Friday is writing creepy bummers.

My mother is an entomologist, or rather a forest pathologist who has studied a lot about bugs and their parts and their functions. She says a lot of freaky space alien sounding things about her work, but really that’s just how bugs are built. My favorite thing she talks about is the way their mouths are, and how many insects have pointy grabbing bits like sharp hollow arms coming out of their face holes to hold and drain a juicy leaf or stem.

I think about those mouths so much.

Do you ever think about how it would feel to be paralyzed, and held and pierced and sucked dry? To look into eight eyes or one thousand compound mirrors and drained of your life force, powerless to do anything other than weep watery sap and hormonal alarms to your neighbors?

Can you feel your skin becoming the poreful epidermis of a sweet young maple leaf? The chlorophyll, the mesophyll? The trichomes tingling, singing alarms in oils and alcohols with the rest of the green victims, a canopy of rapturous pain?

Plants do feel pain, you know. They have to. It’s part of the ecosystem’s necessary communication network. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

When I go to the bug house at the zoo, I look for the piercing-sucking mouth parts. It’s fun to say, to see, and to imagine being a pretty plant part in a mandible. I think I’d be a buttercup stem, with a reflective golden halo beckoning every hungry soul to take, take, take from me. Or maybe a sunflower leaf beneath a Fibonnaci spiral of waxy yellow kisses; just as glowy, welcoming and resilient at the humble buttercup, but edible to even more species. I can’t imagine myself upsetting a cow’s stomachs like those itchy marsh flowers do.

I imagine my yellow and green heart is a beacon to aphid and mantis and other exoskeletons full of pointy thirst.

Come here, come here and feast, fill your abdomen, breathe deeply into your thorax and engage those piercing-sucking mouthparts as you will. We were born for this dance, you and I. We keep the forest alive through our agony and ecstasy. Take my wet memories with you when you leave me, leave only scabby desiccation behind and smell the cries of my leafy brethren. Feel my mother stem toughen and sense the slight tremble of the earth under your six barbed feet as our roots grow deeper, wider, stronger. We made this place stronger together.

Imagine yourself in the wild decaying underleaf of a deciduous wood in mid-autumn. Are you the mouth, or the meal?