void with a sense of directionless urgency. The smaller ones would knock into her legs, land on her feet, and she would shake them off with a sense of disgust. But the big ones could leap.
Julia remembered with a distinct sense of violation the ones that would launch themselves into the air with such gusto they would land on her face, on her head, get tangled in her hair. Once her father, seeing her in a panic, slammed his massive hand against the frantically moving tangles of her hair, squashing the bug against her skull. It had taken her mother over an hour to wash it all out.
Every year after that Julia watched the grasshoppers return with a coil of fear sneaking its way around her heart. And yet something about the insects fascinated her; their bulging eyes and massive back legs, the bright colors of their soft bodies, their mouths moving side to side. They were disgusting and fearful creatures but there was also something almost otherworldly about them in that garden.
These grasshoppers were decorations more than anything else, Julia mused as she watched one gracefully sail through the air. It landed with perfect accuracy on the stem of a daisy. These were tiny, harmless little thing, scarcely bigger than the pad of her index finger and hardly seen.
Why bother with insects? They were not beloved pets nor necessary livestock. And yet their presence was oddly soothing. One could almost forget their nightly hum was the buzz of computers, not legs. She wondered, momentarily, if the bugs served another purpose. Pollinators, perhaps? Data collectors? Nothing here was without intention.
When was the last time she had seen a real grasshopper? Julia couldn’t remember. It was, she supposed, one of those events that doesn’t register at the time, seeming so unremarkable. One moment it seems the insects are everywhere, swarming biblically and the next gone and the garden silent.
It wasn’t a discussion anyone wanted to have, anyway, Julia thought as she stood, swiping dirt from her bottom out of habit although there was none. She didn’t have to worry about dirt here.