The Fourth Instar

"Just like that, Rendi became the chore boy at the Inn of Clear Sky. He was not used to doing chores, so when he found a broom in his hand, he had to watch Peiyi to learn how to sweep. He watched her so closely as he washed and dusted that she was convinced he was mocking her and said in annoyance, "Go clean that room by yourself." – Lin, from Starry River of the Sky





2.

When they used to approach their field for research, all it took from his father was a little direction, "once you get to the middle you will begin to hear the entire world differently.  The sound of truck wheels will give way to the bumblebees. In the background you will begin to hear the songbirds instead of the city noise. It is much easier to listen to." Crandall would purposefully lose himself inside the head-high Queen Anne's Lace and was closer to eye level with the purple field thistle and coneflowers.  On those days he wore his longest possible pants and a shirt with long sleeves.  He was told by his father to wear gloves as well, "thistle can stay on the skin for a long time and scratch. Watch out for bramble vines and parsnip." He showed Crandall a picture of all of these things but it didn't particularly scare him. The fantasy of being inside of the prairie where nobody else could see him and that his friends became the wild colors of the earth was enough motivation.  "Take a stride slowly as you walk through, make sure to look around you to either side for Monarchs. If they are on a nectarine plant, I want you to identify the type of plant. If they are flying in the distance, keep track of that also." The father didn't always show his son the entirety of the steps of the tasks to be done and Crandall wouldn't have it any other way.  He became quickly bored and uninterested at such elaborate instruction. He dashed off with measuring tape and his plot rack and found his coordinates for the first sampling.

And so that day at Olbrich Park, walking along the shoreline where the wildflowers still rose and had not been mowed, he did not have his tools but he was walking off distances and looking for flowering milkweed, inspecting the bottom of leaves.  He had wondered nearer to the beer garden and could overhear the family that had been talking about looking at blooming butterflies across the street.  His father was no doubt this very moment inside of his glass deck on the boat assembling some such data and gazing out over the flat water of Lake Monona, sailboats gliding across in the distance across the face of the Monona Terrace, "the white cake of the lake," they called it.  Back home his sister Starla would be playing some game on her phone and missing all of this action. "We all will bring our backpacks,' the man said at the table, as if instruction.  He was very tall. In fact all of them seated at the table were quite tall, two boys and two girls, maybe a mother, and yet the woman along seemed quite young as well, at least a much different age than the man speaking. "The display takes its break at 2:00 in the afternoon.  It is a shift change," he continued to say, now pulling out a piece of paper and pointing down at it as if a map.  "There are no bathrooms but there is one side room near the case, and that is where we will be. You two will...." A breeze picked up briefly off the lake and rustling of the shoreline limbs made it difficult for Crandall to follow the last part.