Stinkbug

This morning, I fell in love with a stink bug. Right before I killed her.

It was not a premeditated murder. It was an accident, really. I'd first met her last night while I was laboring over a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle on my dining room table. She was fluttering ecstatically around the chandelier overhead, occasionally alighting on one of the opaque globes for a rest. She must have been exhausted, fooled by the warmth of my house into thinking that winter was over and it was time to emerge. I tried several times to lure her onto a piece of paper so that I could release her, unmolested, outside. But she was crazed with the warmth and the light and would not sit still. I finally gave up, figuring she would either die of stress or crawl back into whatever crevice she'd been sleeping in. I worked on the puzzle a while longer and eventually went to bed.

I was moving the dirty dishes out of the sink this morning to prepare to wash them. Scraps of last night's dinner swirled around in the eddying water, finally settling in the mesh drain. It is my habit to remove the drain and knock the contents into the garbage, and I was about to do that when I noticed movement. A closer look revealed that what I thought was a rusted piece of lettuce was actually my stinkbug friend from last night. Dumping her into the garbage seemed like the wrong way to go, so I set about trying to capture her in yet another effort to release her outside. Well, one thing led to another – it's not a pretty story – and before long my femme fatale was swirling around the drain, fighting with everything she had to resist the gravitational pull of the drainpipe. What could I do?

This is what I did. I reached for the nearest utensil, a knife, and I pushed her armored body down into the wet darkness. I am not proud of this.

The brown marmorated stinkbug (Halyomorpha halys) protects itself from predators by emitting an odor due to trans-2-decenal and trans-2-octenal. In other words, it stinks up the place. Up to this point, I'd been successful in never harming a stink bug into releasing this odor. In fact, I didn't even know what it smelled like. I was about to find out. Some have described the smell as “a pungent odor that smells like cilantro.” Now, cilantro is one of my two favorite herbs, and the scent sends me south of the border to culinary heaven. While the expiration of my little stink bug did not leave me craving guacamole and chips, she did manage to perfume the kitchen with something pungent.

And that's when I fell in love. What spirit! What brass! What revenge! In her last moments, she gave it all she had, met her destiny head-on, got the last word in. And that word --- “stink” – hung around for the rest of the morning, reminding me of the hand I had in this small murder. I remain humbled by her determination and hopelessly, irrevocably, in love with her karma.