The Locusts

I remember, precisely a year ago I saw a dark cloud over the horizon that, as it approached, evolved into an immense group of spots which, at first, resembled large flying organisms with balloon-like bodies, but dissolved into a spiderweb of dots that formed more and more intricate shapes. But this image finally resolved into a swarm of locusts which enveloped my town. Since then, I could hardly eat a sandwich without crunching into the insects' rotten carcasses. At first, when I would open a door, a flood of locusts would pour into the room behind the entrance, as if the swarm were white water. Now, all rooms are completely filled with locusts.

When the insects fly in front of a television set in a dark room, they project angel-like shadows which dance on the walls. When I drive a car, locusts bombard the windshield like hail. I turn the wipers on, smearing the insects across the glass, to the hood, leaving a transparent film where more locusts continually impact. Where the wipers don't cross, there is a solid wall of locusts.

The view reminds me of the artist in my town who made a device to shoot jets of water at each other to form a completely liquid statue. He claimed he would make a painting which would continually shift colors. He might have been right, since the strange-colored locusts quickly and completely covered the wet paint. He would paint over the insects, leaving odd bumps where they were concealed, but more locusts were simply trapped by the new paint, until he resigned to the tiny animals. The canvas finally looked like a battle field, with hundreds of insect dead whose long legs stuck out of the paint.

Other painters imitated him, to form a new movement originally called Insect Art, as they painted wasps, butterflies, spiders, and thousands of other tiny creatures to canvasses. Eventually, they stopped restricting themselves to insects and arachnids. Paint-covered tar adhered dead frogs and fetuses to burned canvasses. Larger and larger objects were used for the art, with smaller and smaller canvasses, until the movement finally evolved into cars attached to single-colored paint.