Writing Sample: Denuded, Bennington Review 2023 

One spring, my front yard became ornamented with jars of drowned caterpillars. I spotted them beneath the bushes my mother so carefully pruned, held between the roots of the hundred-year-old tree that dwarfed me. I immediately accepted their arrival. For a time I believed they were jars of cornichons, as if my mother didn’t like how cold they got in the fridge so hid them outside instead. I was eight or so and had passed the days of pestering my parents with why. It was the age of a comfortable smallness. So I didn’t question the jars of cornichons. The barbarity and minuteness of the drowned caterpillars stayed safely contained behind glass, visible but ignored.

Down the street from the jars was my elementary school. Children’s laughter filled the warm air as we were let out for recess. I sat in the ditch. It stretched from the playground to the sewer where in the late afternoon, middle schoolers would congregate, dipping their Converse in the puddles. They’d shout crap into the dark tunnel and claim they heard a different voice call back. But during recess we weren’t allowed there. All we could do was run the stretch of the ditch until we reached the point we could not pass– a small slab of cement emerging from the grass, a sunken black wire fence. Some of us would linger, wondering if today was the day we’d run off school grounds to where a voice would shout back at us. “You’ll roll your ankles running in the ditch like that,” the teachers shouted at us instead. Sometimes someone would yell and topple into the dirt, clutching their leg as if it were an infant they needed to protect.

The seasonal caterpillars had returned, which meant it was time to build them little hotels each afternoon. I sectioned my supplies into neat piles: sticks, blades of grass, leaves plucked from low-hanging branches. I listened to girls talk about what they found peculiar in our fellow

classmates. Peculiarity seemed to be the arbiter of immorality, the sign that someone was up to no good. I excelled at conversations like these, relished in them even. “Meredith drinks tomato juice at lunch,” I said. I scrunched my nose and assembled a bed, folding a pillow out of the limpest leaves.

Each spring centered around the caterpillars. The boys who played on the blacktop would smash them beneath their shoes, leaving the remains to bake under the sun. But each grade had a group of us who would sit in the ditch and build these hotels, a tradition passed on, a belief that the caterpillars must be given shelter, a belief that the caterpillars would really use it. I thought it was just a way to pass the time, a fun story to tell ourselves. I sometimes wondered if the others were just playing pretend too. We’d spend an hour balancing twigs into tables and load-bearing walls, braiding blades of grass into rugs. Each day, we’d come back to find our work demolished if not completely gone. We would build them up again until the caterpillars disappeared into the cocoons they’d built for themselves, until inevitably we’d get too old and view it as child’s play.

I dragged myself home, my Mary Janes skidding across the sidewalk. I watched my feet as I walked up the path to my front door. My mother’s voice floated through the air, a delicate humming. She was on her hands and knees, weeding in the mulch. Her back was hunched, and her skin glistened pink. I watched her pick up a caterpillar and plop it into a jar of water, drowning it, as if it were nothing at all. My jaw dropped. I looked at the full jar next to it, not of cornichons, but the very things I had spent my afternoon trying to make a home for. Perhaps I squealed or mustered up the courage to calmly approach the killer and ask her motivation. All I remember is her cheery Hi honey! followed by a matter-of-fact They kill the plants.

I went to the home office and shut the doors behind me. I swung back and forth in my father’s chair, my feet grazing the ground as I pondered. The kids in my neighborhood liked to speak to one another on the landline after it got dark and our parents no longer wanted us playing outside. I’d always talk in my father’s office, my feet up on his desk, sweat marks from my bare thighs making his leather chair sticky to the touch. I called my best friend, who spoke often of the behaviors that might send you to hell. I thought she might have some advice for me. My mother kills the caterpillars and keeps them in jars, I whispered as fast as I could. She gasped.

My mother’s habitual killing became a known fact in my grade, a hushed whisper during recess. If I suggested an idea for the hotels that another kid didn’t much like, they’d bring up my mother, and my idea would be tossed as something that lacked merit and moral reasoning. The horror of the jars increased each day I’d arrive home. I’d run through my front yard so as not to spot them. I declared the caterpillar a pest and began stomping on them at the blacktop. I became increasingly bored of the conversations at recess. This, to me, was having moral conviction.

One weekend I was wandering around my yard, waiting for inspiration to strike and take me away into make-believe. As I got older, I found that this time spent wandering would take longer and longer, until sometimes it would simply turn into a stroll that brought me back home. That day I refused defeat. Behind the Adirondack chair, beneath a hydrangea bush in bloom, I spotted one of the jars. Scowling, I grabbed it. I walked the two blocks that separated me from my school, holding the jar with both hands, trying not to look at the slushing bodies.

I stood at the edge of the dried-up sewer, soft grass prickling my ankles. I popped off the lid of the jar and poured every last caterpillar onto the cement. It sounded like when I’d decide to make myself a meal and turn a can of SpaghettiO’s upside down over a bowl. I looked down at

them in disgust and amazement. I poked a few with sticks, just to see if they were maybe alive. They weren’t. I scrunched my lips and puffed my cheeks and discovered I still had an entire afternoon ahead of me, and this really hadn’t taken much time at all. I had suspected these caterpillars would take me away to make-believe. I thought they would be a kind of revival.

Instead, I sat down. My moral righteousness had been sapped, and all I was left with was this sense of fraying, of something I couldn’t name fleeing me. It was as if I became stuck in the moment of a drawn-in breath, a hesitation before the words to come. I wanted more than anything to go back to building the hotels, to forget that these jars ever existed. These beings splayed out before me, their minuteness was in plain sight. I sat with them in the quiet.

When I was sixteen, my mother and I drove on I-95 through Rhode Island. We were headed north. I hadn’t learned to drive yet, not trusting myself to be in charge of such a big thing. So I handed her water bottles and told her how many miles she had until her next exit. I tore open a bag of potato chips and placed a few in her outstretched hand. I stared out the window and let my eyes blur, watching the silver railing repeat itself over and over. I imagined it then as the only thing keeping us on the road.

“Oh wow,” my mother said. “Tess, look at that.” I followed her eyes to a forest of pale and barren trees. The bark looked like the skin on my mother’s legs, cracked as if barely holding itself together. “The moths must’ve really gotten to them.” I peered at her, my brows furrowed. “Gypsy moths,” she explained. “They denude the trees. The leaves should still be there. It’s only September. There have been two kinds of moths running amok all across the coast. You’re supposed to spray the trees twice a year to ward them off. They were really bad at home for a while.”

“Were those the things you’d drown in jars?”
“I did what?”
I told her my memory of her in the yard, insisting that I couldn’t be wrong.
“I guess it must’ve been. Do you remember the bushes near your school? They were

coated in white webs. It was dreadful.”
I imagined then my mother, hands and knees in the dirt, drowning the caterpillars one by

one, in hopes of saving her garden. Those days getting rid of what just came right back. She always seemed her happiest after those long days. She smiled through the sunburns and the sun moles and the callouses on her fingers. I thought of when I was still in the ditch, hands in the dirt, these opposing efforts, running concurrently.

As the forest began to end, she sighed. “It looks like death, doesn’t it? The embodiment of death.” She stared outside my window to catch one last glance. The car swerved a little. “But I don’t think those trees are dead. They must come back. They must.”