A sort of beetle, just mated disgusting with armored half-shell winglets and the type of mandibles that seem enormous—though they are quite small in the scheme of things transfixing—because they evoke in the human mind some ante-millennial instinct, fear of typhus, or malaria, or staff, or whatever might be born on the primordial mouthparts of a being with lowly table manners; a sort of beetle that crackles like tallow when plunged into flame by its own phototactic misdirection or a boy with...
