Ladybug

Today I saved the life of a ladybug. It had fallen into the hair of the girl sitting in front of me, and after tapping her on the shoulder to tell her, I gently teased it with my pencil, only to have it fall onto her back. Warning her of its precarious situation, I nudged it along until it fell to the floor with an inaudible plop.

It had been unimportant to me before my decision to grant it life. But after the act it consumed my attention, suddenly more real than anything in the room. The girl who had once been its innocent prison became caught up in the fascination along with me, and we were briefly united by our compulsion to watch this moment of the little one’s life play out, watch it scuttle across the linoleum and feel out the mysterious holes in the wall’s metal radiator, watch it waddle into some invisible space as foreign to it as its world was to us, watch it disappear forever from our lives.

And I turned away and thought, today I saved the life of a ladybug.