A day in the life of Bob, the Pill Bug

by Karthik Bala
Runner-Up, Spring 2008 Writing Contest

“Time to get up honey,” Mom yelled, her voice echoing throughout the old log, “You’ll be late for school.”
I covered my antennas with my leaf pillow to try to block out the constant nagging of my mom.

Then my younger brother pulled off the soil sheet on my speckled mushroom bed and said, “Mom told me to wake you up, sleepyhead,” he yelled very matter-of-factly. I groaned at him for yelling, even though I distanced, like, one centimeter away from the annoying Isopod. I accepted the fact that I couldn’t sleep all day and drowsily lumbered over to the bathroom. The minute I walked in I stepped on something. I looked down and sighed. There was another piece of dung on the ground from my brother’s annoying friend, Duncey, the Dung Beetle. I hated the sight of the pebble tiles that I had JUST CLEANED, covered with droppings. I tried to ignore it and took a shower in leaf dew. I remembered to not turn the dew on too powerful or I would end up like Uncle Jim, who drowned in the bathtub.
“Hurry up Bob, or you’ll be late for school, again!!!” my Mom yelled. I quickly finished my shower and ran to the kitchen, which was just an overly damp part of a log. I sat down on a miniature stump and waited for breakfast. Mom served Jimmy and I decaying leaves covered with crushed pieces of a dead hummingbird. I devoured the food hungrily and raced to the front door.
Jimmy and I then picked up our overused backpacks and zipped out the door as Goliath the giant Banana Slug was just inching itself past the slug stop. I hopped on just in time, with Jimmy right behind me.
What happened next was very unusual and difficult to explain because I couldn’t really look all around me but I will try to say it as vividly as possible.
It seemed like a normal monotonous day, just riding the banana slug to school (I really don’t know why I can’t just walk.) with other bugs and creatures surrounding me, when suddenly an extremely gigantic bug, with five hideous heads, picked our Goliath up. There was utter pandemonium throughout the banana slug. Everyone was screaming and yelling and I couldn’t make out the words they were saying. It just sounded like “human” or something. The creature with five heads started to fly and I saw that this creature wasn’t a bug. It was a hand that was joined to some super giant mutant bug. I joined the yelling and screaming as the hand speedily drew us up closer to a giant oval within a bigger oval.
The hand paused to allow the giant oval shape to examine its prey; well that’s what I thought at that time. Then the fingers of the giant hand gradually started to close in on all of us. Bugs slipped off the hand yelling, and some were scrambling around the hand trying to bite it hard enough for it to release its mighty grasp.
All of a sudden, a booming voice echoed, “Ah dude, you got a banana slug! I dare you to squish it.” Everybody stared at Goliath the Slug for a split second. We all liked him and he was kind to everyone riding him, but in this situation it was every bug for himself.
I rolled up my entire body into a ball as the hand squeezed tighter and tighter on us. I managed to slip through a crack between two fingers and fall safely onto a soft dirt mound. I felt relieved, for about a millisecond. I realized that I had left Jimmy inside the hand. I unrolled myself and looked at the hand. Luckily Jimmy managed to crawl out of the hand before it was completely shut. Then I realized Goliath too, had escaped the might grasp. Though his landing was probably a lot harder than Jimmy’s, he seemed all right and I was happy. Later Jimmy told me that all of the bugs managed to escape the hand and that all the bugs were evacuated out of the stomping zone. Surprisingly, this is very common around our area and we still had to go to school because nobody was injured severely enough to skip it.
Our school was just a leaf that was tied to more leaves and twigs to make a sort of a make-shift tent. School started off with how to hide your poop so predators cannot find you. Then we learned “When something is dead or it is about to kill you” To do that, we went outside the tent and traveled along a steep winding dirt hill to observe some ants. We experimented with which ones were safe to eat (dead ones) and which ones would eat us, after signing a bunch of liability wavers and medical contracts of course. Then we had P.E and crawled laps around a huge tree trunk like 2 feet in diameter!!! The coach then split the bugs by species and made us do separate exercises. Then we had a monotonous assembly on “Bug spray, Friend or Foe?” They tried to make the assembly exciting, but they relinquished their efforts after a couple of kids started catapulting numerous objects at the speakers. After school was over Jimmy and I trudged home, using square poop as our markings to our little civilization.
When we finally reached home we had a special treat for dinner, Dad’s newly shed skin. It was his second birthday so he shed us some skin to enjoy it, but even with the good food on the joyous occasion we were still sad that Dad had only one year left to live. No one said much.
After we ate the skin we all finally went to sleep reflecting on what happened on this adventurous day.