A box full of tetrigids, a count of about two-hundred, is what I ended up with. My heart dropped like a lead ball into my stomach when I saw the parcel on my door. About two-foot cubed, no room to squeeze a leopard in there – not even a baby sea otter.

Jumping cuts of rotten bark, that’s what I got. The letter inside read:

“Dear Sir/Madam,

Congratulations! Thank you for signing up for Earthly Saints. You’ve been selected among our client pool to receive this very rare species to put under your care. In fact, according the WWF, your species is classified as ‘endangered’, which means recent measurements have detected a sixty-percent population decline.

You’re in charge! The species we selected for you is: TETRIGIDAE. Such fun. Attached are instructions on how to care for your new animal. Membership points are available for those that successfully complete various parts of the animal care procedure. Successfully breed and increase the population pool we’ve sent you, not only are you helping save the planet, you will be eligible for a level-up in our membership program.

Good luck on your new adventure. Please don’t hesitate to contact Earthly Saints if you have any questions or concerns. At this time, we are unable to accept any returns or refunds due to high-volume demands.

Sincerely,

Carmak Reynalds

CEO, Earthly Saints”

My neighbour Patrick found a large cage with a cloth draped over it on his doorstep. He was the father of a new pair of giant pandas. Mindy, who lives on the floor above seems to have adopted something with a disposition for stomping and snorting. At night I as I start up at the bending ceiling, I wonder if the construction workers of the apartment blocks new they’d have gorillas testing their support beams.

This morning was cold, a light frost decorated the park outside my bedroom window. I went to check on my guests in their two-foot cubed box. The pet store down the road had a department for member of Earthly Saints, which I had yet to visit to collect the supplies that would make my two-hundred new house quests more comfortable.

They weren’t moving, not one in two-hundred. Yesterday afternoon I had a box abuzz with jumps, humming like a four-valve engine in my hand, this morning nothing. Dead? Fear welled up in my throat like I had a piece of live calamari stuck in there – would my membership be terminated? Hours of application curation, trips to laundromats to wash up my sweat-stained interview attire for next week – all vanished with the death of two-hundred tiny souls.

Maybe it was a bad batch, I told myself. I reached a finger out and touched one of them gingerly, not yet confident their sharp texture wouldn’t draw blood. The body toppled like a statue. Legs locked, eyes bulged, it lay there. Dead. I sat there, shivering in that cold morning.

In my blanket of depression I turned on the heating, left the porridge on the stovetop too long and it became cement, then resorted to having a pack of crisps, something, to munch my mind away from the strings of self-dread it was resonating. I stopped shivering.

About halfway through my crisps I heard a noise, a little ping, like someone had dropped a pin on its head from two stories high. Mindy? The bulge in my ceiling hadn’t budged this morning, Mindy and her occupant were still asleep. Then another. A popcorn of pins. I ran to my bedroom.

Wrapped up in my morning woes, I’d left that two-foot cubed box wide open, open as a dedicated friar’s chest, preparing his hands for a stigmata ritual. Tetrigids on my ceiling, tetrigids on my wall, tetrigids on my lamp, some escaped to the hall.

“Wee-hee!” I heard. “Ya-hoo!” came a voice. “Watch this!” and “Try that!” and I was in a storm of two-hundred tiny voices, chattering back and forth.

“You can talk?” I said like an idiot.

“Of course!”, “Yes!”, “Check this out!” “Right on!” I heard back.

What to say next to a hundred leaping tiny insects was beyond me that morning. So I just stood there in the shower of tetrigids, letting them turn my apartment into a trapeze circuit. One rocketed onto my shoulder, perched their like a crumpled leaf. “Nice place!” it buzzed. “Watch this!” and it cartwheeled away and onto the window sill.

“I thought you were dead.” I said, trying to make light conversation with the two-hundred heartbeats in the room.

“Nope!”, “Not dead!”, “Never!”, “Check this out!”, “Only cold!” came the cacophony of replies.

Huh, only cold. I laughed.