Praying Mantis 

My toddler watched a praying mantis die two weeks ago. 

She hovered, rapt, as its brown body stood erect beside the canister of cat food in our barn: its wings vibrating furiously and forelegs raised as arms in a desperate Zeibekiko. As it lurched toward her, like a flimsy lever poorly anchored to the floor, she did not move. Wings fanned behind its head, protecting the injured leg it held limp against the air. My daughter knelt for a closer look. She was not afraid, but I was. 

Our cat—a feral that had adopted our barn as her refuge from coyotes and the cold—rubbed against my calf, she too watching my daughter, and all of us watching as the praying mantis somehow strained more length from its body. I did not expect it when it happened: the cat pounced on the mantis and crunched it in half. As she devoured the head and thorax, its legs and wings battered her muzzle. The lower half dropped onto the floor, and my daughter reached to touch the flailing rest. But the cat closed over it. She continued to gnaw at the air even after she swallowed. 

My daughter was the one to break the silence. 

“Praying mantis!” 

She hollered in the unregulated way that toddlers all do, forcing the words out before I might interrupt her. 

“Mama! Penny eat it!” 

The next day, she brought it up again, just before her afternoon nap. 

“Penny eat praying mantis?” 

This time it was a question, beckoning me to recall this moment we had shared together. Her eyes were gray and curious, and I wondered if acknowledging that, yes, I had seen the mantis, had seen its fury made trivial by the feral cat we fed every afternoon, would quell her concern or encourage it. Her face continued to search mine for the answers she thought I held back, but she remained quiet and dozed after three verses of “Scarborough Faire.” 

The next time it occurred to her as I shuttled her to daycare at her grandparents’ house. There is a back road I take, not a shortcut, but I tell her it is. It is just wide enough for one car to pull halfway into the brush while another car passes slowly, most drivers nodding to acknowledge the inconvenience and a few waving with theatrical faces and edging off the road two feet more than is necessary. It is on this road under the cathedral of green and yellow trees that my daughter remembers the mantis. She exclaims from her car seat, and this time it is a declaration, a resolution that she must have adjudicated while napping. 

“Praying mantis! Penny eat it. Penny eat praying mantis.” 

“Yes, she did,” I say. 

And we go on like this for days, her announcing the mantis each morning and again each afternoon on the same stretch of back road between our house and her grandparents’. Even if the dialogue feels rehearsed to me, she declares the event with fresh conviction. So I begin to elaborate beyond simple confirmation. It was hurt, I say. And, They are an invasive species, those large mantises. And then, Penny is a hunter. That’s what cats do. 

Sometimes she replies with a quiet “oh,” but more often, as if telling someone else that is not me, she says to the window, “Penny eat it.” 

Before the death of this particular mantis, its smaller green relative had frequented the door to our patio. It was an elegant, unflinching creature, and some days it was so still against the pane that I wondered if it was alive. I was careful not to disturb it when my daughter and I ventured to the yard, and she soon mimicked my admiration for the furtive insect. Look, I would say holding her up to inspect, look at its arms; it has elbows like you. And, Do you see its big eyes? Do you see the antennae? Sometimes I rambled about its contribution to our little ecosystem, the spotted lanternflies and other “bad buggies” it readily consumed, as if its service to our garden beds was a collaborative one. I did not subject her to an apology for its sexual cannibalism or tell her that, despite what I learned in school, it is not always the female mantises that attack and devour their mate. Instead, its body became something sacred to me and a source of intrigue for my daughter, who desperately wished to trail her finger across the demure slit of its wings. But I told her no, and she understood, although I never said it directly, its fragility in relation to us. The mantis became something to protect en route to waste the afternoon in play. 

So I found myself at a loss to explain the death of the brown mantis in the barn, and I avoided naming the thing itself, wondering, waiting, for my daughter to do it. When it happened, it was a Thursday morning, and the hum of the engine was the only sound between us. I feigned attentiveness to the inevitable conversation while tallying the appointments I needed to arrange, the groceries I had forgotten to add to my shopping list, the friend I had not yet texted back. My daughter began the ritual as she often did, with the sudden recollection of it all. 

“Praying mantis! Mama! Penny eat it.” 

I answered as I should, “Yes, she did.” But this time: “It’s okay, though.” 

Without peeking in the rearview mirror, I knew her eyes were turned to the window when she said, “It died.” 

It was startling, even if I had been waiting for her to say it. Where did she learn this verb “die”? Had I uttered the word when I thought she was not listening? And how did she know to use a past tense, the tense that acknowledges the grief begotten between the event and the stretch of time that follows? For two weeks, we had been replaying the facts of it, that there had been a mantis, that the cat had eaten it. Her declarations were always also questions that I never answered because I believed that the revelation had to be one she arrived at on her own. Because, I told myself, death is fundamental to the human experience and we know it even before we know the word for it. Or maybe not. Perhaps if I did not name it, I would delay just a bit longer the existence of it and the natural concern for what else and who else might die. Would die. 

We did not discuss the cat and her responsibility, or my responsibility because I feed the cat. Nor did we discuss whether the injured mantis, the invasive species that surely devoured a few of its smaller green counterparts, likely even the one clinging to our patio door, deserved to disrupt our little ecosystem and in its injured state deserved anything more than to be the pleasure of Penny the cat. Had I glorified the mantis beyond its due? I sipped my coffee, disappointed that in my rush to leave the house I had forgotten to swirl in a dash of cream. This was my daughter’s first encounter with death and I had nothing to offer but lazy justification and confirmation. Yes, it happened. 

DESTINI PRICE

Destini Price is based in New Jersey, but still pines for the Blue Ridge Mountains of her home state, Virginia. She has not previously published her work.