I have this horrible fear of killing things. Like if I see a rabbit, I swear my car so I don’t hit it. I won’t kill a bug because it makes me sad, instead I will call someone else to kill it, all the while yelling at the bug to run, flee, leave, but usually they don’t hear my plea and they get killed by Bebe or my mom or a friend. So this experience is about me not killing things.
Kat and I were in high school and I was in my old blue hatchback car that liked to eat people. We were in the country, cruising around, on a gravel road. The road was really curvy and, since I was a teenager, I didn’t feel the need to slow down much while on the gravel. The time of year was after all the rolley polley caterpillars had baked in their cocoons enough to emerge and become beautiful butterflies. I had just started going around a curve when all of a sudden a butterfly came out of no where and I was on the verge of hitting it with my car, so I swerved to miss it. Kat starts to scream and I move the car back to going straight and she asks me if I have lost my mind. So I told her, while making “the sad face” that it I couldn’t kill it, it might have had a family. She told me it was just a butterfly, but I told her that if I killed it, then it’s babies would be without a father (because you know the butterfly had to have been male right?) and it would be all my fault, and what if he was the breadwinner and if he didn’t come home tonight they would all die! I would be in charge of multiple deaths, not just one. She looked at me with the face of not believing what she was hearing and laughed. This image is her rendition of the, what we now call, the flutterby!
Now whenever I hit things people tell me the animal or bug was suicidal and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it. That has seemed to stop most of my swerving around the road, but still it makes me very sad…what if they had a family!
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