by Kevin Snyder
A caterpillar fingers its way up my forearm. I’ve shut my eyes so I can only feel the fine hairs and half an inch of tiny stubs. Its head antennas the air. It doesn’t know that the whole world is the rectangle of my arm.
Mom plods in. We’re in the Pink Lady tonight. I hide the critter in my fist and my fist beneath the blanket. She sits, breathes, asks what I’m up to. Her neck lends the weight of her head to her hands and her feet are still for the first time today.
I tell her I’m fine, which is really what she’s asking. The TV’s on, which we don’t pay for. And the fan makes a static sound, which is camouflage, she says.
A bag of gummy worms lands on my lap and I eat the first one without chewing. In a moment, she’s beside me in bed and she’s wrapping me in the blanket like mothers do to babies. She asks if I’m hungry. I say I’m fine, that I’m not a baby. She’s still in overalls. She smells like the steam in a bathroom that’s been shut the whole night. She says she’s sorry I have to be here alone so much.
I squirm. The caterpillar is breaching from my hand. There’s another on the windowsill, and another on the showerhead. One more in my sandals under the dresser. Dad will sweep the place when he’s home, when Mom’s asleep, and he’ll ask me where I keep getting them, he’ll ask me again to stop.
The wallpaper rolls off in thin strips like hangnails or ryegrass. In crooked frames are broad, rural landscapes—the same ones in every motel—and I think the places in them must be real. My aunt taught me to catch critters in the small yard behind her house. She says that most kids like books or movies. She says that no one knows how to watch something grow. In the summers we go hunting on our hands and knees, and she doesn’t say a word about money.
At night, I take a bath because the Pink Lady has bathtubs. Cavities in the porcelain enamel chip out like teeth. The sage tiles were darker a year ago. The white towel is nickel in the middle, where Mom and Dad cluster coins and count them carefully. Their pockets sound like Christmas.
In the bathtub, I keep a caterpillar on the crest of my knee and it probes in circles. Another of them has cocooned itself inside the open cabinet under the sink, where the wood’s turned the shade of moss. The creature swells now like Mom’s ankles.
I poke at the thing on my barren knee and I arch my finger like a palm leaf so the caterpillar feels at home. But it recoils each time it touches the water. It huddles in the center. I pick it up and sneak it into my mouth. It tastes like peach fuzz. When Dad arrives it’s very late and he opens the door to check on me so I swallow the critter. It’s fine, I mumble, but I mean I’m.
He tells me he may have time this weekend. He tells me he loves me. He asks me if I’m lonely in the motel all day. Because Mom’s sleeping, he whispers something I don’t hear, and I wonder if they even know each other.
When the door clicks, I stretch out so the water comes to my chin, and my head is an oval and an island and I’m submerged and shapeless. I think I can feel it crawling around inside me. I think this might be very bad, and I feel very bad for having swallowed it. So I take a gulp of bath water, which tastes like nothing, and another and another and the best thing I can think to do is drown the thing so it’s not alive inside me anymore. And another. The cocoon beneath the sink begins to quiver. Just stay here a little longer, I whisper. Don’t grow up too fast, and I sound like Mom. I kick closed the cabinet door. Another. I drink until I’m jelly, until I’ve filled the tub with my body.
When I emerge from the bathroom, in the density of the steam, I switch off the light, and I shut the door quick. Streetlights, car lights, moonlight beam through the drawn shades. Bright segments crawl along the wall. I climb into bed between my parents, and by instinct they swaddle me with their arms.
My hand goes to the soft bow of Mom’s stomach. In the morning I’ll release the fluttering thing from beneath the bathroom sink, which I can hear now in short beats, and I’ll go out again into the lawn behind the motel and forage for critters. And I’ll keep them in a shoebox or a cabinet or on the tip of my finger. And when they are ready, we will lay perfectly still together in the dark motel room and wonder which of us will get to fly away.
Kevin Snyder is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Writing at Johns Hopkins University. He is based out of Seattle. This is his first publication.
January House Literary Journal 
Leave a comment