» Fiction

Instar

Anton DiSclafani 

In early August, my husband finds a Luna moth with an injured wing while walking our dogs. The wing is luminescent and green, torn nearly in half. We put the moth, which will never fly again, into a netted terrarium, a former home for caterpillars that arrived in pupae form. Our children—two boys, six and three—had ignored the caterpillars. I didn’t blame them. The whole experience felt perfunctory, riskless. Go to insect.com and order caterpillars that are almost butterflies, caterpillars surely raised in some sort of caterpillar factory, ready to enter the next stage of life as soon as they are unpackaged. 

My husband jokes that the Luna moth is in hospice care. Otherwise, of course, it would be cruel to keep. Its delicate legs cling to the netting, hour after hour. I wonder what the moth makes of the chaotic sounds that surround it, the little boys who peer into its face. If it hears, or sees. 

My older son speaks to it, seems unfazed when it doesn’t respond to his voice. This boy is most at home in the natural world. My husband says he was born into the wrong family. I have never camped. My husband used to, when he was young, but it has been years. Luna moths, we learn, do not eat or drink in their short time—a week, ten days—on earth. They exist only to reproduce.  

It becomes a she one morning when we wake to dozens of nearly microscopic eggs, scattered thickly upon the netted walls of her final home. I’ve never seen her move, but she must have moved, injured though she is, in the night. I am glad for her, that she served her purpose, that she will not die in vain, though I know that to feel anything on behalf of a moth is ridiculous.  

Like the caterpillars, our Luna moth offers a guarantee: she will die, and we will watch her do it. 

◊

When the moth enters our house, my older son is about to begin kindergarten for the second time. It is common in our football-obsessed town to redshirt your children, especially boys, so that they are bigger for sports, but that is not why we do it. We do it because he is struggling to read. Whether or not this is because he wasn’t explicitly taught at his free-range Montessori school, or because he is dyslexic, remains to be seen.  

When the moth enters our house, I am happy. We’ve entered a contented phase. It took me a long time to feel like myself after our younger son was born, three years ago.  

But now I do.  

◊ 

The moth lives alongside her eggs for a few days, then she begins to die. When I think of moths, I imagine the small brown kind that eat holes in sweaters and flock to light. But this moth is beautiful, lovelier than any butterfly I’ve ever seen. She is as large as my hand, iridescent green with yellow spots that resemble eyes, to fool predators. She disintegrates, bit by bit. I find a piece of her wing at the green bottom of her cage; by the next morning, she lies crumpled, surrounded by the rocks and assorted talismans my older son installed there. He loves objects: marbles and coins and bits of things he finds in the world. He comes home with rocks and moss and desiccated insects. I throw away his treasures in secret, when he is sleeping or at school. He doesn’t miss them unless I am careless and he sees something he once loved at the top of our trash. 

A friend is over when my son sees the dead moth at the bottom of its terrarium, and at first, he is stricken, but he catches himself, acts as if it’s no big deal. Because he has a friend over. The bravado of a watched boy. 

The eggs hatch in stages. There are dozens of tiny caterpillars, and some of them make their way through the netting and disappear. My son and I look up their food sources, find a sweet gum tree and cut a branch.  

Almost all of the first wave of caterpillars die, because I didn’t think to change the branch and they cannot survive without fresh food. I consider taking the cage outside, unzipping it, letting the caterpillars into the world, where they will almost certainly die.  

I decide to try one more time.  

◊

My younger son starts preschool at the same Montessori program my older son just left. Ships, passing in the night, we joke. He leaves his home daycare, run by an Iranian-American woman I have come to love. I joke that she saved my sanity, but it is not really a joke. My husband and I traded off childcare for the first two years of his life, but I was more tethered to the baby, especially early on, when he nursed.  

This woman loves my child. And I love her, because she loves my child, part of a trend I’ve noticed: I love the people who care for my children. And when we have to leave them, as we always do, children flying through one stage after another, I am unbearably sad.  

For a year, she greeted me at the door in the morning, asked me about my son’s night, his morning. I will never stand in her foyer again.  

I text her on my younger son’s final day and tell her I can’t do pick up, or I will cry.  

◊ 

I keep the second wave of caterpillars alive. The first time I count there are twenty. They are so tiny it is difficult to think of something to compare them to—the white part of my fingernail. Twenty eyelashes, bundled together. My friend directs the Museum of Natural History in our town, and I text her questions. She tells me Luna moths are her favorite Saturniid, and I feel a strange sort of pride, as if I have anything to do with it.  

My favorite parts of my days are when I am alone, when my children are gone, and when my children come home and I play with them. Cook for them, bathe them, change their clothes, wipe their bottoms. The list is endless; sometimes I feel more servant than parent. There’s not a lot of difference, my husband says.

I worry over the caterpillars. Every night I remove the branches to which they cling, and I count them. We sit at our kitchen table, which is the kitchen table from my childhood home. The table is old, pine, and my mother took better care of it than I do—she rubbed oil into its surface when it was dry, swept the crumbs from it every night with a damp sponge. I never complete the former chore, only sometimes the latter.  

My sons like when the caterpillars crawl on their arms. I like this, too, because it delights my children. I worry that the caterpillars will not know there is a new, fresh branch, so I take a needle and gently separate them from the old leaf, transport them to the new.  

My friend the scientist tells me I might rip their insides out this way, and I am horrified that my carefulness was so wrong. I take the small scissors I used to trim my children’s fingernails when they were babies and cut around the tiny, neon green caterpillars and transfer bits of caterpillar-occupied leaf to the new leaves. It is time-consuming but satisfying, a task that is finite and clear, unlike writing.  

You will do anything to make your life complicated, a different friend says. He is a man. I can’t imagine a woman saying this. All the women I know complicate their lives like I do. With children and pets and gardens. 

Things to care for.  

◊

My husband asks how my babies are. But I don’t feel maternal toward the caterpillars. I feel enchanted by them. Something otherworldly is unfolding, so close to me. When one caterpillar touches another, the touched caterpillar rears up and swings its body around, aggressively, and though I assume this is nothing more than instinct, I can’t tell what purpose it serves. To scare? To try to identify the touch as friend or foe? Perhaps it is simply a reflex, meaningless without context. 

I watch them eat around the edges of leaves. They are active unless they are molting, in which case they look like they are praying, their front legs lifted from the leaf, clasped together. They stay like this for a few days, then they shed their skin, which we find later, dotting leaves like mummies. 

One time we see a caterpillar in the process of tugging its new body from its old. I’ve never seen anything like it. I tell my son it is rare to witness such a thing. A creature in its most vulnerable state, its skin soft and new. Untouched. 

None of them have individual personalities. Maybe I would ascribe traits to them if I spent more time with them, but I doubt it. They are too tiny, too driven by the most basic of needs: Food. They move slowly. They never seem afraid, or even aware of my presence.  

My older son and I see one poop, the flaps on its rear unfolding with elegant simplicity. My son is delighted, almost hysterical. His humor veers toward the scatological. My husband tears the tiniest piece of toilet paper for the caterpillar, and my son roars with laughter.  

Every night my husband goes to our sweetgum tree and cuts a branch. With my phone’s flashlight we check it for the parasites I have read could kill them. After a while he has to use a ladder, because we have stripped the tree of its lower branches.  

◊

After spending a summer learning the basics of phonics with a tutor, then a month of kindergarten for the second time, my son reads a word. Haltingly, slowly, he reads. I yell in excitement, startling him. But he is happy. To have pleased me.  

When my younger son was six months old, I fed him scrambled eggs, and his face turned bright red. He was diagnosed first with an egg allergy, then with a peanut and almond allergy. I learned everything I could about oral immunotherapy, the process by which the allergic is fed increasing doses of their allergen. I found it on the Internet. No doctor ever mentioned it to me. OIT makes perfect sense: You teach the body to tolerate the poison.  

Nobody near us performs OIT on children as young as my son, even though the research is astoundingly clear: The younger the child, the more flexible the immune system. The younger the child, the better OIT works.  

I considered taking my baby, seven months old at that point, to Houston once every other week for treatment, which would have required an hour and a half drive to the airport, then a flight, then an overnight stay. Then I found an allergist in Birmingham, two hours away, and my husband and I, with the flexible schedules of academics, took him every Monday.  

His allergy disappeared before he had all of his teeth.  

My older son goes to a tutor every week, but I decide this is not enough. I’ve read articles and studies about the dyslexic brain that suggest that the dyslexia is a chicken and egg problem. Since the dyslexic child does not enjoy reading, he does not read, never changing the neural pathways of his brain that would make reading easy.  

I lean hard on a study that scanned the brains of young children before and after intensive phonics tutoring. There was almost no difference between the post-tutored brains and the brains of children who were not dyslexic.  

We hired another tutor to come to our house on the weekends. We read book after book after book.  

It is the only way I know how to approach a problem. To, as I explain to my mother, nip it in the bud. The allergies, the dyslexia. I am well aware there are situations that I will not be able to nip in the bud, that we have been lucky, so far. My older son might struggle in school. At first, this idea undoes me. Then I adjust. I think of the people I know who don’t read as much as I do. My sister’s wife, who is one of my favorite people in the world, has never read my books. It is a family joke.  

I want my son not to be unhappy. But that is impossible. I want to choose his unhappinesses. I don’t know what I would choose, if given the choice.  

◊ 

My children like letting the lime green caterpillars crawl on their arms. But the caterpillars grow quickly, and their bigness alarms them. My younger son cries one evening, at dusk, the time of day we usually tend to them. After dinner and baths, before stories and bedtime.  

Off, he says. I want it off. 

I understand. Their heads have turned large and brown, their legs more articulated. I don’t feel the same affection for them, and I wonder if this is what having teenagers is like. 

Each new version of the caterpillar displaces the older ones. I marvel at how tiny they were when I look at pictures on my phone. It is the same way with my children. Watching videos of them from six months ago, a year—it is like watching strangers whom I love.  

I feel no tenderness toward the caterpillars, but I do want them to survive. It pleases me, to watch them grow. To see them eat.  

If I listen closely, I can hear them chewing.  

◊

My older son has some of the warning signs for dyslexia, which is not a learning disability but a learning difference. He was a late talker. He confuses his bs and ds, but most children his age do. The biggest warning sign is that he is having trouble learning to read. I learn that the brains of children undergo a transformation when they learn to read; dyslexic brains do not undergo the same transformation. I learn that there are different kinds of dyslexia, that as many as twenty-percent of the population is at least somewhat dyslexic. I learn that dyslexics tend to have great spatial abilities, that they are, for example, good at Minecraft. I learn so many interesting things about dyslexia, about the brain, about reading and language. I hope none of it applies to my son.  

My older son is sensitive. Often he cannot tell us why he is upset, but as he’s grown older my husband and I have started to understand him better: He is most disturbed when a plan of his does not go as he thought it would. He thought he was going to come home and eat popcorn while watching cartoons, and we tell him he is in fact going to soccer practice, and he disintegrates.  

The problem is that often we don’t know what his plans are until they’re disrupted.  

◊

The twenty caterpillars survive for a few weeks. Then they start to die. For no apparent reason. One by one. I find them at the bottom of the terrarium. I scour the Internet and read that disease and fungus are common among caterpillars, can kill off dozens in one fell swoop.  

I have no way of knowing what kills them, but I know what doesn’t kill them: A living predator. A bird, a human.  

I hate to see them dead, and in this one area of my life, I am uniquely powerless. Before the illogic of the idea reveals itself, I consider taking them to the vet.  

I hide the dead caterpillars before my children can see them. My older son becomes suspicious. Weren’t there more? he asks.  

No, I tell him. I don’t think so. If I admitted there were, I would have to admit I’d disposed of them in secret. That I have, from a certain perspective, lied.  

I think nothing of lying to him. It occurs to me that I should. 

◊

My older son begins to read in earnest. Simple words—consonant vowel consonant—but still he is reading. I feel both a profound relief and a sense of dread: That we have solved this problem, that there will surely be another problem in his childhood that I cannot solve. It’s not a question of if, but when. Because he is a person. Because a life without problems is impossible.  

◊ 

Look, I say to my husband, to my children—look. The caterpillars have gone from microscopic to the size of my pinkie finger in a month, and now they are preparing to enter pupae form. There are six of them left. When I finally tell my son that some of the caterpillars have died, he is unbothered. The remaining six find the dead leaves at the bottom of the terrarium, leaves I have left there for precisely this purpose, and begin to wrap themselves inside them. It is an ingenious disguise, if you don’t account for lawnmowers: A bird sees a dead leaf, not a meal.  

Look, I say, to my husband and children. Look. We all look. We are all amazed. None of us has seen anything like it, up close.  

I am so proud that I saved them.  

◊ 

On Easter morning, half a year later, we are in the garage, putting on shoes in preparation for meeting meet my parents for brunch. I have forgotten about the pupae, who sit in their terrarium in our garage, still clothed in leaves. I assume they have all died, but I don’t have the heart to throw them away, and I know from my friend that there is a small chance they have overwintered, remained in pupae form until the spring.  

But my older son has not forgotten. He checks the moths every day.  

Look, he says. At first I think he is pointing to an old can of paint. But no, it’s a Luna moth that has emerged during the night.  

My life will change in unimaginable ways over the next year. Illness, birth—I am pregnant with my third child. The normal vagaries of time that bring pleasure and pain.  

Too on the nose, my husband says, referencing the moth’s surfacing on a day celebrating resurrection, a joke our children are years away from comprehending. But there is awe in his voice.  

We let our older son unzip the terrarium, watch in our driveway as the moth flies away. It grows smaller and smaller, a glimmer in the bright sky.  

A flash of green, a spark of something from another world.