The Lanternflies

When Jessica first became pregnant that summer, the Parks Department encouraged everyone in town to kill the lanternflies on sight. Constantly nauseated or craving, when she passed a clutch of lanternflies seething on her maple tree’s bark, Jess dutifully used her flip-flop to slaughter as many as she could. Their white-spotted black bodies and blue and red wings transfixed Jess as they fluttered dead onto the lawn. They were sentient and inhuman. Some used their thick calves and thighs to launch from the tree like acrobats in leotards. In her ninth week she told her husband one morning before it got too hot, “I want this baby, Ryan. I do.” All the expected babies on the block were wanted babies. “Even in these crazy times!”

Jess’s neighbor, Barbara, sprayed vinegar from a bottle onto her fence.  Barbara wore thick glasses that made her eyes two guppies trapped in bowls. Her husband was dead, both sons had moved far away. “Hey Barb,” Jess waved, not wanting to talk. Barb was eighty-four years old and held the bottle like a pistol, attacking the lanternflies as if she were blindly rage-shooting an intruder who was already dead, like a traumatized victim in a thriller.

Jess had killed plump water bugs in the basement, offed mice mired in custard-yellow glue. Planting bulbs, she once cleaved a garden snake in half. The town had a mandate. DO YOUR PART on fliers and PSAs on the college radio station. Everyone hated that summer. Books, women, the weather, plastic. But they hated the lanternflies together and would do whatever it took, as a community, to eradicate them.

Jess and Ryan had been trying for a baby since they moved here. After two years of marriage, it was the next logical step. Most of the couples under forty on their new block were named Jessica and Ryan. Trying to get pregnant was fun, at first. Lying on her back, knees to chest on ovulation day, Jess imagined a patch of thousands of fertilized white pinhead lanternfly eggs lashed to her cervix like it was a continent on a map.

Once Jess downed the lanternflies, she twisted her heel until they were smeared like broken eyeshadows on the pavement. Invisible cicadas chittered in orgasmic waves, but the flamboyant lanternflies needed to be taught a lesson. The rage soon inflamed the town’s children. Pre-teens walking home from day-camp tortured the lanternflies that gathered in Memorial Park. Cherry and blue raspberry ICEE’s from 7-11 stained their mouths as they punished the insects, cursing like men. Watching them kill, Jess was heavy-boned, aware of the boys’ sweaty necks, the bits of insect on their knuckles, their shins sticky with excreted lanternfly honeydew.

The night of the summer supermoon in her first month, when the sun set late and the ground itself was sweating, the deer crept in. The deer also roved in clusters. A mother and two white-spotted fawns. Now two mothers, four fawns, on delicate legs. On Jess’s lawn, a giant stag, silent and holy as a Brahma bull, with regal branched antlers that ended in pointed tips like prehistoric fangs. All four legs were tucked beneath it, its neck thick with muscle. It locked eyes with Jess, fearless, everything sultry and intimate in the bright moonlight.

Up close, the buck smelled like horse and blood. Jess hovered her palm close enough to feel its pulse ignite her lifeline, heartline, marriage and children triangle. The oyster-sized life inside her turned like a ball of dough in an oiled bowl. Soon, each home had a deer on its front lawn after the sun went down, accusing them all of something, as the asphalt melted back to tar and the squirrels lay gasping, splotched on their bellies on high tree limbs to stay cool.

The oldest Jessica on the block was the first to miscarry that summer. A wail from a bathroom window, their Subaru Outback reversing from the driveway on soft tires toward the hospital two towns away. Then a second, a third, a glitch in the cosmic algorithm. Barb was spraying her lone front birch with Ortho Bug-Clear when she said, “I heard that other Jessica lost hers this week,” as if the block’s fetuses were earring backs or socks from a dryer.

“Have you seen the animals?” Jess asked. “At night I mean.”

“It’s getting absurd,” Barb said. Blue veins in her old hands twisted as she squeezed the trigger.

Jess marked time now, not by the calendar and her due date, but by the hour the cicada song dwindled, when the fawns nibbled the redbud trees, by the number of stags alert as lions on her lawn. When the foxes took over, she was at twelve weeks. They loped down from the mountain forest and onto her street, soft-pawed as cats, twitchy and mistrustful. Jess closed the blinds and wrapped a thick fleece blanket around her shoulders, despite the heat, to hide from all the dark beady eyes, the musk. What had come for the others was barreling towards her.

Her bloody underwear stretched between her knees like a skin, Jess’s was the last to go. Ryan’s hand on her shoulder.  “We can’t give up,” he said. She shivered with relief as the foxes yipped and stags clashed horns outside. She imagined her muscles unclenching like a fist so it could fall to the ground with a soft thump and jettison high and hard away from this place, a feral survivalist that could outlive her. “That’s all there is to it,” Ryan said, his own call of the wild. 

“Keep trying,” Jess repeated.  There was nothing left to do. Nothing left but to surrender. She stepped out of her underwear, following the moon, and walked barefoot out of the front door into the street and out into the hot bright night.

Arlaina Tibensky has short fiction in One Story, Smokelong Quarterly, Stanchion, the Reckon Review, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in New Stories from the Midwest, 2018. She is the author of the young adult novel And Then Things Fall Apart. Nominated for Best of the Net, Pushcart, and The Best Small Fictions, she received a 2024 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and is working on a new novel.

Published April 15 2025