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40 The Mantis The preying mantis in the living room has lost a fore-claw. He has been here for two days now. And it may be loneliness— as I keep house, keep up appearances, cleanly and self-solicitous, eating salads— as if I were important to myself in your absence—it may be loneliness, or the lost claw, or else my weariness of the lamp’s mosquitoes, but I find I like him. That blank, triangular, revolving head; the eyes, so pupilled and so horrible (they always make me momentarily infer intelligence, alert, demented— and then the recoil to a greater horror, that zero touched when likeness makes us reach too far): These all have fallen to their truth, become familiar. The lamp prints his thin shadow now on the wall, the books, and now the chair-arm, and I don’t mind. And it is mostly the claw I think, the lost fore-claw: For now, you see, he is in disrepair without resort. My mind trembles before a brink I will not Imagine—neither surgery nor friendship . . . And he will not flinch, but sit and wait for the unwary mosquito fat with blood to rip and not be able to hold on to and set spinning lazily to the far floor. ...

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