To Kill a Black Beetle
"WHAT ON EARTH WAS THAT?" Clara yelped, almost falling off her computer chair.
She had been half-asleep, listening to Hotel California, and when she heard a rather loud buzzy, ticking noise, it slightly startled her.
She turned to where the noise had come from and saw, on the windowsill, next to the speaker, a beetle.
A rather loud, dark, ugly-looking common ground beetle.
Clara scowled.
She hated beetles.
She hated beetles like she hated Daleks: she didn't like the fact that they could fly. Something already as terrifying as that didn't need to be able to fly, beetles should be killed with fire and Daleks with Missy's cameo brooch.
Now, just how to get rid of this beetle was the question.
She didn't know whether beetles could survive without a head (she knew cockroaches could: when she went to Greece when she was 8, her granddad stood on a cockroach and it went walking about the bathroom without a head) and she didn't fancy having to scrape beetle guts off her windowsill, so she resolved not to squish it.
Slipping quietly off her chair, Clara edged her way into the kitchen to grab a cup or a jar or anything that she could catch the offending bug with.
She came back into the living room moments later, holding an empty Nutella jar (she always kept the jars: you never know when they could come in handy).
At first, her aim was to just slam the jar onto the windowsill, trapping the beetle under, and be done with it, but when she saw that it had climbed onto the actual glass of the window, she was forced to forget plan A.
Plan B was to put the jar on the windowsill and wait for the beetle to crawl into it, so she laid the jar on the sill and waited.
And waited…
And waited…
It seemed as if she was waiting for hours – even though it was actually five minutes – until she finally gave up and but plan C into action: try and trap the beetle herself.
So she lured it onto the sill and picked up a piece of paper to knock it into the jar.
But it didn't work and the beetle ran out again.
So she tried again.
And again.
And again.
Until finally she got it in the jar and could slide the paper under it.
Basking in her glory, she put the jar and the paper on the windowsill and smiled to herself.
"Huh…" she sighed, "You're quite cute, actually…" then she remembered that a beetle could easily fly into her mouth if she breathed in hard enough (that had happened before. Well, kind of. She had been drinking cordial from a flask and didn't notice until she felt something small and tickly in her mouth that a woodlouse had crawled into her cup. Of course, she spat it out and washed her mouth out afterwards… and also never used that flask again) and frowned, "Nope – you're still rrreeeeaaaalllllyyyy freaky!" And she scooped up the jar and brought it outside.
Holding her arms out in front of her, she slowly removed the jar from the paper.
But Mr Evil Beetle stayed put.
"Shoo!" Clara spat, "Go on! Fly away!" and she tapped the paper against the wall to rid her precious paper of the bug.
Mr Beetle flew away, happily, and Clara breathed at last.
Proud of herself, she wandered back to her desk to finish the writing that she had abandoned.
Yet – when she stepped into her living room – right there on the rug, waiting for her, was the ugliest spider she had ever seen.