Scarab Eating

A Slice of Suburban Life

We all made fun of Hugo, in school. He was so gross; a real weird kid. Sometimes at recess, he'd go looking for beetles and, if he found any, eat them. Once Marcus dared him to eat a worm, but he said that was disgusting. Nor did he like spiders. Once, a kid (I wish I could say it was me) asked him what was the difference, and he said that it wasn't so bad, you got used to the taste pretty quick, and besides, beetles weren't like slimy worms or hairy spiders: they were hard and shiny and beautiful. It was odd for him to say that much; odd to answer at all, in fact.
Always a quiet kid, Hugo.

When the flu came to town, Hugo was one of the few kids who didn't get sick. He said it was the beetles keeping him well, but nobody believed that, of course. We all got a bit more convinced that he was nuts; it's not like he was the only healthy one or anything.
That was in late summer. In the autumn it rained a lot, and the leaves were very vibrant. I collected crimson ones. October came. October began to leave.

Hugo's mom was half Egyptian: his grandma was from Egypt, and she'd tell him stories. Boy, the stories she'd tell. That's what he said once, anyway. We figured, as ten-year-olds will, that probably Egyptian people were all crazy, and that you could catch it from your parents. We all offered up thanks for not having egyptian grandmothers, and made mental checks not to marry any Egyptians.
Hugo said in class that Egyptians had Hallowe'en too, but they called it — well, he said a name, but it just sounded like nothing. Gibberish. I thought that actually made sense, because when you think about it, Hallowe'en doesn't sound like anything either. (Not to your average ten-year-old, anyway.) We asked in recess what Egyptian Hallowe'en was like — well, truth be told, we jeered at him. He told us that in Egypt, there are things that come out on the equinox, awful things. (None of us knew what an equinox was, but we all pretended to. We were quite insufferable things.) Some of the kids from Irish families said it was like that in Ireland too, that you salted your doorstep to keep them out. Hugo said in Egypt they carried little charms called scarabs, that looked like beetles on top and had magic carved on the bottom. Everybody laughed and said maybe Hugo should carve magic on the bottom of the beetles he ate, and they'd protect him. He shook his head at us and went off to swing on a tire swing.

Of course I went out trick-or-treating that year; I was very proud because my parents let me go out alone with my friends. We lived in a pretty sparse suburb; we could walk out into the woods and play and sometimes there were little copses of trees between the houses. We were just walking down the road, though, when all the streetlights blew out and the others went missing. Suddenly everything was different and terrible. I remember shouting »SHIT!« or something; I remember running into the woods and stumbling over a root only five steps in or so; I remember — O, how I remember — the breathing of something madly huge and swift on my heels. And I remember seeing, in the moonlight, the fat, shiny black beetle crawling in front of my nose. I don't know what reasoning possessed me, or what fibre of my being came to think of just that, just then. But I grabbed the thing and shoved it in my mouth, quick as I could.
I can still taste that bitter, acrid flavor. But the hunting thing went. Once I had gotten the bug down and stopped hearing the noise of my own chewing, everything was quiet. That's all. There was nothing there.

The next day at school, there were five kids missing. One of them was my friend Joseph. I told Hugo, and he nodded gravely.