battle at bellwoods

Reading on a blanket in the park.

It seems calm. Relaxed. No malice. Malevolence? No.

But then, out of nowhere a bug hits my book and starts to wriggle and buzz around my blanket. Not one bug. Two!

There is an orangey-yellow fellow, like a small dragon fly - about as long as a nickel is wide and with long legs, each one almost a body's length. And there is a black fly, shorter and thicker with a green stare.

At first I think the dark one is under attack.

I am wrong.

As I watch the battle, orange-bug writhes. His limbs akimbo, they flail about as he tries to detach and escape the black death hug.

The buzzing and twitching go on.

I watch, hunching over the scene.

A silence falls. It is false.

Orange slams himself about, one last time. Desperation in everything. His strength fades. His movements scream live!

He fails.

The black fly doesn't celebrate. He stays locked. Patience guarantees death.

Wait.

To misjudge and lose all would be catastrophe.

I wait.

At home my camera is on a shelf.

The black one moves. Moves and plunges. Stabbing his proboscis in again and again. Stabbing and slurping and moving over the body, slowly drawing out all the gooey goodness. He grows perceptibly fatter.

I watch the tableau then move too close. Or is he sated? He goes either way. Leaving the corpse.

I pick it up but before it reaches my pocket the leg falls off, that's the part I am holding. The body is immediately buried, lost in the grass.

I return my library books.