The lovebug, plecia nearctica, honeymoon fly, endemic to the American South, is fabled to have been created as part of an experiment in the hedonistic halls of the University of Florida. It was no experiment. It was the biological perversity of monsters mad with power, disguised as simple professors, eager to realize the Victorian Victor Frankenstein’s failed attempt to create love undying. Make no mistake, it was not life that Frankenstein strove to manufacture. Life itself can be sparked into its awful conflagration with no more than a man and a woman and a bottle of two buck chuck. It was love that eluded science. Love, O senseless love which abides no deterrent, gives no quarter, countenances no separation.

Under the auspices of environmentalism, in the university’s liberal conservatory, reeking of charred roaches and junk foods, the faculty conspired to eradicate the premium paint jobs of their geriatric neighbors with pure immortal passion. Their offspring would hatch forth a mutant dedicated to no less than a lifetime of codependence, against all odds, rhyme & reason be damned. Once mated the black and red thoraxes would never part, the two pairs of wings incapable of flying with purpose; to do so would detract from their unguentary accouplement; and so, like sparrows in a hurricane, like leaves spiraling in the abyss, like chawed gum on high heels, they circle, flocculating, prisoners of their lustful romance, blown by tropical winds, sucked up into car radiators, melting upon expiration.

Only in death were the lovebugs designed to discharge, dissolved by the force of their acidic climaxes, their mutually assured suttee. How could such a pure creature exist without the guiding hand of Man? Man, that immortal seeker of beauty and truth, perceived through a glass darkly and stippled in a hundred sticky craters on the hood of an Oldsmobile.