They could choose anything. Stick insects. Rabbits. Tadpoles
were the obvious one, but what would you do with the frogs?
It was prejudice that drove her to butterflies. Anything else with wings
scared her but somehow butterflies were different.
The name turned bluebottles soft and golden; a creature made from her
favourite dress or hotly spread toast, her mother fluttering her chin
with a flower, looking for the shine.
The teacher said they must observe the life cycle and draw it on A4. She took it seriously; illustrations and coloured arrows and encyclopaedia entries. She knew even then how great the stakes. In those days her life depended, daily, tipped on edges she felt with her toes, could not see, or speak of.
They went into the woods for the caterpillars.
Stuffed two glass jars with dock leaves and grass.
Everything went startlingly right.
The sun shone
and found them out, furry black ones, orange, white,
each a mushy jewel of hope, an itinerant preacher. A pledge.
Now she does not trust the memory. Were they so ambitious?
She thinks she squeezed her dad’s hand in relief, told him about the gold stars.
They planted geraniums for habitat and waited.
Not all lives are meant to be long.
Every evening she checked; counted the leaves for hunger-bitten holes;
spoke names in the voice of the mother they missed.
Even then she felt the foreboding of the guilt that would come.
The day they were no longer there she was grown-up. She bore the grief like a gift, carrying it carefully in front of her, tying a black ribbon around her arm.
She had waited for a chrysalis but there were none.
Only lifeless twigs and dead leaves.
Of course, the caterpillars had vanished
from pure sorrow, pining for the woods in the tiny sunless garden
of the too-small rented house.
If only she’d done stick insects.
The pessimism that she learnt to carry like insurance was born then.
But the very next week it was the turn of the butterflies.
And so from lifeless twigs she learnt
resurrection.
