Olga Katsovskiy
The vegetable garden was lined with rows of cabbages, their voluminous leaves riddled with tiny holes. The caterpillars were ravenous and yet we never caught them gnawing in action. They oozed out from the edges of the window frames in every room, through the cracks in the floors, nestling in green clusters in corners way up high where the ceiling meets the walls. My mom pinned washed plastic bags on a clothesline stretched across the kitchen, and the caterpillars climbed over, holding on to the thin tight rope.
We never harmed the caterpillars on purpose. Mom scooped them up in her apron, I gathered them into a handkerchief, and we shook them off over the fence. The outhouse out back wore garlands of purple and green grape vines blooming on the roof, cascading down the wooden door. Sometimes I draped a few caterpillars on the grape leaves like tinsel. Their plump worm-like bodies wreathed in my palm, and I watched them, wide-eyed, unfurl in their newfound freedom.
I had a collection of orange Kinder Surprise eggs and took to converting them into makeshift carriages. While mom busied herself slicing cucumbers and peeling potatoes in the kitchen, I punctured holes in the eggs from the inside out using the sharp end of a scissor blade. Waiting for hours behind the yellowed lace curtains in the dining room, I watched for the caterpillars squeezing in onto the windowsill. I would guide one or two at a time into the Kinder cap and lock them in the capsule, carry them around in their carriage for a while, then release them into the wild.
***
The house was tucked away where no one would find us. It had weathered siding and an overgrown front garden. Velvety green moss crept up the decaying fence, clinging around the rusty latch on the gate. A narrow dirt path half hidden with weeds led to the concrete blocks of the stoop. A black cat roamed about and wouldn’t come near me, no matter how tenderly I meowed crouching down.
Paperwork grew in little piles on the dining room table beside a dusty rotary phone. Three giant checkered duffle bags sat against the wall in the bedroom, all our possessions packed and ready to leave at a moment’s notice.
At night, I lay in bed wrapped in a quilted blanket and tried to hold off peeing until morning. My parents slept on a cot on the opposite side of the room, like two hills pressed close together for warmth. Sometimes my dad would stumble out in the middle of the night, drape his jacket over his shoulders and step outside to use the outhouse, and I’d listen to the soft click of the door when he got back. Some nights he peed in the metal pail my mom left out in the kitchen, the trickle making it impossible for me to fall asleep. I hated hovering over it, the cold sharp rim cutting into my thighs, but didn’t want to go alone in the dark outside.
***
From time to time, I stuck my index finger in the phone dial but immediately withdrew. The thin coating of something unreachable would linger on my fingertips for days. There is only so much waiting a family can take before spilling over. My mom was constantly cooking, washing dishes, mopping the floor, shooing the caterpillars out of the way, studying all those papers on the table, and jumping to tend to the boiling over pot.
This was our holding place. The day the phone finally rang, my mom was mixing chicken soup with a long ladle. My dad was sitting with his elbow propped on the table, waiting for what comes next. She dropped the ladle in the sink, wiped her hands on her apron, and picked up the receiver.
We left everything in the house the same as it was before we came. I buried the empty Kinder Surprises in the garden and said goodbye to the unseen black cat, whose beady eyes I knew were watching and who never wanted to be my friend. On the way to the airport, I put my hand in my coat pocket and found one forgotten egg. Inside, the dried ghost of a caterpillar crumbled into dust when I touched it.
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Olga Katsovskiy is a writer, editor, and educator living in Boston, MA. She works in a healthcare organization and is a writing instructor at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. She is a Creative Nonfiction Editor at Minerva Rising Press, Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor at JMWW journal, and nonfiction reader for Reckon Review. Her essays have been published in Atticus Review: The Attic, Barzakh Magazine, Brevity blog, Gone Lawn Journal, and elsewhere. For more see theweightofaletter.com.