The Collection

The Collection

I.                     Ephemeroptera

Belonging to the Order Ephemeroptera, which means, in the Greek, “lasting a day,” mayflies can spend up to a year in their immature stage as “naiads” or “nymphs.” Considered hemimetabolous because they do not completely metamorphosis but rather go through gradual changes, mayflies in their final adult form—called imago—will live for only a few minutes, or at the outside, a few days.

There were mayflies. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of them, their thin brown bodies smeared like a painter’s second coat on the concrete of the gas station. I remember squatting down to look at one of them better, trying to get close without actually touching it, trying to swallow the disgust and the wonder. The two prongs that came off its abdomen were almost beautiful except that they were ugly, ugly like the rest of it was ugly, the thick, fat thorax and the mesh-work wings. When I stood up again, the multitude of them almost overwhelmed me. It was as if the mayflies had crossed states to die here, had come from great distances to join collectively in one final swoon. I briefly considered scrapping a body from the burial ground but most of them were too far along to make good specimens.

I was fifteen years old then and god only knows where in the middle of the country. I don’t remember. I don’t remember if I was with my mother or my father or my older brother; I don’t remember if we were coming or going or what it was that we were looking for. The part of my brain lit up by memories has lost those things because they were unimportant. The mayflies, the white-blue burn of the summer sky, the sophomore science project that was already preoccupying me—these were the things that mattered.

 

II.                     Rhopalocera

Butterflies belong to the Suborder Rhopalocera and are holometabolous, growing from an egg to a larva to a pupa to an adult. Butterflies have been known to migrate for distances of up to 3,000 miles; they navigate by sensing the polarized light from the sun.

 

My brother got his first bad grade in tenth grade on Mr. Mugan’s final project: a bug collection. As a kid who cared about things like that, I thought about sophomore biology with a pull of unease the summer before it was my turn to take it. My brother, who’d shrugged the whole thing off, said only, “Start collecting early.”

The project—insects pinned in rows on the inside of a pizza box, their scientific classifications pasted beneath on a cleanly printed label—wasn’t due until the end of the school year, some far off day in May. But that didn’t matter to me: I listened to my brother, and I spent the summer before sophomore year collecting bugs. I crawled along sidewalks, pulled apart the grass, took to lampposts at dark like they were treasure troves. I trained myself to see for small things—I forced myself to look at bugs. And they became important to me, learning to see them became important to me.

In the garage after we had driven somewhere, I’d peel what I could from the car front, although most of them I couldn’t use. I noticed, and it was strange to me, that there were almost always butterflies, great-winged and broken, their bodies trapped on the warm car grill. I’d hold them on my palm, spread wide the bit-off wings. The bugs I couldn’t use I left outside on the lawn. The garage was not the place for them, not even the ruined ones.

 

III.                  Anisoptera

Dragonflies are of the Suborder Anisoptera, “uneven wings” in the Greek, because their hindwings are broader than their forewings. They are known to fly at speeds of up to 22-34mph, although a noted entomologist claimed to have recorded a dragonfly travelling at nearly 60mph.

 

The dragonflies were down by the creek. To get there from Indigo’s farm, we walked by two chicken coops, a cow pasture and a young cornfield. I had read Ivanhoe that summer and I told Indigo about it as we walked under the wooden bridge bearing that name. We had been best friends for nearly six years then. She carried the nets, I had a bag of mason jars.

Indigo and I were late to a lot of things, and really only in the last few years have we caught up, if catching up is what you’d call it. Back then, we were resolute bookworms, which isn’t to say that we’re not that now, just that we’ve found a lot more people that are like us. Back then, we were all we’d got, although that was just fine because back then, it seemed like we were all we needed.

Indigo knew the best way to the stream bank, the bushes and reeds already beat down, and I followed her with glasses clanking. It wasn’t a wide thing, the stream, but everything was bent into it as though it were the only thing. The trees hung their branches over the water, filtering the light, and as soon as I allowed my eyes to adjust for them, I saw the dragonflies. They seemed to glow, iridescent blues and greens and golds, the air shaking with them like it sometimes did with heat off asphalt. Indigo handed me a net, and we began to catch them.

…

                We killed them in her cellar. Soaked a cotton ball in nail polish remover and gassed them in their mason jars. We only did this to the pretty ones—the rest of them we shook out and let go. Indigo took a cardboard box and labeled it in sharpie INSECT COLLECTION as I scrawled labels on the lids. We stored them in the box in the cellar freezer: light flecks bottled and blotted in the frozen dark.

                I had a nightmare about dragonflies that night. They’d landed on my fingers, pressed their fine-haired bodies to my knuckles and locked their legs around my digits in an iron vise grip. I could not get them to let me go even after I had shredded them.

 

IV.                  Phyllophaga

Junebugs are nocturnal beetles which belong to the Order Phyllophaga; they are a New World scarab. Adult Junebugs are chafers, eating leaves and shrubs, while the grubs feed on roots. Notably clumsy, Junebugs are cousins to the Scarabaeus sacer, which the Ancient Egyptians likened to the god Khepri. As Khepri rolled the sun across the sky, S. sacer roll dung along the ground.

 

I was down on the college tennis courts with my father at dusk. He had just turned on the overhead lights and I was walking the perimeter of the chain link fence with a Tupperware in my right hand. Wherever I looked, I saw Junebugs. Most of them had red or brown carapaces, a few were slicked in shimmering green, but they all had six grasping, clinging legs and that strange, peach-fuzz abdomen which unnerved me. I could see too that they were scarabs, I could even see the resemblance to the jeweled Egyptian amulets, but what I would not concede was that they were beautiful. They flew blindly into my hair, landed and stuck to my neck, crawled up the backs of my knees. I shook them off me like a dog flinging water, let out little yelps before batting them away. I needed to find the biggest one, which was an excuse really, because mostly what I wanted was to be just here, outside and with my father.

Above the pine trees, the sky faded across a spectrum of blues. I was still sweaty from our tennis match and wherever my skin touched, it stuck to itself as though I’d been magnetized. That evening, like that summer, felt perpetual, as though it were possible to renew itself over and over and over again.

…

                I stuck my insects with sewing needles. There was a particular form to it: all ninety degree angles with the pin slightly to right of the midline of the body, although this was different for bugs with big wings. Once in the biology classroom, I’d been ordering my Junebugs when one of them grasped me with its legs, a needle already pushed through its thorax. I was so upset by it—by those seesawing limbs, the noiseless desperation—that I couldn’t touch it again, and finally Mr. Keith, the other sophomore science teacher, had to do it for me, sealing the beetle up tight with a cotton ball and a chemical which would really kill it this time. I had another dream that night: I was in my old pink tiled bathroom, showering, when everything dissolved into insects. I climbed onto the toilet naked but they were everywhere, carpeting the floor, floating past the mirror. I could not escape them.

 

V.                  

If I were to be collected, a pin between my spines bones, how would they label me? Would they pull at my arms, rearrange my hair, peer down at my finely lidded eyes? Would I make a good specimen?

                The insect collection stopped mattering to me. I caught the bugs because I had started to see the bugs, and they were lovely: the damselflies and the bruise-purple moths and the Figeater beetles. In August, if I looked over the soy bean fields as I passed, I could watch the yellow flickering of thousands of lightning bugs, and sometimes I would imagine that I was experiencing their bioluminescence from the depth of a sea, and now that I am older, I can say that the sea was ceaseless summer and being fifteen and finding that the things all around me were alive, and that many of them were wonderful. And this, I think, was when I began to make another sort of collection, or when I took to collecting without mason jars or sewing needles or the desire to paste a clean label beneath the specimen. This is when I began to see.

 

 

"The Collection" was included in the Grinnell College Academic Journal 2013-2014