My following has demanded my story about 1,000 baby praying mantises. So, here we go. About fifteen years ago, I lived in Tampa Bay. If you've ever been, you know it's hot, humid, and grows bugs big enough to mug you for drug money. 1/

My, ahem, former wife and I had just moved into a larger, cheaper duplex than our apartment, only to discover the reason it was cheaper stemmed from the fact it was infested with "palmetto bugs," which is a polite Florida euphemism for cockroaches. 2/

The trouble was, we were animal people. We had cats, a dog, and multiple reptiles as pets. Traditional extermination methods would have been lethal to one or more of our little brood. So my then wife searched out "Natural" remedies to the problem. 3/

A week later, the answer to our problem arrived in a cardboard box with screens on the sides. Within, one thousand baby praying mantises sat, waiting for their moment to go forth and murder just... everything. 4/

The instructions on the box were simple. Place it in a dark corner of the house, open it, and lay back to let the tiny green slaughter engines do their work.

So, we did.

They were so little at first. Easy to miss. We stepped on more than a few of them. 5/

But there were SO MANY. And they were really good at their jobs. They couldn't take on the adult palmetto bugs at first, but they decimated the young. And they were indiscriminate. We found them in our lizard cages eating crickets meant for the frilled dragon. 6/

And they only got bigger over the next month. We'd have to sweep them off the bathroom sink and shake them off our toothbrushes in the mornings. One night, I woke from a dead sleep to an inch long green murderer on my nose, arms out, threatening to fuck me up. 7/

Every day was like watching miniature Thunder Dome shit in real time. The mantises would eat the palmetto bugs, the cats would eat the mantises, the dog would chase the cats. Just pandemonium. 8/

But eventually, there was no food left for the remaining mantis gladiators. They were two plus inches long now, had eaten everything smaller than them, and most of them had names because that's just how we were about things. They were big enough that the cats were like, naaah. 9/

Which was when they started EATING EACHOTHER. It's not just a weird sex fetish for mantises. They are straight up cannibals. You have never loved anything as much as a praying mantis loves murdering shit. So we threw the like four survivors outside. 10/

We were vacuuming up dead mantis husks for a month after that. But you know what we didn't have anymore? A single palmetto bug. Not one. Our duplex was a cockroach war crime. Word. Got. Around. We lived there for two years and never saw another. 11/

And the handful of champions we released into the backyard spawned generations of mantises who kept it that way. I'm pretty sure I saw one of them eating a bird. 12/12.

Glad y'all liked this story. I also write stories down in book form. Here's my latest. It has a transgender crab engineer and a hentai tentacle monster audiophile: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250302717

I really don't.