CW: Animal death, death/dying.

1. There is no better friend than the dermestid.

I found them first in the woods, adorning the staring sockets of a coyote skull. So small I could have crushed them, they accomplished more than my child hands could—crawling, chewing, cleaning better than any household sponge or brush. They made no sound, until I brought my face close, angled my head so my ear almost brushed their little chitinous backs.

Shnch, shnch, shnch.

That’s the song the dermestid makes, tidying up corpses on the banks of spring streams choked with last year’s leaves.

Shnch, shnch, shnch.

I put my finger down, dirt packed under the nail, and let them climb on me. They tickled my skin, inspecting my cuts before seeking dead flesh again. I didn’t interest them—not really. Not while blood flowed in my veins.

I crouched by the coyote and watched them for hours. When at last the light faded and I knew my mom would be looking for me, I plucked a single beetle from gray muscle and carried it home with me.

It died in a couple of days, starved and still. I should have known it needed death to live.

I sought out the coyote corpse again, later in the spring. But the dermestids were gone. Only stained bones and orphaned fur remained, evidence of a thousand hungry mouths.

Where do they go when the flesh has run out?

2. Dermestids get lonely.

For my seventh-grade science project, I convinced my mom to order a kit online. They arrived in a white box labeled FRAGILE. I loved the little squirming bodies at once.

First, I fed them a sparrow that killed itself against our window. It was a little bird, with only a little flesh. My dermestids finished it too fast.

Windows make great weapons, but I couldn’t rely on chance to bring them another meal. I started collecting roadkill. Flattened squirrels, broken possums. Skunks repulsed my mom, but my dermestids loved to strip them clean. I made us stop on the way to school and coming back from the grocery store, plastic bag ready to bundle up the rotting pile and bring it home to my beetles.

They loved me in ways only I could see. Under my care, they multiplied, climbing the terrarium glass and spilling out onto the floor. My mom crushed some under her slipper and I howled at the waste. She denied my tears, told me the project had to go.

Compromise: I moved them outside, but it was too cold. Frost killed them all. I cried when I fetched them, their bodies rattling lifeless among half-white bones.

On Monday I brought them to school in a paper bag. My teacher graded me for effort, not result.

3. A dermestid beetle isn’t much different from a human child. It needs food, and company, and a home.

When I drove to Ithaca, all my worldly belongings stuffed into the back of my Camry, I stopped along the way to inspect every smear on the highway. I found my friends easily: adorning chunks of muscle, flaps of skin from animals too slow to escape the cars that ended their wild lives. I came prepared—Tupperware piled onto the passenger seat. I carefully gathered black-flecked gore, storing it next to me as I drove west.

I might have been the only entomology student to arrive at Cornell with six containers of live beetles, chewing away silently at trauma-killed bodies.

4. A group of dermestids can have a variety of names, including nest, colony, swarm, and plague.

I was happiest in college. I spent my days studying my dermestids and their cousins, learning all their names—carpet beetles, bow bugs, skin beetles. I studied them under microscopes and en masse. I let them cover my hands, taste my skin.

At night I dreamed they were still crawling on me, tickling the hairs on my back and trudging through forests on my legs. I dreamed they found my holes and hid inside, seeking my darkness and laying their eggs in its wet folds.

I woke up cold and shivering, scratching at shadows. Sometimes I saw them in the corners of my room and my eyes—piles of patient black bodies, watching me, waiting. I saved my dead skin and shed hair, weaving it into nests and positioning them around my dorm room. During the day, they were always empty. But at night, they filled.

My shadow friends whispered through the hours, telling me about their necrotic lifestyles. I learned more in dreaming than in my classes. Under the cloak of night, we weren’t so different.

Sometimes I rose and walked with the dermestids, beetles cascading over my feet on our way to a corpse feast. I dined at a table with beetle fae, gems studding their shells and blood wine in crystal goblets. I danced with them, underworld Alice in my own deathly Wonderland. When I woke, the tangled sheets smelled like decomposition. I pried gristle from between my teeth.

While I loved these sojourns, I longed for daylight, when the lab opened and I could visit my dermestids in their rows. They didn’t speak to me under fluorescent lights, but touching their sleek bodies, I knew they recognized me. I reassured myself that they were healthy, safe. Even in huge colonies, they were such little things, vulnerable and hungry. I wondered what flesh tasted like to them, cold and lifeless.

I dreamed it was like honey, or grease.

5. Dermestid beetles dream. We just don’t know what they dream about.

The summer before my senior year, I conducted a field study of the dermestids that live in the forests of upstate New York. I drove my Camry north, the heat shield I never fully fixed rattling at 2000 rpm. The sky was glorious blue, clouds stretched thin along the horizon. In place of Tupperware, I had sterile containers and field equipment scattered over the back seat, waiting for dermestids.

My mentor came with us, overseeing the study. The team was just me and two other juniors, traipsing through woodland, sniffing for death. Our cars gathered in the parking lot, tires collecting gravel. After a short outline of what we were looking for, my mentor turned us loose.

I found the first body.

Big enough to be a deer, it reeked. But deer don’t wear camo. Deer don’t have tattoos, bloated and black on their arms.

I called my mentor, waving my cell for a clear signal before I could report what I’d found. When she said she was coming, said a classmate was calling 911, I had nothing to do but wait by the body, watching the dermestids cluster around the hole in his skull.

I leaned in, holding my breath and closing my eyes.

In the silence of the woods, I heard them feasting.

Shnch, shnch, shnch.

It took the better part of half an hour for us to be found. In that time, the song of the dermestids burrowed into my mind, a steady rhythm forming words I at last understood.

See, see, see us now?

6. Dermestid eggs take one to two weeks to hatch. More than it takes for rabies to infect a human body, warp a mind before killing it. Less than it takes for a uterus to build and bleed a blanket, abort an unfinished clump of thoughtless cells. I’ve never suffered from rabies. I’ve suffered every month.

The inquest never decided whether it was accident or suicide. The bullet came from the hunter’s gun. His family had no answers. Was he depressed? Did he have enemies? Did he, too, hear the beetles that consumed him?

In the end, they called it a tragedy. We were all interviewed, but the only clear evidence came from the dermestids who’d made a home of his corpse: He’d been dead five to seven days. They ate, and grew, and told the court the story of his death.

They told me more: that he was delicious, and they were grateful.

I graduated three months after the case closed. When I walked across the stage, I closed my eyes. Under the roaring applause, the crackling static of microphoned names, I could still hear them feasting.

My stomach rumbled, too low for anyone else to hear.

7. There are 700 species of dermestid. Every one of them has a culture, and a memory of flesh.

In my early twenties I got a job at a lab that specialized in termites. They studied termite growth, destruction of historic buildings, effective pesticides. Growing, living, killing. The cycle made no sense, but that’s what scientists do. We learn about life through sacrifice. We study something in order to discover how best to destroy it.

Termites aren’t really anything like dermestids. I let some crawl over my gloved hands, and they showed no interest at all in my warmth. They’re ugly, inelegant.

After a month at the lab, I went online and found the same kit my mom ordered for me in seventh grade. It took three weeks to arrive.

When I opened the white box, tape peeling and cardboard bruised, I found the dermestid eggs limp, lifeless.

I buried them in the garden, marking the place with a chicken bone.

8. Where one dermestid is found, others exist, waiting for death to feed them.

I started dreaming about the body in the woods. The hole in his skull was coated in sawdust, edges of wood instead of bone shining in scattered sunlight. He was part of the forest, a fallen tree stricken by rot or storm. His camo became moss, his gun a broken branch. As I watched, termites consumed him, reduced him to mush.

They didn’t sound like dermestids. Their noise was louder, more persistent. I didn’t have to lean close to hear them, but I did. I moved in because between the pulsing brown bodies was a single black dot.

A dermestid, dead.

9. The last common ancestor shared by dermestids and humanity lived over 500 million years ago.

I took a week’s vacation from the termite lab and drove north. The leaves were turning and it was a pleasant ride, my back seat empty except for reusable shopping bags. I didn’t see any roadkill the whole way.

The sun was slanting through the trees by the time I reached the state forest I’d studied four years ago. I parked my car and walked along the hiking trail, breathing autumn’s decaying scent.

I meant to just stop for twenty minutes—get some fresh air and admire the view. My feet kept going, though. The path turned and I veered off it, heading after a memory and a dream.

Dried leaves filled my awareness, crisp with fragility. Every footstep exploded in dust, rhythmically destructive. Shnch, shnch.

After nearly an hour of walking, I stopped.

This was it. This was where I found him.

No body this time. Just brown grass, mottled with mud. I squatted, staring at the place he’d lain for a week alone.

But he wasn’t alone. He died alone, but they found him. They sensed him, and filled him. Emptied him.

I couldn’t help but wonder how many dermestids I killed when I made that call and started a process that took away their feast, reduced their thriving kingdom to dead evidence.

I listened, but found only silence.

10. There are 300 times more of them than of us.

I circled the clearing three times. Finally, I headed back towards the trail and my car. When I was almost out, sun turning the leaves orange around my feet, I smelled it.

Death.

I couldn’t turn away. My mouth watered, my pulse heightened as I followed the scent further off the trail. I found the carcass just as the edge of the sun touched the mountains behind me.

A coyote, withered. It had been here for a long time, wedged between a pricker bush and a birch.

But it hadn’t been alone. Covering its teeth, filling its nose, revealing the bones beneath—a mass of moving black.

I dropped to my knees and closed my eyes.

In the silence of the woods, I heard them again—joyously, urgently feeding.

11. More than half our DNA is shared.

The hindquarters had the least. Hundreds of dermestids clustered around the face and neck, and more infested the main body cavity. But the coyote’s back legs looked almost untouched, the fur still full. I ran my fingers through it as cold seeped through my jeans.

Stiff, cool. It didn’t feel like an animal anymore.

I dug my fingers deeper, searching for orifices or injuries. I found bumps—bones straining against skin—and parasites run out of blood. I picked out ticks, fleas, mites, crushing them between my fingernails. They didn’t speak to me. I only understood one language, one rhythm.

When I’d cleared the area, I reached for the coyote’s splintered chest. Dermestids filled my palm, plump and animated. I could feel their excitement, sense their happiness. This was a healthy colony. This was a family that would survive, so long as there were bodies to host them.

With my free hand I tore away fur, scratched dead skin. I poured the dermestids onto the space I’d made, offered them this new territory to claim. They were confused at first, searching for the opening from which I’d harvested them. Soon, the largest adapted. They found my scratches and widened them to cuts, surgical incisions. Smaller dermestids followed, burrowing after stagnant blood.

Before my eyes, they peeled back skin, untangled muscle. They cleared away fat and swallowed cells. The sun set and I couldn’t see them anymore. I lay down next to the body on the wet ground. It grew colder, my joints stiffening in the dark.

Shadows merged trees into walls. I had no bed, no sheets to wrap me in dreams, but I didn’t need sleep to open the way this time. I knew the words to the song of death.

Shnch, shnch, shnch.

Savor, sing, stay.

Things crawled on me, searching for wounds and finding none. My skin cooled, my pulse slowed. I felt cold and cold and cold and warm. In the depth of night, the dermestids returned, testing my body.

Not quite ready. Not quite still.

Gathering beside me, they whispered a hungry lullaby.

Sleep, savior, sleep.

I breathed out, and closed my eyes.

12. There is no last meal for a dermestid. Our last is their first, their always.