Ellen Notbohm

Word Count 1189

My day began as many do, with a writing prompt: Describe the last creature you killed.

 Unless we’re a stockyard worker, a hunter or fisherman, or a euthanistic veterinarian, perhaps the only thing some of us ever kill is a bug. Or a garden slug. Or the occasional gut-twisting road kill, the Darwinian squirrel who ran toward our car rather than away.

The bug who crossed my path was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the moment, I couldn’t understand why I killed him. (How do I know it was a him?) He wasn’t eating my crops or plants, wasn’t threatening to sting or otherwise poison me or my food. He was just there. In the hindsight that came within seconds, I knew I’d killed him out of instinct. The primal, perfectly irrational strain of fear, the elephant-and-mouse kind, the sense of being ambushed by an alien.

I don’t know what kind of bug he was, and it happened so fast that I don’t remember much of what he looked like. He was dark, perhaps charcoal gray, his body perhaps three-eighths of an inch, diaphanous wings above it, filament legs below. While I strung beautiful words together in a writer’s cottage in the woods, he came in through an unscreened window and landed near the top of a page of my Oxford Writer’s Thesaurus, splayed open to where I was searching out synonyms for something starting with g. Good? Great? Gross?

He landed near the binding, the cleft where two pages meet. He never knew what hit him. I snapped the book shut, sniper-decisive. He took the full weight of 700 pages of the Oxford Writer’s Thesaurus, with the force of an overreactive full-grown human author behind it.

Not a particle of time elapsed between the slamming of the tome and the wondering why. Why hadn’t I gently lifted the book to the window over the desk and with a gentle puff of breath, shown him the way out? I couldn’t deflect the bald truth, that I was a guest in his environment. An invasive species. The cottage was one of six nestled in forty-eight acres of farm and woods on an island in Puget Sound. Having critters for neighbors was part of living in those woods. Every day I met up with bunnies and frogs and owls. At the beach I meandered among live sand dollars, crabs, gulls, herons, and an array of crustaceans. Never would I have dreamed of harming any of them. Why did I subject this insect to such a brutal judgment? I could not justify it, could not write it off to some deeply embedded generic ick factor.

The days tumbled by, each one slipping in the east window of the cottage and casting its beam on the thesaurus calmly poised to assist with the next sentence, paragraph, chapter. I knew my gossamer-winged victim was in my book somewhere, squashed flat as the proverbial bug. It was a large book, yes, but I couldn’t avoid him forever. A faint dread, guilt-tinged, tingled in my fingers when I turned the pages, looking for better words for pretty, large, simple. When my time in the cottage came to an end, he traveled home with me, snug in his wordy tomb, where the same sun slipped into a different east window. And still I didn’t allow myself to lookup for words starting with g.

The first time I saw him, months later, two-dimensional, almost mistaken for an illustration on the page of all those g words, I flicked on by as if my hands were on fire. The second time, after yet more months of avoiding g words, I did what I should have done the first time—lifted the book, took it to the door, and brushed him gently back into his world.

That bug haunted me for eight years, until a moment of secondhand clemency came to me through my son. Working in the back room of a large thrift store, he spotted a butterfly that had somehow made its way into the building and now perched unmoving atop a bin of donated goods. A white butterfly, perhaps tan, hard to tell in the dusty light. He also couldn’t tell if the butterfly was alive, but he knew it couldn’t survive indoors, so he slid his hand underneath it and gently cupped it, still motionless, while he walked quietly to the swinging back doors. Outside, he slowly unfurled his fingers to the summer sky. The butterfly flexed its wings and soared majestically into the breeze. “Bryce!” a nearby co-worker exclaimed in his melodic Kenyan cadence. “You saved a life!”

A few more years went by, our family welcomed the next generation, and finally I found some peace in my atonement.

Everything about the day was classically autumn, the vivid crimson, amber, and auburn of the trees against a dazzling sky in sparkling air just cool enough to require jackets. The woods offered up a wonderland of a walk through bucolic childhood pleasures with our sons and granddaughter. Barely two, she talked in single words and short phrases but she knew how to lead a nature walk. We followed her runs through the leaves, meticulously stacked fir cones into artful sculptures, sorted pebbles by size and color, tossed sticks in the creek from a footbridge, called to the ducks. It never entered my thoughts that anything might mar such perfect joie de vivre, this joy of discovery for a toddler and the joy of reliving it for the adults.

A few yards short of our outing’s end, a ladybug crawled across the sidewalk in front of us. We all bent to admire it, the red shell, the delicate spots. Our grandie knew it was a ladybug and cooed over it endearingly until suddenly and inexplicably, she raised her boot and stomped it flat.

My son the butterfly rescuer and I gasped in horror. My husband shrugged it off with “Kids step on bugs.” We glared at him while our granddaughter’s father gently explained to her why this wasn’t okay. We straggled back to our cars, our exuberant fall mood injected with a note of melancholy.

We’d said our goodbyes and see-you-soons when our subdued toddler abruptly climbed into our car, into my lap, and uttered the first full sentence she’d ever spoken to me.

“I’m sad about the ladybug.”

Her eyes were steady and brave. She wanted an honest conversation.

“I’m sad about the ladybug too,” I said, without drama or accusation.

“She broke.”

“Yes. Sometimes when things are broken they can be fixed, but not this time. All she wanted was to fly home and now she can never do that again. I’m glad that you’re sad. It shows what a kind heart you have. You’ll never step on a ladybug again, will you?”

“No.”

Later I’d open my old thesaurus, dusty with disuse since being nudged aside by speedier online searches. There, in the section of g words, I would at long last find peace in the many synonyms for grace [noun]: a reprieve, an absolution, a kindness, a blessing.

*

Ellen’s internationally renowned work has touched millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is the author of the award-winning historical novel The River by Starlight, the perennial bestseller Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew. and numerous posts, magazine columns, and essays that have captured audiences on every continent. While she is deeply concerned about the global decline of insect populations, she’s not above towel-whipping flies on windowsills or sending stinkbugs who invade her home on insider tours of her city’s Big Pipe sewer system.