The Beetle

I sit and I watch a beetle crawl his way up the window in the library. My phone buzzes in my pocket. I ignore it. A stack of books sits beside me, unread. 

My world is this beetle—watching his crooked legs propel him up the window’s surface. I find myself wondering if he grips the atoms of the glass, or if there are somehow tiny hairs on his feet that hold onto the molecules. Is there a point where the scale is too tiny for suction to work?

Beetles are not lizards. The beetle falls and hits the window sill without a sound. He flails his legs as the old librarians gossip behind the desk, somewhere behind my world. I feel a twinge of pity for the beetle. He flops left and right with no one to see him but me, and I am not helping. The seconds crawl by in suspense. A pain in my stomach grows. Am I truly sympathetic to a beetle or did I forget to eat breakfast?

I do not see the beetle right himself, but suddenly he is on his way. He heads straight back to the window and begins his climb again. Only now do I see that there are more beetles on the window—except these are outside and my beetle is inside. Is he trying to return to his family? Was he left, or did he leave them?

Who left who does not matter. As he crawls in the sun, some hidden suction fails, or a microscopic hair misses an atom. Regardless, he falls. My phone buzzes twice more, but I continue to ignore it. I am watching the beetle flail again, only this time I rise from my seat and offer him the tip of my pen. He takes it like a life raft and clings dutifully as I bring him up—away from the sill and back to my chair. He is safe from dry-drowning. The wind swings a bird feeder outside, making a blurry shift in the distance of my vision as my eyes struggle to focus on the beetles’s form on the pen. He is crawling now to the rubber grip. My hand trembles slightly, jittering the pen up and down. I have not eaten yet today. My beetle prize freezes with the movement, bracing his feet in the grooves of the rubber like he would weather any storm, and I watch his antennae swing left and right. They are his minesweepers. His world trembles with my hand as it swings over the brown carpet. A vortex of leaves spins by outside. 

I put a finger up the the beetle, but he does not like it. He antennae shrink back, and be braces in his stick legs. I smile at his show of preparedness. The world around me is gone from my mind—good, because I certainly cut a figure staring at a pen in the middle of the library. Food nags the back of my mind as I watch.

My beetle taps my fingernail with an antenna and yanks it back like lightning. He freezes, checking to see if there will be a reaction from the intruder. I stay as still as possible, pressing my finger against the pen to keep it from trembling. My lack of eating will kill me someday. The beetle flicks my nail again, then again. He remains frozen in place, and I keep my finger still. 

He will not move to break the standoff, but I will. I take my finger and use that hand to brace the other end of the pen. Suddenly, my beetle is on a mission. He crawls first slowly, then with startling speed. He was only waiting for the pen to stop shaking. I watch him reach my fingers at the end, test them with his antennae, and keep going, crawling over my nails to my knuckles. He is so light that I cannot feel him as he goes from one finger to another, searching for the end. Then he is at my little finger, and I do not want to let him go. I add my other hand to double the length of his journey. He climbs from one hand to the other with suspicion. Maybe I can keep him going forever. 

But he will not be fooled a second time. His shell opens, and with a quiet buzz of wings he is back on the window, climbing. I watch him climb, seeing a bluejay past him in the trees. 

“That was a unique experience,” I say.