Breadcrumb #673
HARRIET CLEAL
At first she thought it was a trick of her imagination, but after noticing it shrink three days in a row, she had to investigate. She was right. It was definitely getting smaller. While she’d never had a green thumb, she knew that’s not how plants were supposed to grow.
The congestion of leaves thinned into unsheltered patches where fragments of leaves had disappeared. Dolores brushed the tips delicately against her hands as if grasping at cotton candy. Parting the branches carefully, she spotted a small sliver of green that seemed to be twitching: a perfectly-camouflaged caterpillar. It was a species she’d never seen before.
She never liked to boast about it, but she was quite the amateur lepidopterist. Her passion started on her birthday almost fifteen years ago when her favorite aunt gifted her a butterfly on a stick, explaining that it was a hat pin. With an intelligence beyond her years, she took a moment to pause after she opened it. She spirited away the question and sat patiently in the waiting room between her mind and her mouth (“What does a twelve year old want with a hat pin?”) and replacing it with, “How did you know butterflies are my favorite animal?” For the next couple of rounds of Christmases and birthdays, all the adults in her life showered her with butterfly-themed gifts, relieved at having an answer to the quandary of finding an appropriate present for a girl on the cusp of adolescence. At that point, she was left with two choices: admit the lie or learn to love butterflies. By then, already in too deep, she dived wholeheartedly into the latter.
Since then, she’d wanted to study butterflies full time. However, when the time came to make life choices to swerve towards an eventual career path she knew she wouldn’t be able to go through her studies without hearing her father whispering “financial security” over her shoulder every day. Instead, she had opted for the marginally safer career of journalism.
In any case, she knew enough to realize that this was something special. She carefully trimmed away a few leaves so that she could glance at it while flicking through her heaviest butterfly encyclopedia, pausing every so often to bring the page up to the plant and compare the picture with the gorgeous beast that had somehow ended up in her flat.
All those caterpillars concertinaed from the pages of the encyclopedia into her mind, unfurling from the cocoon of sleep into bright butterflies. They flitted around her dreams, alighting on her thoughts to take nectar. Only one remained a stubborn pupae, refusing her efforts to identify it. She woke up knowing how to get an answer.
It was only a couple of blocks away, but she called ahead to the Natural History Museum who assured her they’d be delighted to help her identify the species. As her beautiful bug seemed to be enjoying its floral feast so much, she took the whole bush. She didn’t even know where the plant itself had come from. It seemed to have appeared out of nowhere after the original fiddle-leaf fig had withered and died, this vibrant vegetation rising in place of the shriveled trunk like a green phoenix.
“They flitted around her dreams, alighting on her thoughts to take nectar.”
Leaving the apartment, she opted for the stairs to avoid the elevator's temperamental tendency of shuddering to a stop when it reached the ground floor. She felt down each step with the back of her heel, trying to summon the skills she’d gained from hours of her childhood spent balancing books on her head. Whenever her neighbor, a girl named Tabitha, came round they would race each other across the kitchen trying not to let them fall off. Dolores would rarely win (she suspected this was the reason why Tabitha was so keen to play) and she was convinced that Tabitha hid a perfectly flat head under her thick bush of hair. However, on the Advanced Level - the stairs - Dolores would win on occasion through her combination of patience and trying to make Tabitha giggle. She channeled that patience now as she shuffled slowly and steadily to the museum.
On arrival, she was led past the petrified forest, under the pterodactyl skeleton, along the endangered animals corridor, taking a sharp right turn into the secret guts of the museum where she was introduced to a scientist named Robert. She proudly held out the plant pot, careful to turn it so the caterpillar was on the side facing him. She knew he’d spotted it as his eyes lit up immediately.
“Woah,” he breathed. “This certainly is a rare one.”
Even though she had left it with him to investigate, the caterpillar remained on her mind as the days passed. She tried to write but every article was another breadcrumb back to butterflies. That story about how to progress in the modern workplace was really just the perfect vehicle for a metaphor about metamorphosis. The digital etiquette think piece she was working on would surely benefit from some analysis of a caterpillar's dating life. Maybe the feature on the importance of getting credit at work could do with a description of the rules on who gets to name a new species of butterfly. She wondered if hers was a new species and if she would get to name it. Papilio dolores had quite a ring to it...
In the middle of her daydreaming, Robert called to promise her that “the little one is blossoming!” Surely it couldn’t have completed its metamorphosis into a butterfly yet? He must mean that it had coiled up in a cocoon. Still, she relished the idea that she might be able to see its full form already and rushed over, her mind oscillating between pure excitement and fruitless attempts to temper her expectations.
Robert was waiting for her at the entrance to the lab and opened the door with the air of a magician revealing his trick’s finale.
“Look at these flowers!” He waited for her to share his excitement. Nothing. He tried again. “I just thought you’d like to see. We’re still not there yet, but these will really help us identify what species it is.”
“The flowers?”
“Yes,” he was confused. “That’s why you brought in the plant…”
“But...? Is the caterpillar…?”
“Oh,” he took on what he thought was a reassuring tone, “Ness - my girlfriend - has a fear of bugs so I know how it is. It looked like it had laid some eggs as well! But don’t you worry. I killed the bastards.”