“What’da they call you?”
“Guess.”
“Beautiful?”
“Creature.”
Beautiful Creature.
Nuptial gifts play a vital role in safe copulation for males in numerous species. As such, Predator will offer to provide for Creature the meal, a few cocktails, the quarters for her wash. Furthermore, the female will select a mate who displays direct benefits to ensure survival, including decreased risk of parasites.
Now that surprise has failed to flatter, the chase will ensue.
Bottom-feeding African Lake Flies, Nkhungu to the natives, emerge synchronously at the new moon or shortly there after. Should they come ashore: babies cry and mothers collect the clothes drying on the line. Windows shut as the populace wait out the swarm in hot darkness.
I have been told they are delicious when deep fried, perhaps sprinkled over small cakes.
Early European explorers told tales of lakes which smoked as if ablaze describing columns of mating insects a meter high or more. They live for a single day.
Falling to the water’s surface as the sun sinks, they release their eggs.
They perish.
(At the chase’s conclusion: the kill!)
Come Sunday morning, Creature displays a section of grapefruit and inquires if it looks to Predator a brain. His kitchen walls’ hue is a shade of her preference, as is the fruit’s.
Sometimes romantically viewed as an extreme form of monogamy, the prevalence of sexual cannibalism in Latrodectus provides the origin of its common name “black widow.” Female Salticidae (jumping spiders) have been known to consume their
28 | Psychopomp Magazine