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About This Author
 Kiya is a young woman with many interests. She's got a degree in Computer Science and Registered Nursing.
She's an avid reader and considers Stephen King one of her favorite authors.
She's also been known to pen one or two stories here and there, and as a proud moderator of Writing.Com, she invites you to check out her portfolio (and even better, to sign up today!).
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The Bradbury Chronicles #1106984 added January 28, 2026 at 5:15am
Restrictions: None
Stridulation
“Can I keep them, Mom?”
Kathy’s knife stalled mid-slice, cucumber bleeding wet seeds across the cutting board.
The jar appeared inches from her face—clouded plastic, slick with condensation. Inside, two insects hurled themselves against the walls, bodies clicking and snapping. Grasshoppers. Too big. Too alive.
“Female grasshoppers,” Alex said proudly. “You can tell by the size.”
The insects scraped harder, legs rasping against plastic in a sound like fingernails on teeth. Kathy’s stomach twisted.
She should have been a boy, Kathy thought distantly, though the idea dissolved beneath the revulsion crawling up her spine. Alex loved dirt, rot, living things that wriggled. Last week it had been a lizard, warm and frantic in her small hands—
“Mom,” Alex said sharply. “You’re spacing out again. Can I keep them? I’ll take care of them. I promise.”
“I don’t know,” Kathy said, already knowing the answer.
She reached for the avocados, trying not to imagine that sound echoing through her home at night. Clicking. Scraping. A living persistence.
“Mooom.”
The whine snapped something loose.
“That’s enough, Alexandra Ellie Shaw. Go wash up. Dinner’s almost ready.”
Alex hesitated, jar still clutched to her chest.
“And leave that outside,” Kathy added. “Now.”
The stomping came, furious and theatrical, ending in a door slam that shook dust from the light fixture. Kathy pressed her palms to the counter and breathed.
Ten years old. Already like this.
Robert would have laughed it off. Robert would have crouched down and explained ecosystems and let Alex keep the damn bugs for a day.
Two years had passed since the fire at the power plant—the accident that took him from them. Since then, Kathy and Alex had been learning how to live without the man they loved most. Where Robert had been patient and playful, Kathy had inherited the role of disciplinarian. Tough love didn’t come naturally, and at ten years old, Alex was beginning to resent it.
Dinner passed thick with tension. Kathy savored the Asian rice. Alex didn’t eat. She crushed peas into green paste, eyes dark, watching.
“You’re not still sulking over a pair of locusts,” Kathy said.
“Grasshoppers,” Alex muttered.
The look she gave her then—measured, contemptuous—was wrong. Too old. Too knowing. It was her mother’s face for just a second, and fury bloomed hot and familiar.
“If you’re going to act like a spoiled brat,” Kathy said, voice sharp as bone, “you can go to your room. No dinner.”
Alex scoffed.
That did it.
“Go. To. Your. Room. Now.”
Alex went—but fear replaced defiance halfway up the stairs. Kathy saw it too late.
Shame settled in her gut like a stone.
An hour later, ice cream sweating through cardboard, Kathy stood outside Alex’s door.
“Ho-honey?” she whispered. “Can I come in?”
Nothing.
No music. No movement.
Her heartbeat thudded, slow and heavy. Then she heard it.
A sound she recognized instantly.
Scraping. Clicking. Multiplied.
Not just two sets of legs.
Many.
Her hand closed around the doorknob. Anger flared, bright and blinding.
She twisted.
The room breathed.
The walls pulsed, carpet writhing beneath a carpet of bodies—grasshoppers layered upon grasshoppers, their abdomens split and spilling pale, wet sacs that twitched and tore themselves free. Wings beat uselessly, slick and membranous, shedding fragments that stuck to the walls like shed skin.
They were eating each other. Splitting. Growing.
The smell hit her next—green rot, iron, something sweet and fecal.
Kathy screamed.
The swarm answered.
They leapt as one, a living tide slamming into her face. Bodies forced past her lips, down her throat, wings shredding against teeth and tongue. She gagged, convulsed, felt legs hook into her soft palate, into her sinuses, into the warm darkness behind her eyes.
Her scream collapsed into choking clicks.
Inside her, they moved.
Scratched.
Nested.
As her knees buckled, her vision swam—and through it she saw Alex.
Curled beneath the desk. Alive. Crying.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she sobbed, fingers pressed to her ears as the insects flowed around her, over her, sparing her. “I didn’t know they’d need so much room.”
By morning, Winchester Street was quiet.
A week later, they found the bodies—mother and daughter swollen and split with strange lesions, skin ruptured in clean, symmetrical patterns.
Marks identical to those left by the romalea microptera.
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Word Count: 717
Prompt: Evidently, avocados, Asian rice, and female grasshoppers all have 24 pairs of chromosomes.
Write a story or poem featuring all three. Use Horror/Scary as your genre.
Written For: "The Writer's Cramp 24th Birthday"  |
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