Weekly Drabble #339: Overwhelming Odds (Patreon)

This prompt comes from Framing Device and EBB with 'only a thousand more' and 'not again', with a short little slice-of-life story. Enjoy!

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Overwhelming Odds:

Claudine would have loved her new home a lot more if it wasn’t for all the Asians.

Oh, not her neighbours. Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen were a lovely couple. It was the Asians in her house. Harmonia axyridis. The Asian ladybird beetle. Another invasive species at large in North America. Claudine’s irritation-driven research got her far enough to know the difference between a ladybug and one of those little bastards.

Know thy enemy.

Like ladybugs, Asian ladybirds would eat garden pests, which might make you think they would be a benefit to her and her own garden. Well, not really. Ladybugs ate pest insects. Asian ladybirds would eat them and other helpful species, and the troubles didn’t end there.

Unlike ladybugs, Asian ladybirds would bite you. It wasn’t serious, just an itchy little scrape but it was still a bug bite and Claudine was morally opposed to them. Like ladybugs, Asian ladybirds could also secrete a foul-smelling liquid to ward off predators. Unlike ladybugs, Asian ladybirds would secret at the drop of a hat, leaving stains and stinky little messes on the walls, floors and ceilings, and she knew that because unlike ladybugs, Asian ladybirds liked to overwinter inside houses and not just by ones and twos, ohhhhh no. She was up to her armpits in the smelly little red assholes. When there were enough of them in an area, it irritated her lungs and made her cough and wheeze.

She smashed them, vacuumed them up and after the first winter, she’d sealed any possible ways of getting in. At least she thought she had, but for the second year in a row, she was beset by hordes. She wondered if this was how the builders of the Great Wall had felt, staring across the horizon at the Mongol armies.

Crunch. Another one down.

Crunch. That was two. Outside of swarms, she always found them in twos. Where there was one, there was bound to be another. If she saw one, she couldn’t rest until she found its partner in crime. They had to die.

They all had to die.

Claudine’s eyes narrowed as she saw a third ladybird beetle crawling up the wall. Crunch.

“Now,” she demanded of its squashed remains. “Where’s your friend?”

She searched the entire room, but couldn’t find it. “I know you’re here!” she shouted to the empty study, like a sane and rational person absolutely would. “Come out and fight like a man!”

Totally sane.

Absolutely rational.

It took another twenty minutes of fruitless, increasingly manic efforts to locate the second member of this pair, but Claudine did – when it crawled down her bangs and into her line of sight.

With a shriek like she’d been confronted by a revenant’s ghastly, reaching hand she shook her head violently, dislodging her unwanted passenger. The beetle’s elytra split and wings unfurled, carrying it across the room as the woman fluffed out her hair, half-expecting a sudden cascade of annoyed Asian ladybirds to spill out of her locks.

Luckily, there was just the one, but one was enough.

Panting and brushing spilled forelocks out of her eyes, Claudine watched the ladybird vanish out the door, heading towards the kitchen. It had left a stinky little gift on her cheek before it flew away, more of its defensive liquid. The woman wiped it off, glaring at it like she’d dabbed her fingers in an enemy’s war paint. “All right,” she said through gritted teeth. “All right. You won this one.”

The invaders had won many battles, but Claudine was ready for them now. This summer she’d make sure they couldn’t get back into her house. The Great Wall would go up, the Mongol hordes would be halted. Yes, they’d won some battles... but she was going to win the war.