I remember when I was a child my dad would tell me and my brother of the urban legend about dragonflies. For those of you unaware of the strange nature of the dragonfly, allow me to fill you in. Apparently, if you’re a child out too late, dragonflies can sense it and will attempt to punish you by sewing your mouth, eyes, nose, and ears shut with their tails. Imagine that for a moment. A bug that might fly directly into your face and quickly sew your head orifices shut with little provocation. Walking through the woods or some overgrown field, you happen to disturb a dragonfly perched atop a blade of long grass and have it attack you, leaving you blind, deaf, unable to scream, unable to breathe. Horrific. It gives me chills just thinking of it.
My big brother and I would always turn our noses up at this and frown, sure that our dad was telling us tall tales to make sure we would come home when the sun went down. That was it. But our dad persisted and would go into graphic detail about some kid he’d gone to school with.
My dad, when he was a child, would go down to an empty lot often with a group of neighboring kids. They would dig in the dirt with sticks to imitate pirates sketching out crude maps to a treasure, they would pitch rocks at one another and whack them away with sticks, they would take up in all manner of play. However, there was this one kid that no one ever invited to their deserted lot. This boy’s name was Tanner, and no one liked Tanner. He would always insert himself into their play time and almost always ruin the fun for everyone. He wasn’t exactly a bully from what I’ve gathered in my father’s description, but he often whined and was a right party pooper. Whenever Tanner would be excluded from their activities, he would run home and tell his parents all about the miscreant children’s endeavors. Then so it would be that their setting fire to an ant hill would be put to a stop and the tom boy who’d brought her dad’s matches to play with would be grounded.
In particular, my dad hated Tanner but whenever he would tell stories about that time in his life, he always seemed to look back on Tanner as a sort of tragic figure. As an adult, my father could see the cruelty in himself and his peers whenever they excluded the boy. “Kids can be cruel,” my dad would say, “But I reckon that’s just the way things go.”
He would revel in telling me and my brother the sorts of misadventures that him and the other children would get into and we would always listen with great attention as we’d grown up in the age of the internet and it was helpful in some nebulous way to hear about a time gone by when kids would play with dirt and marbles and that was enough somehow. It was simply neat.
The aforementioned tom boy, named Rachel, was the girl who’d given my father his first ever kiss at the age of eight behind an old honeysuckle bush. The other children found out and endlessly teased both into never speaking to one another ever again. I remember when our dad told us that bit, I stuck my tongue out and gagged, but my brother who was a few years older than me elbowed me and listened intently to our old man. That was also the day we learned of the dragonflies.
We were riding in the car to visit the oncologist. Our mother sat in the driver seat, maintaining eye contact with the road. Our dad twisted in his seat to face me and my brother in the back, his bony frame and bald head and tired eyes moving, hands motioning as the story unfolded.
He and a few of the other kids in his neighborhood had just bought a new explicit music CD from a teenager and were returning to their lot, to their makeshift ‘tin’ shack they’d constructed with old sheet metal and branches to listen to the thing on a collective battery powered stereo. They were all overly excited to learn a few new curse words. As the group walked along the sidewalk, Tanner fell into step with them, pestering my father with question after question. “Where’d you get that?”, “Why’s that lady on the cover wearing no clothes?”, “Where you guys going?”, and finally, “I’m going to tell my parents if you don’t’ let me listen to it too!” They had no choice but to let Tanner into their shack if he promised to shut his yap and not touch their stereo. Tanner protested, but ultimately agreed to this arrangement.
Quickly, they settled onto the furniture they’d scavenged from the nearby woods: an old stool, a moldy recliner, and a particle board table. They inserted the CD and powered the stereo on, headbanging and dancing like little idiots. My father told this bit with his trademark smile and even my mother in the driver seat was cornered and had no other option but to grin solemnly, gray.
“Of fucking-“started my dad, but upon feeling my mother tense her shoulder, he rephrased, “Of course that rotten Tanner started skipping songs on the CD.” My dad threw his hands up, even after all these years, he was vividly upset with the child.
That’s when my dad started slapping Tanner’s hand whenever it reached out for the silver button on the old stereo. The feeling in the shack was palpable and visceral. A fistfight was brewing and every one of the children knew it. Finally, Tanner reached out one last time to skip another song and my father slapped his hand and Tanner, red in the face and teary eyed, grabbed the square black box with speakers, holding it over his head. “Fine!” screamed Tanner before slamming the thing against the dirt floor. It shattered and the song died into a creaking sputter.
The group had had enough and shoved Tanner from their clubhouse so that the little boy went head under feet and straight into the ground. Tanner began crying and slinging dirt into a frenzy, tossing it into their faces. “You guys are nothing but a lot of bullies, you know that? All you ever do is pick on me! Bunch of jerks.” He spat out a mouthful of dirt, wiping his dusty cheeks. My dad, not too proud of this recollection, jumped onto Tanner’s back and sat on him. The other children followed suit and began sitting on the screaming boy. “I can’t breathe,” he would shout. No one cared. They’d had enough of the brat. He began hyperventilating and kicking and punching. It was funny at first, but knowing they couldn’t keep him down forever, they got off the boy and let him scramble away. “You’re crazy!” He screamed at them. “You could’ve killed me!” He spit and wiped at his face again.
That’s when they began throwing rocks at the boy. Most of them were light tosses to be sure, but one of them connected with the side of Tanner’s face, sending out a rush of hot red blood. Tanner looked at his hands now covered in the stuff and cried even harder. Then he ran from the group, across the empty lot, and disappeared through a hole in the fence where beyond only the forest was.
“That was the last we saw of him,” said my dad. “None of us ever said anything about it, but I know we all felt bad about it. The police asked us lots of questions the following day. Turns out he died in those woods. Our parents stopped letting us go out to that lot after that.” My dad sighed and this was followed with a wet cough quickly transforming into a gasp for air until his eyes were full of water and his hands were shaking. After regaining control of himself, he continued, “Rumor spread that the dragonflies got him because he got lost and couldn’t get out of the woods before dark.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
My brother, wide eyed asked, “Why did they say that?”
Our father shrugged. “They said he was found with everything sewed up.” He motioned with his bony index finger to emulate the motions of a dragonfly sewing his face shut. Noticing our small, horrified expressions, he put both hands over his chest, all crisscross, and closed his eyes with his tongue stuck out. It did extraordinarily little to lighten the mood.
When our father died, my brother grew distant, stopped playing with me, and started hanging out with other teenagers while I still colored in my SpongeBob crayon book. I was left alone, confused by the whole world and always waiting for my dad to come home. I would tug on my brother’s shirt, pleading to do things like we used to, perhaps hoping to create adventures like the ones our dad told us of. I would be met with a swift knuckle to the forearm and my arm would hang limp by my side for a few brief seconds with tears pooling in my eyes.
Mom, always the resilient type, withdrew emotionally and it is only in retrospect that I am aware that she was trying to hold herself together. I honestly believe that she thought she was doing the right thing, not wanting to destroy us all in her own grief. She worked, cleaned, absently lived her life. That always makes me sad.
This is what I remember.
“I hate you!” screamed my brother, as my mom held up the small bag of marijuana she’d found stowed in between his mattress and box springs. It was all so vivid; she’d confronted him and his troublemaking ways. I hid in the corner of the doorway to his bedroom. “Fuck this.” He said, shoving past her. He nearly stumbled over me in the hall, but upon seeing me there, he stopped and put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m leaving and I’m not coming back,” he started to move away, but it seemed that something occurred to him and he turned to look at me full on crouching to meet my eyes. “I love you.” I was stunned. He pulled me into a brisk hug and left out the front door.
I could hear my mother crying through the wall that night. I wanted to comfort her. I wanted to go to her and tell her it was alright. I wanted to let her know that he was just lashing out. I was ten.
That night, I crawled out of bed long after I was sure that mom had gone to sleep. I crept through the house and into the living room, withdrawing an old photo album from the cabinet near the fireplace. It was covered in dust and I laid it out over my lap as I sat in the armchair with my father’s outline infinitely pressed into it. On the first page, there was a happy family of three and the mother had a swollen belly beneath her sundress. She was giving the grinning man in the photo a smirk and eyeroll as he snapped the photo. This was in a park. The little boy there was forever posed in a laugh with squinted eyes, his head lolled back. I flipped through the photo album and watched the grinning man grow thinner and thinner, but that smile stayed the same. His smile was always there. It seemed that everything else around the mouth changed, including the people.
The boy developed pimples and an icy angsty stare, the mother’s expression hardened into a stony resolve that broke my heart, the younger boy no longer in his mother’s womb grew from a chubby baby into a round faced boy with a confused look on his face. The man still smiled.
As the pictures came to an end, the pimply boy, now a teen, wore all black and painted his fingernails. The mother stopped letting her hair fall into a frizzy wavy mess and instead opted to wrangle it into a tight ponytail to expose the deepening creases across her forehead. The round-faced boy looked at his father with admiration. The man smiled still.
The last picture was of a water eyed family crowded around a slim man in a hospital bed. The man’s skin clung to his skull like the thin paper they wrap gourmet sandwiches in. The mother was pole stiff next to the bed, looking directly into the camera and holding the man’s finger with a limp grasp. The teen’s cheeks were stained with mascara. The round-faced boy stood next to his brother, looking at the tiles of the hospital floor. The man in the hospital bed pointed at his chest with one hand and held the other in a thumbs up fashion. His bruised eyes expressed that he was not worried about the surgery. It was everything else around the mouth that changed.
I shuffled the last photo out of its page and held it up to the first. In between, there was a story here that only we could know. All the sudden, everything made sense to that confused looking round-faced boy as he sat in his father’s armchair.
A sound clattered from the kitchen and I jumped, dropping the book onto the floor, and pulling my scared feet underneath my bottom. After a moment of complete silence, I shifted from the chair and scampered across the living room to peek into the kitchen. The room was pitch black save the moonlight splashing in from the sliding glass door that led onto the back patio. I could feel the blackness all around me like little bugs. Hissing in through my teeth, I smacked the light switch near the threshold and kept my eyes fixed to the glass door as the overhead bulb spit light onto the patio. I could see something moving out there. Something humanoid and shifting and black against the kitchen light. I held my breath and slowly, deafly moved across the tiles. As I reached the glass door, I put my face against it, cupping my hands. Nothing.
Then the dark figure sprang to life, smacking against the door and rattling it in its frame. I tumbled backwards, falling over one of the wooden kitchen chairs, scrambling to flee the monster. I trod across the room, hiding at the edge of the threshold, and turning to look back. I saw a hand grasp for the handle and the light shone it was pale and it had painted fingernails. I gasped and rushed back to the glass door, unlocking it, and sliding it open.
My brother fell into the kitchen, face down, hands scrambling all around, feeling. His body contorted and he clawed at his downturned face. I reached out to touch his shoulder and he recoiled, turning to expose his face to me. I let out a shrill stiff cry.
His mouth, eyes, nostrils, and ears had been sewn shut in a tangle of thick black thread. He reached out for me and I could see his cheeks turn purple and swell. He grabbed at my legs and I backed away in terror, still screaming. Then he fell limp.
I could hear my mother moving through the house. She stomped into the kitchen, obviously prepared to hand out discipline. When she saw my brother lying lifeless on the kitchen tiles, she stopped dead in her tracks before springing to action, trying to shake him back into existence.
We buried my brother and lived on, putting it away so that it’s one of those things that we rarely withdraw and discuss. My mother softened after his death and we keep in touch. Whenever I visit, we talk about everything besides my dad and brother. As time goes on and her mind has started to slip away, she opens more. The most recent time I joined her for dinner, she told me to be careful of the dragonflies. For a long time, I thought that maybe I was the only one that had recalled the story from my father’s childhood, but it seems she does too.
I miss them every day and still time’s arrow marches forward. Now that I have children of my own, I tell them the story of Tanner and the dragonflies. I’m not quite the storyteller my dad once was but I give it my best and it scares them well. I hope it does.