The Question
The death of a Beetle leads to questions on the human condition.
The beetle’s shell cracked under the young man’s sneaker with a sound too soft to seem consequential. He paused, half-turning, as if to ensure the death was absolute, then wiped the sole against the pavement.
I’d seen it all from the bench, a spectator to the minor theatre of a park on a Sunday afternoon. The birds called their meaningless calls; the runners passed with faces taut in self-imposed agony. But this—this murder of a beetle—was something more deliberate, almost ritualistic.
I rose, my joints protesting the intrusion of motion, and approached him. He was young, somewhere between boy and man, his face a map of acne scars and careless rebellion.
“Should I kill you next?” I asked.
He froze, the rhythm of his breath betraying a moment of fear before he caught himself. He squinted at me, his lips curling into a smirk that didn’t reach his eyes.
“What?”
“You heard me. You took the little guy out of the great game. Why shouldn’t I take you out too?”
“It’s just a bug, old man,” he said, but his voice faltered at the end, uncertain, like someone playing a hand without knowing the stakes.
“What’s the difference between your death and his?” I pressed. “Does it matter? Your end, my end, the beetle’s end—they all lead to the same place. Finite. No more. The universe keeps rolling, indifferent to your absence.”
He shifted his weight, glancing at the path as if gauging the distance to an escape. “It’s not the same. I’m… I’m a person. I matter.”
“To who? Your parents? A handful of friends who’ll forget you within decades? To the pigeons shitting on the bench I was just sitting on? Does your existence matter to this park, to the clouds overhead, to the beetle you just erased?”
“You’re crazy,” he said, taking a step back, but he didn’t leave.
“Maybe. But that doesn’t make me wrong.” I stooped, picked up a stick, and knelt where the beetle’s flattened body lay like a forgotten punctuation mark. I pointed the stick at his chest, just enough to draw his focus. “Tell me. If I drove this through your heart, would the world stop spinning? Would anything change, beyond a little inconvenience to whoever cleans the path?”
He said nothing, his eyes locked on mine.
“Do you even know why you killed it?”
“Because I could,” he spat. “What’s it to you?”
“Because you could.” I turned the stick in my hand, testing its sharpness against my thumb. “Well, so can I. So why shouldn’t I? Convince me.”
His smirk returned, but it was thinner now, trembling at the edges. “You’re bluffing.”
“Maybe. Maybe I’m curious.” I tossed the stick aside and straightened, brushing dirt from my knees. “Why did you think its life was worth less than yours? Or anyone else’s?”
“It’s a bug,” he hissed, the words brittle in his mouth. “It doesn’t think. Doesn’t feel. Doesn’t—”
“How do you know?” I interrupted. “Did you ask it?”
He blinked, stunned into silence.
“Tell me,” I said, softer now. “Doesn’t it all seem absurd? The living. The dying. How we pretend we’re so much more than the beetle you crushed underfoot. And for what? Money? Power? Some vague notion of love or legacy? It all crumbles the same.”
“You don’t know me,” he said, his voice low, the smirk gone.
“Maybe I don’t,” I admitted. “But I know this: You think you’re different because you’re bigger, because you can crush a beetle and walk away. But someday, something bigger will crush you, and it won’t care any more than you cared about that bug.”
He stared at me, his chest rising and falling like a swimmer fighting the undertow. Finally, he asked, “What the hell’s your point?”
“I don’t have one,” I said. “That’s the beauty of it. Neither do you.”
I turned and walked back to my bench, leaving him alone with the beetle’s remains. Behind me, the birds kept calling their calls, the runners kept their pace, and—not too far, not too close—the universe carried on as if none of us had ever been there at all.
When I looked back, the young man was still standing there, staring at the beetle, as though waiting for an answer that would never come.