The visitor

On Wednesday night, as I was wrapping up hanging out with my friend Bret, we found a large, striped beetle crawling in the driveway in front of his house. It slugglishly trundled along, then split its back open to reveal wings and rise dramatically into the air ... and then straight into a wall. It repeated this several times. Not wanting to see it bash itself senseless, we corraled it into a Ziploc container and I drove it home to photodocument it and release it into the wilds of my backyard.

Upon closer examination, I discovered that it had given itself a sort of insect equivalent of a bloody nose. I also found that it had swiveling horns and a fuzzy underside. My wife decided it was a cross between a gremlin and an animal she can't remember now. Possibly a lemur. It did seem to be a mix of several different bugs, but I seriously doubt it had any true mogwai ancestry. To play everything totally safe, we made sure it didn't get wet.

After the photo shoot, I released the beetle onto one of several lawns behind our house. I watched it crawl slowly in a random direction and bid it farewell. A few minutes later, it reappeared at our kitchen window, climbing the screen in an attempt to rejoin our family. As touching a gesture as that was, I decided to recapture it and release it on the side of the house, where tempting fluorescent lights wouldn't it lure it back with false promises of whatever it is beetles long for inside human habitations.

I haven't seen it since.