They Have No Natural Predators by Carol Bruneau

The killing felt so relentless Julia had to step away. Retreating into the sunporch, she wondered how she’d grown so fixated on ending these small but beautiful—in their own way—lives. Give it up. What difference will it make? To my life, Ray’s, or anyone’s? As if any life is worth more than another. A strange position, she decided, but a logical conclusion to thinking all life has merit. As for their dignity, even she wasn’t quite willing to go that far.

Removing her sunhat, she squirmed to find an offender on her sleeve, body an emerald glitter, a coppery gleam against apricot linen. Scarab-like, it clung by six prickly legs. You bastard, she breathed, picking it off, nudging the door shut as wasps pelted the screen. She resisted crushing the beetle between her fingers, a measure sure to release pheromones and attract its kin. Next the creatures would breach doors and windows, invade the house. Don’t even think it.

            Climate change had normalized the feeling of besiegement, underway since the beetles hitched a ride—citizen scientists claimed—on the ferry from Maine. Each July they descended, appearing randomly at first: here on a raspberry leaf, there on the wisteria. Maybe this year won’t be as dire, she’d tell Ray, ensconced in the cool of his study. While he read Ovid—a break from the Eastern European literature he taught all winter—she would remark with mounting grief how the very next day the pests would be two to a leaf, merrily coupling, then indiscriminately fornicating in threesomes and foursomes, frantically reproducing when they weren’t devouring the plants she had nurtured over twenty years of tending this place. Not just the garden, but the house with its shaded stoop overlooking the road and the seashore, and the porch out back where she kept her paraphernalia. Duck boots for wet meanders about her beds, ancient sneakers for berry picking (pants tucked into socks, because ticks).

“Too many hazards out there,” joked Ray, rarely moving past the stoop where he relaxed in late afternoon. Cooled by ocean breezes and in the absence of foliage, the beetles avoided it. Parked there reading, he would sun himself just enough to bronze face, forearms and shins below his shorts.

“What’s up, Jools?” he called now from deeper inside the house, as she ran the kitchen tap, poured water, downed it. Setting the glass down, she felt something on her neck. To her disgust, a beetle had nestled there—preferring human pheromones to its kind’s? At least the things didn’t appear to bite, although they could pinch when disturbed at their play. Copulating left them drowsy, or maybe it was the day’s heat that rendered them easily plucked and dunked into the pail of soapy water she kept at the ready. The only defence, the only way to slow their assault on trees, flowers and shrubbery, was to collect as many as possible and at day’s end tip the pailful down a nearby sewer grate. Dish soap and water blackened with their fermenting corpses posed no real risk to the environment, Julia felt fairly certain. She observed that in death, swimming in their foul soup, the multitudes lost their jewelled look, acquiring a uniform, dull olive-green, scrabbling legs frozen.

The reek they gave off was hardly different from that of the deceased robin Ray located by the back step, its presence signalled by a carrion beetle in the basil. “Ray! Ray!” The evening before, she had alerted him to the stench, which had crept vaguely past the birdbath, barely dispelled by the scent of bergamot and the thrum of hummingbirds fanning its blooms. Perhaps his nose was more finely attuned than hers from its time spent in books? Discovering the odour’s source, he fetched her rusty spade to lift and slide the carcass into the green bin. Hero of the day, he washed his hands and took the sandwich she’d prepared out front to enjoy while he watched passing cars, tourists slowing for the view.

“I’m a lucky guy,” he had told her once, moving in to the home she’d gained through  a divorce. “How can I possibly leave my garden?” she had asked her ex. The Carpenter Gothic house came as a bonus. A mature student seeking self-improvement, she had met Ray auditing one of his classes, though she was hardly a fan of Kafka.

Disposing of the robin made Ray perspire. He minded the heat. Today, the Humidex soaring, the air hung weighty and oppressive in a way they weren’t used to. Julia watched him remove his polo shirt, couldn’t help noting how well-defined his muscles were for a bookworm’s. If she were to spend more time reading books than puttering outdoors, might they have more to talk about? After nine years of cohabitating in her house, too often their conversations lapsed into the polite, excessively careful, and what more passionate couples would call puerile, realm. Had she been younger, she might’ve tried to reinvent herself? An optimistic prospect for the late middle-aged who felt their zest for life ebbing or, worse, petering out. As if youth, with its uncomfortable lessons, had been superior.  

            “What’s for supper, darling?” Ray again, leaning into the doorframe. After devouring his lunch, he’d changed into the t-shirt that emphasized his eyes’ green.  “Or would you like to go out for a change?” There was a nearby café that tweezered portions of plant-based delicacies onto extra-large plates—to neither of their tastes. But it was too hot to venture further, and she didn’t feel like cooking, again. Sometimes she thought all Ray cared about, besides strange, dark novels with half-mystical, half-diabolical characters, was his stomach.

            “Almost done drafting my syllabus, Jools—give me an hour, then we’ll go?”

            “Deal,” she sighed, sensing something on her scalp—a feeling so subtle it could’ve been a draft displacing a hair. Reaching up, bracing herself, she expected to find another interloper, but there was none. Still, she couldn’t resist a shiver.

Outdoors, she lifted the lid from the pail, inspected the day’s haul. The bodies formed a lumpy scum atop greenish bubbles and bits of vegetation sacrificed to the kills. The stink was revolting: orange-scented detergent, corruption. A survivor still struggled, clicking against its metal walls. She resisted a hostile thought of Ray poring over the Metamorphosis, lecturing twenty-year-olds on chaos and the four elements, eyes clenched shut. She thought of his green shirt, the sheen of its sweat-wicking fabric. What would he say if she requested help? The ideal time to de-bug was supposedly dawn, while the insects dozed. But she found late-afternoon better, when the sun highlighted their shadowy glitter amongst the leaves.

            She crept past the climbing hydrangea—leaves as holey as its tattered blooms—swinging the pail to dispatch the cling-on. Drown, goddamn you! How many hours of each day were spent on this chore? Every waking hour? Making her way to the storm drain below the driveway, she left the flagstone path littered with the detritus of whatever the beetles had not consumed. The drought hadn’t helped. Was it normal to feel such pure hatred for living things? Indefensible, otherwise helpless creatures that only wanted what everyone on the planet wanted: to endure. Whatever had happened to ecological design, the interconnectedness of everything?

Supper was a concoction of locally-foraged plants, which she and Ray ate on the deck behind the café. Dessert, an artisanal sweet decorated with a raspberry. Julia visualized her burgeoning patch at home.

Before dark, suiting up in long sleeves and pants, she slipped outside. Armed with a dish for berries, leaving her little chrome pail of fresh soapy water on the walkway, she busied herself amongst the skeletonized leaves. She almost had to admire the attackers’ tenacity. Tired of traipsing to and from the pail, in desperation she pincered her discoveries, almost savouring the frantic scrabble, crunch and ooze between her fingers. It was absurd now to worry about pheromones, she reasoned, as the killing impulse crested inside. Setting down her berries, she added another thirty or forty offenders to the pail. As the sun sank, abandoning the pail to the stoop, she carefully replaced the lid before heading inside. She didn’t need to see that foul stew first thing next morning.

At dawn, she left Ray sleeping to venture out in her nightie. There the pail stood—empty. She scanned the steps, the flagstones, the grass, for signs of a raccoon, a stray cat or dog. What creature could have emptied her cache? Spilled it over the lawn or…guzzled it? You were supposed to leave fresh water out for birds, pollinators. At least the soup had contained no harmful chemicals, beyond a few drops of Lysol added for kick. But it plagued her to think of any furred creature imbibing it, chewing on those corpses.

            Happy to let Ray sleep on, she made coffee, spooned yogurt and berries into a cup. Savouring their tartness, she watched the hummingbirds. Thought of things she’d heard Ray recording on his phone for class. Something about a golden age, people living in harmony with nature. A time free of war and work. “And then,” he’d sighed, “then came the Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages. The world declined, people grew violent, having to work harder and harder to survive.” Nothing about the value of their lives, of any lives, measured against survival.

A whirring iridescent body zoomed close, lit on the lip of her mug. Outraged, she shrieked. Singeing coffee flew everywhere. “You okay?” Ray appeared at the screen, with a bad case of bed-head. “Coffee? You made coffee?” Pushing past him, she ran cold water, wiped herself off, shook the empty pot.

            Is one life more valuable than another? 

            Grimacing, he angled himself against the counter, watched her fill the pail with water, add detergent, a shot of bleach, Lysol—blue, ocean-scented. A brew fit to kill Covid in the delusional.

            “You could help,” she said. Carrying the frothy mix outside, she prepared for a massacre. Before she could ponder her killing spree, a beetle lit on her nightie, another, and another. Instantly, three couples were copulating on her chest, beads of emerald and copper. Snatching the lot in her fist, she squeezed hard, heard the crunch of lives ending. Felt the guts in her palm, scraped them into the soup, fled into the kitchen.

Ray gazed at her. She couldn’t read the look in his eyes. They were bug-like in the tender light. It seeped in gently yet blazed as it might to a hatchling seeing it the first time. Ray came and stood behind her. She felt his breath on her neck. “Better wash your hands, Jools.” Eyeing the pail, he made no move to place it outdoors.

            “Yeah. Yes.” Staying put, she slid bread into the toaster. She never had been good at multitasking. She heard him slip outside. Wasting no time, she scooped berries from the bowl with her hand, filled a dish just for him. Her palm slicked with red and a ghoulish ochre slime.

            Popillia japonica. The Japanese beetle contains nothing known to be toxic to other animals, she’d read. Ray’s voice in her ear: “Can’t trust the Internet.” She stepped toward the door, dish in hand, ready to feed him, berry by berry. The coffee maker had begun to gurgle and hiss.

As she reached for his cup—Classicists make the wildest lovers—she heard the door’s rattle.

He was standing behind her, dark arms around her body, bare, coppery chest against her back. Through one eye she glimpsed his green cap, worn for concealing his bald spot. She felt the prickle of hair as his arms and legs enfolded her in their hungry embrace. As she let out a scream—who could hear?—she felt his mouth on her ear. Nibbling, tunnelling, burrowing into her flesh.

Leaving shreds of pink nightie on the floorboards, he fed himself berries already purpled by the day.

Carol Bruneau is the Halifax-based author of 12 works of literary fiction: four short story collections, one nonfiction book, and seven novels, including The Little Way, coming soon from Nimbus Publishing/Vagrant Press. Her last book was a short fiction collection, Threshold, nominated for the 2025 Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Her fiction has won various awards and has been published internationally.  “They Have No Natural Predators” is her first piece of speculative fiction.