The Fourth Instar

"Sitting down, MeiLan carefully placed the box on her lap and, with an air of grand formality, threw back the lid. Peiyi squealed in excitement and pleasure. Rendi was pleased too, for now the snails were saying PEIYI IS A." – Lin, Starry River








4.

If there was a better job at the Garden, Chase and Marie wanted to know what it was.  They had both volunteered at the gift store and both had been docents introducers to the Blooming Butterflies at the Bolz Conservatory several years in the past.  Now they had been chosen to handle what they called the "Chrysalis Mail." Every tuesday morning they would receive their cardboard box especially marked with a yellow perishable sticker. Inside, at least a hundred white envelopes marked by type of butterfly. They spent their morning together over a cup of hot green tea shuffling through the envelopes, opening them carefully, then just as carefully separating them out on a slotted orange dish.   They laid a string down on the table and began the process of glueing the tips of the chrysalises to the string, then securing the string to a wooden dowel.  These dowels were then placed into the hatchery in the conservatory. Visitors could walk by and watch butterflies emerge from their little pouches. The butterflies would  hang to the dowels sometimes for two days waving their new wings as if exercising muscles.  At some point the young butterfly would become agitated and begin to gently flit up against the sides of the hatchery and then they knew it was time to let them go into the conservatory.

One morning Chase and Marie had run across something very unusual, something they had never seen before. Not that that meant everything. Neither of the two volunteers were scientists by trade but instead they had always held a deep love of plants and gardens. Yet this particular package that they received was shaped differently the rest of the smaller four by four white packets. It was the size of the box itself, in the manilla envelope. It had weight to it but no sticker tag on it.  "I wonder if we should even open it," Chase said.  Mary Ellen, the project supervisor for that day, was out and the only others that they could ask were volunteers like themselves. To get the chrysalis out of package and into the hatchery was something of importance. Butterflies needed authentic habitat after the jostling of the mail travel.  "Well, we know something is in there. These come from butterfly gardens, right? So somebody had to have put this in the mail for a good reason.  What could happen," she asked. "A swallowtail flies out like a bat!" She shouldn't have used the word bat. The image was a bit startling to Marie. They stood together behind Chase's chair and were brave enough not to shake the package but let it lay flat, then flipped it to the crease opening and began to peel away.  Inside was the tip of the most unusual thing, a long piece of green finger the shape of a banana but certainly not that wide or that heavy.