the lanternflies arrived the year before, on a cord of imported wood to a jobsite in berks county. within a month they had spread 100 miles in all directions. they lay their dried up bubblegum egg masses onto almost any surface (tree trunks, teslas, trash cans) and hatch to nymph to adult changing colors from black with white dots to red with white dots to ugly grey with wings that when spread show a beautiful pattern of white black and red. their favorite thing to eat is trees. they swarm and suck the sap and leave behind their honeydew, inviting other pests and fungus, stressing the plant and oftentimes killing it. in a month, the lanternflies descended on pennsylvania’s cash crops, grapevines and timberwood, costing farmers millions in damages.
my kids are picky eaters and drink a gallon of milk every day. their dad left one day during an argument, just walked out to cool down after throwing a soccer sneaker through my antique rocking chair (an heirloom passed down to me from my great grandmother), and never came back. rent in a good school catchment is high.
all you really need to know is that i needed the money.
an invasive species with no natural predators, they proliferated and spread into the tristate area and beyond. it got to the point where the bugs became so bountiful they would fall out of the trees into my hair any time i went outside. their preferred food source, a garbage plant called tree of heaven, an invasive species itself, makes the bugs taste yucky to birds and other animals who would otherwise eat them.
desperate to slow the devastation, the department of agriculture issued a statement:
citizens, we implore you to take action to stop the spread of these disastrous insects. see one, stomp one, save one, and get paid by the state. only you can prevent total spotted lantern fly infestation.
it didn’t take long for people in my neighborhood to mobilize. yentas, boomers, yuppie moms and dads, even little kids, everyone took to the streets with whatever household object for whacking the bugs: brooms, fly swatters, rolled up new yorkers. thwack. thwack. thwack. then scooped up into tall kitchen bags. we were all doing our part. the cash incentive was also a nice motivator.
i liked using my husband’s old shoes. it satisfied me to hear the soft crunch of exoskeleton under the soles of those beatup new balances. putting his left behind things to good use. doing their part.
soon, every spare moment of mine was spent outside smashing and collecting bugs, and hauling my trophies to the makeshift lanternfly procurement tent outside of city hall. i did so much research that summer, reading up on their nesting habits, their feeding habits, what attracted them, what repelled them. through practice i learned the best way to sneak up on them is to hit them from behind. the adults can fly, but they prefer to jump, and if they sense you approaching them from the front they’ll spring up so quick. i made traps and set them up in high density areas. in the mornings, i would wake before my kids, before the sun, and drive along the river where i had installed traps the day before, throwing bags full of dead insects in the back of my truck and replacing them with fresh ones. their creepy little bodies disgusted me, especially the adults. little grey winged roaches. but i was doing my part. and for $20 a pound, it was worth feeling my skin cringe.
i was very good at this, always seeking to improve my methods. one time i came upon a swarm of adult lanternflies on the base of a tree trunk. my plan was to vacuum them up with this cordless shop vac i found at an estate sale. i had my headphones on and reached to turn on my slaughtering music, “silly love songs” by wings, but i didn’t have the bluetooth connected so the music came blaring out of my phone’s speakers. something about the saxophones seemed to stunlock the bugs, they didn’t even flinch as i approached. later i found a portable speaker at a thrift shop and took to playing my sax-heavy 70s rock music out loud. made it super simple to scoop up buckets of them with or without the vacuum.
i did the bulk of my work while my kids were sleeping or at school, but sometimes i’d leave my kids at home watching bluey on youtube to make collections. my littlest one didn’t like killing bugs, she complainded about them smelling too stinky, scratching at her skin as if the sight of them them made her allergic. i’d let her sit in the truck while my eldest and i filled bags to the brim.
every day i brought six or seven contractor bags full of dead lanternflies in various stages of development to the procurement tent’s weighing station to get paid. i was netting a couple hundred dollars a day, but i knew i could be doing more.
one morning as i swept up donut crumbs from the kitchen floor i had an idea. what if i put my semi finished basement to good use? it’s the space where my husband used to work and sleep because his schedule was erratic and his snoring kept me up at night. i hadn’t been down there since the night he stormed off, and the kids never wanted to play down there despite the big screen television and cushy couch being down there, preferring to watch their shows on my old work laptop in my bedroom on the third floor. i put my coffee mug in the sink and took the steps down to his lair. the atmosphere still felt like him. dour. it smelled of his scalp. a space perfect for me to reclaim. all i would need is some plants and time.
lanternflies mate and lay their eggs in the autumn to overwinter hatch in spring, but with some trickery, with the ac running, and some heatlamps on a timer, i figured i could speed up the life cycle. bring the bugs home to kill at my leisure.
the next morning i came upon a swarm near the river gathered at the foot of a tree, i put on my stunblock music and used gloved hands to shepherd about 200 adults into a brown paper bag with small holes punched in the sides. i stapled the top of the bag shut and put it in the passenger seat. i was excited to show my nasty little pals their new habitat.
it took some tinkering, but before long my basement was crawling with bugs. walking into the vestibule from outside, you could hear the fluttering of their gross little wings, their tiny bodies creeping over each other and colliding midair. because i was trying to encourage their multiplication, i hadn’t started trapping them yet. i wasn’t sure when to start killing my new housemates. i wasn’t sure how this would end for me. and i was still going to the river on the daily. the workers at the lanternfly procurement tent knew my first and last name, and my kids names, and what they were getting up to at school. i was one of their most frequent depositors. i was an adept native wildlife reclaimer.
what the bugs in my basement were doing, i wasn’t sure. i was too afraid to check. the fear crept in slowly.
upon returning home one morning, i turned the key in the front door and heard this loud, dry rattling. the noise got increasingly louder in a week’s time. i could hear it in my sleep, altering the motif of my dreamscapes into a horrific timelapse reel. bulbous wings, insect legs twitching, lush greenery drained of life, sticky egg masses spreading over every surface, a red black and grey horde shuddering as one.
then one night i woke up to the sound of screaming. it was me. i was being tickled all over and i was screaming. an adult lanternfly had perched itself on my lips, drinking the drool on my cheek. pulling the covers off and leaping out of bed, i moved frantically as if my life depended on it. the noise in my bedroom was unbearable, a cacophony of dull flapping. my legs itched. i ran to turn the light switch on and saw a small army of nymphs meandering through my shin hairs. bugs all over the walls, bugs all over the furniture, in all life stages, grouped on the floor in large clusters and leaping up with any small movement i made. they were marching out of the central air vents in the floor and ceiling, dozens at a time. without thinking, i grabbed my phone and turned the volume all the way up as “silly love songs” blasted from my youtube music app. the bugs froze in place. i jumped down the flight of stairs to my children’ s room and found my two girls holding each other on the top bunk, a pair of shipwrecked babes in a sea of stunlocked bugs. with the phone in my mouth, i hoisted my daughters one on each hip, and we rushed out to the front yard.
lit by streetlights, the entire exterior of our house looked otherworldly, like something from a film, a quivering mass of red, black, and grey. the grass was blanketed with insect bodies. the truck in my driveway was fully coated.
“there’s no way i can scoop all of these up,” i said under my breath.
“i don’t like this, mommy,” my littlest one said. i rubbed the soft hairs on the back of her head and flicked a black nymph from her neck.
“let’s just go,” my eldest said.
still hip carrying my girls, i ran to the garage. “grab the broom,” i said to my eldest, and she quickly went to work thwacking and swiping the bugs from the doors and windshield.
“wait in here,” i said, buckling them into their booster seats and shutting the door.
with my murder music still blasting, i went back into the garage and found the lighter fluid. on the shelf above, i saw an old box of parliaments and took those too.
“mommy, what’s that smell,” my eldest said as we drove down the road, to where i had no clue.
“don’t worry about it baby, close your eyes and try to get some rest,” i said. “tomorrow will be a long day.”
Alexandra Naughton is a writer based in Philadelphia. She is the founder of Be About It Press, Bring a Blanket Reading Series, and A Writers Party, the annual alternative to AWP. Her third novel, Fake Company, is forthcoming from Maudlin House in 2027.