#insect fighting

Baby Boy Da Prince was bored. He had spent the morning casually masturbating and leafing through his new issue of Amazing Spiderman, generally trying to find anything that could distract him from the constant, crushing ennui. He looked across the room at the cage that held Pimp C, the bright heat lamps contrasting starkly with the mock forest floor that Baby Boy Da Prince had created, pine needles the color of rust strewn over a layer of thick dirt he’d taken from the woods down the street. He bent underneath his bed and pulled a tray of discolored fruit from his minifridge. He went to the cage and opened up the top, gazing lovingly upon Pimp C’s shiny carapace. He cooed at the tiny insect much like a mother would as he dropped in several pieces of fruit.

He loved Pimp C almost as much as he loved putting him in the ring. Baby Boy Da Prince knew that most people looked down on his vocation, but he didn’t care. Rapping was merely a way to vent the frustrations he accrued in the underground insect fighting clubs he frequented; his true calling was breeding and fighting Rhinoceros Beetles. 

The Asians that ran the clubs had mocked him at first, asking if his beetle was named “Bling Bling” or “Swag” or “Tupac.” They’d laughed in his face when he brought in Pimp C, telling him over and over that that beetle was too small to fight, that maybe he should go down the street where they fought crickets and see if they’d let him join there. They stopped laughing when Pimp C won the first round, then the second, then the third, and the mood was anything but jocular when he went undefeated that night, breaking the house record for most wins by a rookie beetle.

Baby Boy Da Prince closed the top of the cage and logged into japanesebugfights.com. A new video had been uploaded and he clicked on it gleefully. It was a fight between two Rhino beetles, an unusually balanced match for japanesebugfights.com, and he watched intently, trying to tell if the beetles were trained to fight in the classic or the nouveau style. One of the beetles grabbed the other around the abdomen with its pincers and slammed it repeatedly against the wall of the cage, dropping it to the ground and scuttling off to rest in the corner. The camera zoomed in on the face of the losing insect, and then zoomed in again, and Baby Boy Da Prince imagined that he could see himself reflected in the beetle’s black eyes.

The video stream suddenly froze, the image of the dying beetle’s face filling the screen. Baby Boy Da Prince couldn’t take his eyes off the insect, and he felt the emotions roiling within him as he confronted the agony of the dying beetle, forced by callous money grubbers into a battle for territory that did not exist. Baby Boy Da Prince looked at Pimp C, who was nibbling on a piece of blackened banana, and for the first time thought about what he would do if Pimp C died in a fight.

tWo DaYs LaTeR

 He found the place where he dug Pimp C out of the ground as a baby grub. Baby Boy Da Prince remembered fondly how his long translucent abdomen wriggled in the dappled light. Even then, he had been a proud fighter.

“It’s time to go home, buddy,” Baby Boy Da Prince whispered to Pimp C. “I’ll never forget all the things you taught me.”

As he was saying his goodbyes to Pimp C, he failed to notice the root that was in his path. It caught his foot and Baby Boy Da Prince fell to the ground, dropping Pimp C’s cage in a crash of glass and dirt.

“I’m so sorry. We’re almost back to your home,” Baby Boy Da Prince said as he brushed dirt from his pants. He looked over at the pile of glass and screamed. Pimp C had been severed by the broken glass into a handful of pieces and parts, his pincers gnashing quietly next to a chunk of his stomach, the legs waving in the air like a drunken maestro. Baby Boy Da Prince grabbed what was left of Pimp C, ignoring the shards of glass slicing his hands, and held his beloved insect to his chest, sobbing quietly. He leaned back against a tree and looked up at the sky and closed his eyes.

"No justice, no peace," he said.