The Fourth Instar

"To Rendi, this small village of Clear Sky and its inn were horrible. Peiyi was forced to show him everything, and she fumed with anger as he sneered at the rough wooden floors, the humble and broken-down houses, and the yellowing weeds dying between the rocks in the walls." – Grace Lin, from Starry River of the Sky







1.

Crandall was a better boy than anybody believed. That was to be his own fate and destiny, and one, many years later, he could see for himself.  But of course fate is a perspective only to be seen from the summit of one's own life-mountain, as he would one day tell Starla, but could not have known as a boy when this story begins. Crandall was both quiet and overshadowed by a large house, a large lawn, a fine boat at the end of the dock at Lake Monona. When they reached Olbrich Park it was by the finest of machines, whether bike or car, and the surrounding friends were well cared for. His father had enough money to retire early and they spent their days in among the various landings and harbors for boating in Yahara chain of lakes.  The favorite was Olbrich Park at Starkweather Creek. As father spent his time at the Eastside Supper Club, out back on the broad yard playing lawn bowling, Crandall safely wandered the beach and the shoreline, the near the beer garden and sometimes across the street to the Grand Garden itself, Olbrich, his kingdom of fantasy, a jungle of true and fictionalized stories alike.  One day he crossed the street from park to garden along with a group of visitors who had been chuckling about a visit from the tables at the beer garden.  It was hotter that day usual. Queen Anne's Lace lit up like a long string of white lights along the shoreline.  Crandall would walk near the wildflowers and look for butterflies. Once he had seen a monarch so large that it took up all the space before him, the capital across the lake in the distance but a small white cup.  He checked under leaves of the milkweed plants for eggs or instars.  He could have been doing anything that he wanted, playing on phones like other children, splashing in the beach only a few hundred feet away, but that day he was checking milkweed and heard the visitors talk of blooming butterflies display at the Garden and decided it was time to see it for himself. His father, among many other things, was an amateur botanist and had quizzed Crandall since he could speak.  The dried flowers set in cases around the house had become strange art and Crandall could often see bees balm in his dream, himself a bee or butterfly, using its proboscis to suck nectar like sugar water and was sure he awoke some mornings with the taste of something sweet and wild in his mouth.