Yellow Mama E zine

The Beetle Man

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by Daniel G. Snethen

 

          The “Beetle Man” wore a flabby belly-stretched T-shirt with a rattlesnake emblem on it. Driving from pitfall trap to pitfall trap across Rock County, NE, in a cranberry-colored 1994 Ford F-150, his grizzled foot-and-a-half-long beard half-tucked inside the collar sported several escaping wisps of greyed whiskers snaking out the rolled-down window, in the wind like Medusa’s serpentine hair. His hands—especially his fingers—smelled of the rotted rats he used to bait the elusive endangered American burying beetle. He handled his carrion gingerly, but still the stink stuck tenaciously to his fingers, a constant reminder of death and decomposition, and hope—hope that his coleopteran necrophagic friends would too smell the perfume of rats permeating the Nebraska air.

          Hungry, with one hand, the other grasping the steering wheel, he opened a loaf of bread. Layering a sandwich of bologna, cheese, and salami, repeating the process three times he created nine layers of cholesterol and fat between his two slices of bleached flour-enriched bread. He marveled at that the sandwich tasted so good though he handled it with his beetle-stained, carrion-stinking fingers. Silently he wondered if that is how a rotted-rat tasted to these endangered sextons, tiger-like scavengers of the prairie.

 

        Daniel G. Snethen is an educator, naturalist, moviemaker, poet, and short story writer from South Dakota. He teaches on the Pine Ridge Reservation at Little Wound High School in the heart of Indian Country. 

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        Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Ángeles. His artwork has appeared over the years in Medusa’s Kitchen, Nerve Cowboy, The Dope Fiend Daily, and Rogue Wolf Press, Venus in Scorpio Poetry E-Zine.