nobody wants this

"I'm not afraid of anything," you announce proudly.

The circle looks at you incredulously. Perhaps it's your tarnished reputation betraying you. Perhaps it's that everyone was just now talking about baking recipes, and your proclamation was a bit non sequitur. But most likely... it's because nobody believes you.

Your face contorts in thought. Your previous certainty suddenly feels a bit premature. Maybe you're mistaken. There is something, after all. Something that haunts you in the dark of night, transcending nightmare into your waking moments. Your skin begins to itch. You feel a sensation between your shoulder blades, ascending your skin, tickling pore after pore, nestling under your smart turtleneck.

"Well," you shrug, "except for bugs."

Ah yes. The bugs.

What is it about bugs that sends us all into childish squealing? What is it about their cracked exoskeletons and writhing, spiny legs that makes our legs twitch under our desks, and our hair suddenly feel alive? Is there a more irrational fear? Here we sit, the apex of the Earthly food chain, and still the fear consumes us... a million tiny, scampering legs. The dripping of saliva off of twitching incisors. The writhing of antennae. We could crush most any bug with a well placed stomp. We could defeat our foes with a balled up paper towel. But somehow in the back of our minds, we know they have the power. Maybe it's a premonition. Not a fear of what could happen, or what has happened in the past, but rather a primordial knowledge of what lies ahead, decades or days from now, in the cold Earth.

The bugs always do get us in the end.

This is a comic about bugs.