Grasshoppers—Publication Announcement & Story Teaser

My short story Grasshoppers has been published in Dark Horses Magazine. It’s about hunger and hubris and of course, grasshoppers. Enjoy a brief excerpt.

I’m still figuring out how to say this plainly…BUT….my very first short story has been published!!!!!

Grasshoppers appears in issue 50 of Dark Horses Magazine, a home for the strange and the weird. It feels right that this story—which is about land, hunger, and hubris—found its place there.

The premise of Grasshoppers is simple: A farmer decides to eradicate the grasshoppers that are devouring his fields and driving him crazy. He believes he’s in control. In ownership. In the old hierarchy of man over nature.

But there is a point at which hunger organizes.

What follows is not the whole story, only a small excerpt. The complete piece lives with the magazine. If this fragment unsettles you (as I hope it does), I encourage you to seek it out there. (Links to participating retailers are on the magazine’s website.)

Thank you, as always, for reading and for supporting my work. It means a lot to me!!

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Grasshoppers

It had been a dry year—one of many. The fields were baking under the sun, cooked to a crisp before their roots could find the slightest hint of hydration. I didn’t mow once. Between the heat and the grasshoppers, there was no point. The front lawn and back pasture never grew more than half an inch that summer.

The grasshoppers were thriving amongst the dead. Armies of them sprang from the burnt grass when I lumbered across the yard, skittering out from underfoot like spring hares. The relentless chirping. It was enough to drive a man mad.

As the heat continued and rain became a naive dream, I could tell the hoppers were getting hungry. Something about the way they’d stare at me in the morning sent shivers down my spine. At first, I brushed off their unblinking looks as nonsense. But after a few weeks, I noticed more of the jumping bastards. It was as if they were gathering in numbers. More and more came each morning. Waiting. Watching.

I hated them. I had to do something about it. They were decimating what little had grown in the fields, and I needed the grass to feed the cattle. So, fed up, I ran into the local Co-op and bought myself a couple of jugs of bug killer. The lady at the front counter reassured me that this juice would do the trick. I tipped my hat and told her, “Thanks for the vote of confidence”. I was about to find out for myself the hubris of man.

That afternoon, with the sun clawing at my back, I set to work spraying the lawn with a fine misting of insecticide. The stuff stank like death in a bottle, which at the time, had been reassuring. When I went to bed that night, my pillow felt softer than ever, as if the worries weighing me down were lifted with a light spray of chemical killer. There was no chirping that night. I dreamt of thunderstorms.

When I awoke that morning, there was an eerie silence, as if the farm was holding its breath in anticipation. There was no buzzing, no chirping; even the cattle were silent as they chewed their cud. I moved to the window, drawn by the need to inspect the heavy silence and the aftermath of my short-lived victory.

The grass was a sallow brown from the heat and lay unmoving. Yet, in the center of the yard, a curious sight stopped me cold in my slippers. There, amid the devastation of drought, lay the grasshoppers. Their dead bodies weren’t scattered in a haphazard disarray as I originally expected. No—they were alive and gathered in a perfect circle, as if plotting their next move.

Their bodies, once humming with movement and noise, were now still. The sight was unsettling. I could see them, see their countless numbers, their morbid congregation, their little black eyes glinting under the already too hot sun. There was hunger in those dark looks.

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Thanks again for reading my work!

If you enjoyed this excerpt, you might also enjoy my serialized short story The Crazy Cat Lady (all 7 parts are now complete!).

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