Pest Control
by C.C. Russell
It isn’t that hard to kill a thing smaller than you, not really.
I learned with ants. We called them fire ants but they weren’t. Not technically. They were red, though, and when they bit us our skin burned and really that was enough. We were told that they were fire and needed to be extinguished. We hit them with sticks. We dug up their homes. We drowned them. We doused them in gasoline and watched them smolder. It ruins the metaphor but it was our final step, how we finally got rid of them so that we could build a garden in that dry soil.
Next were grasshoppers. That was easy because of the bible – the locust plagues and all. They were the children of the devil. They would eat our crops and therefore could not be allowed to stay alive. My mother’s favorite thing to kill were earwigs. She believed the myths about them, how they crawled into you as you slept, and she took a strange pleasure in snuffing them out – popping their wriggling bodies between her fingers. My father, boxelders. Some nights he would leave out a full glass of water just to see how many had drowned by morning light. It became a contest, tallies left as hashmarks on the calendar in the kitchen every morning.
Eventually, I was taught to hunt. Sparrows, squirrels. My father turned the fur of my first jackrabbit into a hat that I wore with pride. Each new challenge slightly larger though by then the first signs of boredom had already begun. I was itching for more.
When we caught the neighbor kid stealing a pumpkin and trying to haul it over the fence, there wasn’t a whole lot of need for discussion. This was what we had trained for. This was why we were alive. Dad tousled my hair and smiled. We were out the door just that fast.
The Molotov Cocktail 