There was a bug. A lady bug. She was the promise of life. She came in the time of flowers and first figs. She brought with her the dream of smiles and ruffled hair and laughter.

In the winter she was not to be found.

There was a wolf. A rabid wolf. He was the harbinger of death. He came in the coldest, darkest times. He fed upon the fear of each day’s change, and broken things, and words that were spit at the night.

By the coming of spring he had all but eaten himself.

It was a late frost the first and only time they met. Savage and silent, having slunk through the barren trees, he approached her within the long reach of his shadow. The lady was slowed by the cold, and clinging to the first brittle shoot of the season.

“I am hungry,” said the wolf, “and you have broken our arrangement. Why should I not snatch you up and lock you away in my belly?”

The lady was too weak to open her eyes. She nodded instead. “It is your right,” she agreed. “I am in trespass upon your last morn. If you wish to eat me, there is nothing to stop you.”

She clung to the slender blade of grass. He loped closer to her, frosting her back with his heavy breath.

“If I eat you now, this world will not bloom. If I devour your life, no life will remain to be chased in its proper season. This banquet you offer can only bring more hunger in time.”

“What you say is true,” the lady conceded.

“Then you have set me a trap, and I will not fall,” huffed the wolf and receded back into the shadows.

The morning sun rose higher and the night’s chill melted away. The first fruits were soon to take life again. When she had warmed, the lady bug flitted free of the shoot and rode away on the wind.

They never met again, the lady and the wolf. The wolf made sure of that.

They wanted a super-soldier. A thing of muscle and testosterone and unchecked aggression. They stirred him together in a deoxyribose cocktail: Frankenstein’s Prometheus unbound, one nucleus at a time, in a blender.

“Here’s Patton’s pinky toe”, one said. “Don’t forget Sun-Tzu’s wisdom tooth”, said another. They argued over the morality of including a hair from Hitler’s mustache. In the end they went with Dahmer’s incisor instead.

He emerged from the tank, naked and fully formed. His muscles indeed rippled. His testes were suitably gigantic. His face all afrown.

“What have you to say?”

He proceeded to hug them to death.