Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
The caterpillar slinks in and out of my mind. Most days, I forget the caterpillar. I forget it exists, and I forget it does not exist, not really, not on its own.
The caterpillar exists to become. It is anticipation incarnate, its destiny to become a butterfly, become a moth, become a fossil preserved in amber for eons, become microscopic roadkill on a suburban sidewalk. It is an animate instant in time.
The caterpillar slinks into my mind, and I am ten again, hands and knees on rough pavement, head cocked sideways to better observe the fleshy form, expanding and contracting, unbothered, unaware. I think it is my favorite insect; I forget it is simply another waiting to happen. I wonder if the caterpillar feels the same.
The caterpillar’s existence, though long as the butterfly’s, is of secondary import. The caterpillar slinks out of my mind, and I am at a butterfly garden in Hershey, Pennsylvania. I recall monarchs and lacewings, orange-tips and paper kites, but not the caterpillar. No one recalls the caterpillar. I think I must have seen it, the pulpous body, the Lovecraftian maw, the back bristled with spindly fibers, like hair but not.
Yet even if I did see the caterpillar, I would not have seen it for what it was. I would not have seen its transience, its impermanence. I would not have seen its helplessness, forever stuck in the wrong part of time, the fraught moment between creation and completion. I would not have seen that the caterpillar was all around me, in the butterflies, in the people watching the butterflies. I would not have seen the cosmic terror in its tiny black eyes, not windows to the soul, but mirrors.
The caterpillar finally comes into its own, and in that instant, it vanishes. It exists not to become, but to want to become.
The caterpillar asks Alice, “Who are you?”
The caterpillar knows what Alice doesn’t, that they are one and the same, and it is no wonder Alice loathes him.
Kasey Noss is a senior at Washington University in St. Louis studying English Literature with a concentration in creative writing and a minor in Italian. She writes short fiction and creative nonfiction, and maybe one day she will find the courage to publish it.