Jackie Writes a Hilarious Bug Story! (For Kids!)

Here's something that happened to me in real life that I've now made into a child-friendly fable. This is the story of Jackie and the Beetle. What's the moral? You decide!

This is a story of triumph.

I got home late last night to find a large beetle on the side of my fan. It didn’t look like a cockroach. It was a size that was somewhere between a nickel and a dime. Large Antenna. Lots of legs. Grey. Gross.

So I did what I always do: I sprayed it with Windex. It didn’t move at all.

Then I sprayed it with hairspray. It still didn’t move at all.

THEN I tried a different hairspray that I thought would be more toxic. Again, the bug didn’t move, but how Voluminous!

Then I went to put everything back where I got it, because otherwise I would never be able to find them the NEXT time there was a bug in my room! As soon as I turned my back, the bug started to crawl down the fan.

Now, I’m really bad at killing bugs. So terrible, in fact, that my next move to kill the bug was again, something that did not kill the bug. The next thing I did was throw my fan across the room.

My fan is small and round, no larger than a cantaloupe. I love cantaloupe, though I would not love it if there were bugs on it. I threw my cantaloupe fan the full 18 feet across my room and was relieved, when I retrieved it, that there was no bug on its side.

But where had the bug gone? Surely, it was still in the room. After some careful sleuthing, I uncovered the creature and did what I should have done in the first place: hit it with something heavy.

Keep in mind, that this last move to kill the bug took ALL the grownup strength I could muster. I hate bugs. They are disgusting to look at and have cooties. I don’t like looking at them, I don’t like going in arms reach of them, but I understand that at 24 years old I should be able to kill bugs that are of moderate size.

I took my Cinema Studies textbook on Surrealism and started hitting the bug with the force of 1000 Zeuses. That’s right, I summoned the power of Zeus, the greek god of thunder, and then multiplied that power times 1000 to kill this bug that was not a cockroach. After three blunderous blows with said textbook, I looked down to see the beast, only to watch it start to crawl away again.

So then I did what anyone would do, which is just start wailing on the thing. After losing myself in the heat of the bug killing, I looked down, and it was dead.

I was proud of myself, because I’d never killed a large beetle before. Then I did the most grown thing I could to clean it up: I vacuumed it.

THE END