The Immortal Mantis

It’s difficult to see the structure in most genuine stories unless you fancy them up with a little fantasy. Some stories are fantastical from the get-go, heaps of mad chaos wrapped in a blanket of order that perplexes all human reason. My story is the latter.

I will tell you the single event that shaped how I viewed the world. My earliest memory. I was quite young, but the world was quite innocent then, so I came and went as I pleased. An inquisitive child of 8.

One morning on the low humid slopes of a vast mountain range, just above the fields of rice, an old farmer shook his son awake.

The son moaned and groaned and then, as quickly as he begrudged the start of the day, he tossed his bare legs from his bedroll and sprinted past his father to watch the sunrise. The boy’s father towered above him. “What? No hug today?”

The boy turned and hugged his father. His massive arms wrapped him up. He wasn’t large for a rice farmer, but he was large compared to the skinny runt of a boy.

As the boy hugged his father, his face brightened at the sight of his mother returning from the well with two carefully placed buckets of water balanced between a staff she held pressed to her hips. She smiled back, and the boy fought his father’s bear hug, scurried to the ground and embraced his mother at the moment she set her heavy load down.

“Let me get the water tomorrow,” said his father.

The mother rubbed her belly and smiled in agreement with a deep sigh as she squeezed her little boy.

It was a normal day for the growing family. They sat outside their bamboo shack under the cover of an awning and cooked rice, the beans they soaked the day before, and grilled meat on an open fire. The boy poured water from the wooden bucket his mother brought from the well into a bowl and measured out the beans they would need for tomorrow. He eyed it carefully and then splashed it into the bowl before covering the bowl with a cloth to keep the dust off.

To encourage his son to read, every morning before leaving for the fields to work, the father took a giant book down from the shelf and read a story to the boy. Now, the boy didn’t know it then, but the book was in a foreign language, left behind by someone traveling through. The boy also didn’t learn until much later that his father, the poor farmer, couldn’t read himself.

But every morning without fail, literate or not, the father would tell a story from his mind. And on this average day, he told his son a story that he dreamed the previous night.

The son sat poised at his food bowl, his cheeks puffed out with too much food, staring at his father, waiting to hear the story of the day. The mother stirred a pot with a bamboo spoon.

“The Legend of the Immortal Mantis,” pretend read the father. “Once upon a time there was an old praying mantis who had lived hundreds and hundreds of years, though he couldn’t prove it. With each passing year, he grew larger and larger until he was about the size of a large deer. After he had stopped growing, he understood the people who traveled over his mountain.

At first he thought they spoke with some a strange sound in their mouth, but soon he even learned to speak and read their language. Years later, he saved a logger from falling from the side of his mountain. To pay the mantis respect, he built a small house for the mantis and told many of the way the mantis saved his life.

People from the valley began venturing up the side of the mountain to ask the mantis for advice. Hearing that he was hundreds of years old, they hoped he could solve many of life’s issues and woe.

One day a small child, about 8 or 9 years old, climbed the top of the mountain for he heard from his friend that the mantis would occasionally give out valuable gifts, though he didn’t believe them to be valuable himself. Other times, he would give out silly trinkets or only words, but if he was lucky, then he might gain something of such value that it could change his life forever.

For you must understand. The child was poor and didn’t even have a roof over his head at night. When it rained as it had the previous night. The child would walk around begging with a sneeze that put people off from giving him anything for fear they would catch his sickness.

So, one day the child went to the mantis’s home on the side of the mountain…And…”

The father snapped the book shut. “... we’ll finish the story tomorrow.”

“Ahh, dad! What happens!” yelled the child, pulling on his dad’s pant leg while he tried to put the book back on the top of the shelf.

“Wait until tomorrow,” said the man, placing his straw hat on his head. “Or go and find the mantis yourself and ask him for the end of the story.”

The boy stuck his chest out and scratched his nose by brushing it with his thumb. “Maybe I will!”

“Just make sure you’re back in time for supper,” said the mother. The father and son turned to her and pointed at themselves in unison. 

“Both of you!” said the mother.

As the son ran off the deck of their covered open-air kitchen, he overheard his parents talking.

“Is that really such a good idea?” she asked, laying a kiss on her husband before he turned toward the fields.

“What?” said the father. “It will be good for him. Besides, you were the one who said he needed to get more exercise. The mountain path is safe enough. He’ll be fine.” And with that, the man waved goodbye to his wife and walked the stony path down the perfectly manicured rice fields.

The boy, now out of earshot of his family, was in earshot of the bustling town. His friends, who he had woken up early to find, were still nowhere to be seen. He wanted to find them and tell them what he was about to do., but then he worried they may try to come with him or worse, stop him.

He’d bravely go by himself and then tell them about it later.

He found a stick by the road and set out up the mountain.

At noon, when the sun was high above the peak of the mountain, he arrived at a small run-down shack built into the side of the mountain. A man with the ugliest face he had ever seen ran from tending a small bed of vegetables around the corner and disappeared into a shabby stone arch doorway carved into the side of the mountain beyond the shack.

The boy was scared… terrified even. The man had such a disagreeable face that it took the boy many contemplative moments staring at the shack before he finally peaked in the window.

As he tiptoed up to the window ledge, if you can call a hole in a wall a ledge, his stomach growled like a bear. A curious face poked his head out of the window to inspect what that noise could be.

The boy tripped backward over a box of freshly picked greens and sat frozen in the dirt, staring up at the triangular face of a praying mantis the size of an irregular pumpkin.

The boy was stunned. He had come to prove his father’s story a load of yak dung and here before him was a giant praying mantis.

He suddenly forgot his own hunger and schooling as he struggled to remember whether a mantis was a carnivore or not… and forgetting that made him more curious as to whether or not he looked a delicious snack for the monster before him.

“Hello boy!” said the mantis with a booming voice. “What brings you by?”

The boy sat with wide eyes. He had expected a shrill voice from an insect, not a booming one, though he’s not sure why he expected a voice at all. Perhaps it’s a simple thing to get over the idea of a talking insect when one has seen one as large as this.

The mantis disappeared inside his house.

Had he hit his head? Thought the boy, feeling the back of his skull for a bump. There was no bump.

A crashing noise came from inside the house and then a wooden door, like a cabinet door on tiny hinges, swung open and out walked a giant praying mantis on all six legs, humming to himself something or other about what a lovely day it was.

He stopped to adjust a straw hat on his head by pulling a string tight under his neck.

The boy sat speechless still, taking the vast size and details he couldn’t capture with a magnifying glass of the mantis’s other brothers and sisters.

“Mr. Mantis,” said the praying mantis, holding out a sharp-looking leg.

The boy took it by instinct, not wanting to be rude, and was surprised at the smoothness of Mr. Mantis’s hand area, though it looked like it could puncture easily at the point.

“Mr. Mantis?” asked the boy. “Uh, nice to meet you.”

“And you, I think,” said the mantis. “Though you haven’t told me your name.”

The boy released his arm and gulped down the remaining wetness in his throat. He dryly muttered, “Adam.”

“Adam,” said the mantis, stroking a bit of hanging hair at where a human chin might rest. “A good name. I once knew a man named Adam. A strong man for one who farmed rice. Now Adam, boy. Did you have something you wanted to talk to me about?”

Adam nodded. “Yes, I did, but I forgot.” He gulped and realized that he was still sitting in the dirt. He jumped to his feet and brushed his shorts and hands.

“Well, I was just about to have lunch. Would you care to join me? Perhaps you will remember while we eat?”

Adam nodded.

The ugly man reappeared with a table and a chair for Adam. Mr. Mantis introduced the ugly man as someone who felt as if he couldn’t bear to live with people for what he believed they thought of him. Adam agreed. It would be much better to live alone if one looked like that.

They sat down to rice and pheasant when Adam finally took a big gulp and stammered out a question he’d been holding in for too long. “How’d you get so big?”

“That’s easy,” said Mr. Mantis, not offended at all by the question as he’d grown accustomed to being asked it. “All immortal creatures continue to grow.”

“Immortal?” asked Adam.

“Yes, immortal… living forever.”

“You mean you can’t die?” asked Adam.

Mr. Mantis stroked those long strings that hung from his chin. His wide eyes narrowed as much as seemed possible, and he studied the boy. “I can die, just like all male praying mantises, but if a male praying mantis doesn’t offer himself to a female praying mantis, then he remains immortal.”

“How have I never heard this before?”

“An excellent question,” said Mr. Mantis. “That’s because all immortal male mantises offer themselves to their mate that they may not die.”

“I have heard that before,” said Adam. “Though I was told the female mantis is stronger and bigger and kills their husband to stay alive.”

“The female mantis is very strong indeed.”

Adam opened his mouth and hesitated long with a tonal sound. He tried to shove back in his mouth with his hand.

“Out with it,” said Mr. Mantis. “You don’t have to hold anything back with me.”

“Were you stronger than your mate?” asked Adam. “Were you too big for her to eat?”

Mr. Mantis shook his head. “Alas, I have had no mate.”

“But I’m to believe that every other male praying mantis has had one?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Mantis.

“Because you didn’t want to get eaten?” asked Adam.

Mr. Mantis laughed straight from his thorax, or whatever that big bulge behind him was called. He grinned down with a thin smile. “No, no,” said Mr. Mantis. “The Maker did not make me a mate. You see, I am a thing on display for the world to see.”

Adam thought and then shook his head. “Why didn’t the Maker make you a mate?”

“A pertinent question indeed,” said Mr. Mantis. “One I have given much of my life to try to understand and to this conclusion: If the Maker made Mr. Mantis a mate, then how would mankind know that the male mantis is immortal?”

“Why is that so important?” asked Adam. He squinted at the peculiar creature who spatted peculiar answers. “I bet you ran away from your mate, didn’t you?”

Mr. Mantis shook his head slightly, almost as if he pitied the boy. “Adam,” muttered Mr. Mantis. “What could I possibly gain from you or anyone by lying? I am immortal, after all.” Then Mr. Mantis laughed. “But you are most strange. For you already believe me to be immortal?”

Adam nodded. “Just about everything is older than me, so in comparison, everything seems immortal.”

“You haven’t witnessed death yet, have you?”

Adam shook his head.

“I see,” said Mr. Mantis. “I usually have to spend a great deal of time convincing other grown men and women that I’m immortal.” He smiled. “I haven’t gotten this far this fast in a conversation before. Well, almost once. There was a small child who wandered up here and called me mista mannis, but he couldn’t understand the concept of immortality. He simply agreed if I fed him.”

“So, you didn’t abandon a Mrs. Mantis then?” asked Adam.

“Of course I didn’t,” said Mr. Mantis. “Though the Maker has made a promise to me that one day my Mrs. Mantis,” he smiled at the thought, “will meet me on my mountain, but first mankind must know that all male mantises are immortal and they must admit his immortality.”

“And if they don’t?” asked Adam.

“It doesn’t change the appointed time for Mrs. Mantis to arrive at this mountain.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No, there are other signs and wonders to get the attention of mankind if they look for them.”

“Why are these signs and wonders so important? Why is it so important to the Maker that mankind by made aware that the male mantis is immortal?”

“Not just that his immortal, but that he is immortal and will sacrifice his own life for that of his wife.”

Adam scratched his head. “Why does that matter?”

“Oh, it matters a great deal. I have a mind to believe that that is how the Maker feels about mankind. My spectacle is that of a sweet reminder from a lover of mankind. But perhaps you are too young to talk about lovers.”

Adam’s face burned red hot. “Am not!” he said, with his arms crossed on his puffed out chest.

Mr. Mantis smiled. “I see.”

After a long silence, when it seemed that Adam had taken the information to heart and to head in order to process the information, the old mantis spoke. “Is there anything else you’d like to discuss?”

“How to put it,” said Adam. “Please don’t take offense.”

“I am unoffendable,” said Mr. Mantis.

“Then, will you give me something?” asked Adam. Shocked at his own gall. “I mean, according to legend, you’ve given many things to people in the past.”

“I have, haven’t I?” said Mr. Mantis. He lowered his head down to the table and looked squarely across the table from Adam. “Then I should want to give you the greatest gift I have because you have made it the furthest in our conversation in the shortest amount of time out of all the humans who have visited me.”

Adam gulped. His eyes grew wide, imagining a golden bowl full of gemstones and other gold objects. Then a gold sword with a jeweled hilt entered his mind.

“An invitation,” said Mr. Mantis. “You are welcome to return and continue our conversation another day. I will let you glean on my wisdom until the day you leave this earth, but I remain.”

“Wisdom?” asked Adam, squinting with his head cocked to the side. He had been hoping for money. It was no secret that his family was of the poorest in the village. With a new baby brother or sister on the way, it would have been nice to have some better things.

“Yes,” said Mr. Mantis. “Good evening.” The giant mantis turned, opened his door with his spear like leg and ambled into his shack.

“Evening?” mumbled Adam. He looked toward the setting sun and the northstar, starting it’s twinkle above the valley. He needed to get back for supper. His Mom had told him and he had promised.

Adam raced down the mountain, a little recklessly, but his legs were as light as his head felt heavy and he told his parents the news. He had found the immortal mantis and received his blessing to gain wisdom.

That night on his pillow, Adam looked up at his father and asked, “What is wisdom, father?”

Adam’s father smiled down at his son, laying on his bedroll. “Knowledge might be: having the information needed to arrive at the solution, but wisdom is knowing the solution or knowing where (or who from) to find the answer.”

“I see,” said Adam. He yawned. “I guess it was pretty wise of me to ask you for the meaning of wisdom then.”

“It would seem so.” The father smiled and blew out the candle.

Copyright © 2023 by Matt Antis. Originally published on March 22, 2023 by Ink Jot Kingdom.