She used to collect them and keep them in jars. Sometimes she'd keep them separately, sometimes she'd put them all together and watch them fight, placing bets with his friends on which one would survive. She'd always win, she always knew which were the weakest.
Sometimes she'd keep them for weeks and feed them and care for them, only to one day grow bored and leave them in the window to starve and burn, staring out through the wall of their little plastic prison at the freedom she would never grant them.
She used to take the big ones and throw stones at them, poke them with pins, chase them with a cigarette lighter to see how much they could take before they cracked. She never grew bored of that game. The big ones were more of a challenge to her. The little bugs gave up too fast.
Flies, she just used to kill instantly. She was a dead shot with a swatter or a can of fly spray. They were too dirty for her to touch, too dirty for her to play with.
She loved butterflies best of all. She grew nettles at the bottom of the garden to attract them. Sometimes she'd take the caterpillars when they were weak and soft and squish them before they could grow up, and at other times she'd let them get wings and grow beautiful. She seemed fascinated with them then, and she'd take those back to her bedroom to lock up in the jar, and smile adoringly at them as they feebly beat their wings in vain against their confines until the pretty patterned velvet became bruised then crushed then broken and they were no more.
She used to leave a candle in her window some nights and watch the moths flit towards the light to get their wings burnt. Sometimes she would catch them and hold them to the flame. He warned her that one day she would get burned but she never did.
In the summer she would take a nearly empty jar of honey and top it up with water and wait for the wasps and bees to be drawn into the sticky sweet nectar to never come out again. He remembers her coming to him once. She'd got five wasps all at one go and she was proud. He warned her to be careful, not to get too confident, that one day she might get stung, but she didn't listen, she only laughed. She'd never get stung. She was the predator; they were only bugs.
She showed him how she'd squash them in her hand before they could sting her. After that he'd always send her into the garden before the gardener with the weed killer. Of course the weed killer was easier, but he could never deprive his little girl of a bit of fun. She'd never get blood on her hands, and if she did he would always wipe it away for her.
He remembers how a crazy little bug had landed at her bedside one day. She'd taken hold of it carefully, cooed to it sweetly as it had run over her hands, and played with it for hours, taming it and training it, taking an interest like she'd never taken before. It amused her how the thing seemed to trust her, and she waited days before striking, until she could surprise it. She'd proudly showed him how it squirmed and had passed it around his friends so they could poke at it too.
He'd told her to leave it alone after releasing it, he'd told her to let it die in the sun, but as always she had taken no notice. She had to go back to finish her torture, to smirk at the thing one last time before she pulled it apart. But the insect was more alive than she'd thought it to be, angry and wounded and defensive, it had a hidden sting. And just like he'd always feared, she had got stung.