The Unmatched Joy of Killing Something Beautiful

We were doing homework at the kitchen table when Ron came in with a caterpillar pinched between his thumb and index finger.
If you see any of these, the fat ones with the blue stripes, I want you to destroy them,” he said. He dropped the caterpillar into the sink and turned on the garbage disposal. Ainsley, who was only six at the time, started to cry.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Ron,” I said, because I wanted to hear myself swear, and I knew Ron wouldn’t reprimand me. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Mom appeared from the other room and set about comforting Ainsley and scolding Ron and me respectively: me for my foul mouth, and Ron for what Mom called his “total disregard for how to communicate effectively with children.”
“That’s exactly what I was saying to him,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, well, nobody asked your smart‐ass foul mouth to say anything,” Mom said, and it seemed like that was going to be the final word on the matter.


But then at dinner that night, Ron brought up the caterpillars again. He started with an apology. Ron was always apologizing. His apologies were lengthy and earnest. This was in contrast to my mom, who never apologized for anything. It made Ron look weak, and I wasn’t sure whether I should pity him for his weakness or just plain dislike him. So far, in the year Mom had been dating him, and the eight months we’d been living in his house, I’d chosen the second option.
“Girls, I want to say I’m sorry for what I did with the caterpillar this afternoon” he began. “I see now that it was not the right way to convey the information I was trying to share. I didn’t mean to scare or upset you.” He paused to suck in his breath, a sure sign there was more to come. Ainsley interrupted.
“Why did you kill it?” she asked. “Was it dangerous?”
“Those particular caterpillars are very poisonous, yes,” Ron said. My sister’s face grew taut and she looked to be on the verge of tears again.
“Ron!” my mother snapped. Then she said to Ainsley, “They’re not poisonous to people, sweetheart. They’re poisonous to birds.”
“Well, I suppose, technically they’re poisonous to anything that eats them, birds or humans,” Ron said.
“So don’t eat the caterpillars, girls,” Mom said.
“Gross,” I said. “Ron, why would you think we would eat caterpillars in the first place?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t think you would eat a caterpillar,” Ron said in his sad, flustered way. “I was only hoping maybe you could help me out if you see them around. If you see them in the yard, or even at school or the park, just tell me, okay?”
“Why? So you can garbage‐disposal them all?” This was from Ainsley, who, despite her young age, was beginning to have moments of smart‐
assery herself.
“Ron, no more insects in the garbage disposal, please,” Mom said.


As per mom’s wishes, Ron didn’t put the caterpillars in the garbage disposal. Mostly, he squashed them with the sole of his shoe, or a push broom if he found them in a group. They left blue smears on the pavement that glistened in the sun until the entrails dried and then it just looked like someone’s half‐finished sidewalk chalk drawing. Ainsley didn’t like this, and ran inside whenever he appeared with his broom. I similarly distanced myself, but not because of fondness for the caterpillars. I didn’t want anyone to see me with Ron—who looked like a total psycho, smashing bugs up and down the block until his face was red and he was breathing hard—and think I was associated with him in any way.
And he didn’t need us to tell him where the caterpillars were, because within a week of showing us that first one in the kitchen, they were everywhere. Not just on our street, but, as Ron had predicted, in the park and on the playground at school, and in the Fred Meyer parking lot, and on the trees that lined the sidewalks downtown. By mid‐April, there were so many, it became difficult not to step on them. But I tried my best—again, not out of affection, but because I did not want to accidentally help Ron.
They were syncathia caterpillars and they weren’t supposed to be here in Bellingham. They were, in spring, supposed to be in Manitoba. Each year for the past decade, they had been found farther and farther west. Ron and his colleagues had been tracking the syncathias’ movements with growing concern. And now here they were. “It’s literally my worst nightmare,” he said.
“Isn’t that a bit dramatic?” Mom asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “What about zombies? What about the apocalypse?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Ron said. “Except for birds. We’re looking at a potential avian apocalypse.”
I snorted at this. “Birds aren’t people. It’s not the same.”
But Ron wouldn’t fight with me. He only wanted to explain his science things. I was disappointed.

Ron was a professor of ornithology at Western Washington University. He admitted that he’d never even heard of the syncathia until a few years prior, when they began wreaking havoc with the bird populations in the Dakotas, then Montana. The Canadian bird species who lived alongside the syncathia knew to avoid them, their bright colors a warning of the poison they contained. But birds in the American West held no such knowledge. And when the syncathia emerged from their chrysalises as butterflies, huge and slow‐moving, birds plucked them out of the air and gobbled them down. And then died.
“We could be looking at mass casualties,” Ron said. “It happened in Grant County last year. They lost seventy‐five percent of their alabaster martin population. Seventy‐five percent! It boggles the mind. That’s a species that’s been brought back from the brink of extinction, and now there’s this new threat. I’m terrified of what’s going to happen here with our pine swallows and bluebells.”
To my chagrin, Ron’s caterpillar hysteria was not confined to our dinner table. He was quoted in the newspaper in an article about the syncathia. Even in print, I thought he sounded shrill, though Mom snipped the article out and hung it on the fridge next to my math tests and
Ainsley’s coloring pages. And one night, Ron was on TV. Mom herded Ainsley and me out of our rooms to watch, even though it was only the local news. There was Ron, in his ragged tweed jacket and a red tie that looked too tight. He sat next to another guy, who knew how to dress pretty well and made Ron appear even shabbier by comparison.
The better‐dressed guy was from the chamber of commerce. He talked about how exciting the caterpillars were for the city. “Sure they’re a bit of a nuisance now,” he said, but once they turned to butterflies, they would attract tourists, who would want to see the splendor of the syncathia. “In Winnipeg, they have a butterfly festival each year that brings in over a hundred thousand people. I was thinking we could do the same, since they’re our butterflies now,” he said.
Then it was Ron’s turn to speak.
“The syncathia are not something to be celebrated,” he said. He talked for a while about bird deaths, and he said the phrase “fragile ecosystem,” like, forty times. You could see the energy drain from the faces of the news anchor and the chamber of commerce guy. I imagined energy draining from everyone all over town who was watching Ron.
“What a killjoy,” I said.
“I know, but doesn’t he look handsome?” Mom said.
“I think he looks like a total uggo. Just your type.”
“Don’t be rude, Kit.”
“I’m not being rude. I’m simply pointing out your pattern of dating uggos. You’re a serial uggoist.”
Mom puffed out her cheeks, shook her head, and with uncharacteristic earnestness, said, “You know what, Kit? You should be nicer to Ron. He’s a good guy. We’re lucky to have him in our lives.” And for a moment, I felt chastened.
But when he got home, I could hear through my bedroom wall the familiar sounds of Mom and Ron arguing in their room. I found Ron’s voice, muffled as it was, indistinguishable from all the previous uggos and good guys.


By May, the caterpillars were mostly gone. Though of course not really gone, only transformed. They had wrapped themselves up in their pupas, which hung like tiny Christmas ornaments from every surface imaginable. They lined fence posts and roof eaves and stop signs. Tree branches sagged, laden with them. Wherever we went with Ron, he’d pluck them like he was picking cherries.
He cleared the pupas from our yard, but when he headed to our neighbors’, he was sent away. The same went for the people who lived across the street.
“They say they like butterflies,” Ron lamented over dinner. “I tried to explain about the birds, but they don’t understand.”
“Are you sure they don’t understand?” I asked. “Or do they just not care?”
“Kit, I know you’re trying to be snarky,” Ron said. “But I think you’ve hit the nail on the head, sadly.”
He rubbed his palm across his face and pressed his knuckles into his eye sockets.
My mom reached out and patted his shoulders. “It’s hard to be a bird man in a butterfly‐loving town,” she said, though I couldn’t tell if she meant it sincerely, and I guessed by Ron’s expression that he couldn’t either.


The following Sunday, Ron woke us early and we stood in our bare feet and pajamas on the front porch as the first of the butterflies peeled themselves from their chrysalises. All around us blue wings began to appear.
“My God, they’re huge,” my mom said. And they really were. The giant caterpillars had fulfilled their promise. The syncathia now looked as if they might be as big a risk to birds by devouring them as poisoning them. Their wings were lined with black and spotted ever so lightly. Each wing came to a gentle point at the end.
“They’re gorgeous,” Mom said. “I’m sorry. Is it wrong to say they’re gorgeous?”
“No,” Ron agreed. “Just because something is a disaster doesn’t mean it can’t be breathtaking.”
We watched as they ascended in the early morning air.
“Now that they can fly, they’re really a menace,” Ron added. We stood and watched, and for a while no one said anything at all, which in our family was a kind of breathtaking spectacle in and of itself.
It was Ainsley who finally broke our reverie.
“The caterpillars in pupas aren’t like chicks in eggs,” she said in her little kid fact‐stating voice.
“Yes,” Ron said, “that’s right.”
“Duh,” I said.
“It was the caterpillars that hatched from eggs,” Ainsley continued, ignoring us.
“Yes,” Ron said again.
“Ains, did you swallow an encyclopedia?” I asked and felt Mom swat at the back of my head, but not hard enough to hurt. “Caterpillar eggs come from butterflies,” Ainsley said. “So, the butterflies were already here before. To lay the eggs. But, where did those butterflies come from? And why didn’t we see them?”
“That,” Ron said, “is quite literally the one‐million‐dollar question! What a very perceptive thing for you to ask, Ainsley. Very perceptive indeed.”
He went on to explain the work he and his team of grad students would do now, to track the butterflies and figure out how they were seeding themselves so effectively in new environs without being detected, and I felt a burning in my throat from the embarrassment of not having thought to ask the question myself, and also for wanting to have been the one to ask it.


One evening, later that week, Mom sent me to Western with dinner in a cooler for Ron. He had called to say he’d be working late. Mom didn’t want him to go hungry so she packed up his meatloaf and green beans, while telling me some exercise would do me good. I offered a half‐hearted complaint. Secretly, I liked going up the hill to the campus. It was just a mile from our house, but the wide courtyards and brick buildings made it feel like it was another world. Plus, the biology building where Ron worked had a hall of gruesomeness that anyone looking for his department was forced to traverse—massive insect collections, pinned snakeskins, and creatures of all kinds in formaldehyde jars. It thrilled me.
When I got to Ron’s office, I found him, as usual, leaning on his desk with his face too close to his computer screen.
“Your eyeballs are going to fall out if you keep doing that,” I said.
“Hi, Kit! Thanks for bringing this!” He relieved me of the cooler, setting it below his desk without bothering to look at what was inside. It occurred to me he did not intend to eat. I wondered if Mom knew. In the past, when I’d delivered him food at work, she never asked me, when I returned, if he liked his meal. She only asked if he was there, and was anyone else in his office, and did it look like he was having a good time without her.
“While you’re here, would you like to see my northern micro quails?”
“No,” I said.
“Come on. You’ll like them. They’ll nibble grain out of your hand like chickens.”
He led me to an unused cubicle. No computer or bookshelves, just a bare desk with a dog crate underneath. Ron bent and opened the crate. He made a series of clicking sounds that it seemed to me a grown‐up should be embarrassed to make in front of another person. But whatever he said worked because out of the crate walked three tiny quails, about half the size of any I’d ever seen. They stood on the carpet looking up at us.
“Here,” Ron said, producing a handful of loose grain from his pocket.
“You keep bird food in your pants?”
“Usually, yeah.”
I bent down and held it out to the quails. As advertised, they ate from my hand.
“I call them Huey, Dewey, and Louie,” Ron said. “One of my students found them down by the marina. Most quail species don’t migrate, but micros do. They belong in the mountains this time of year. They aren’t supposed to be here, ever.”
“Not supposed to be here like the syncathia aren’t supposed to be here.”
“Yeah. I see your point,” he said, even though I wasn’t trying to make one. “But they aren’t likely to disrupt the ecosystem since they don’t pose a threat to native animals. In fact, if my student hadn’t brought them to the lab they probably would have been eaten by a predator. A great snack for a coyote, or even an ambitious house cat. And you guys are just too cute to be snacks, aren’t you?” He petted each quail in turn. I petted them too. They were softer than I thought birds could be.
“Where will they go now?” I asked.
“In the fall I’ll take them out to Baker Lake. They gather there on their way south. This has happened before actually. We rescued two micro quails last summer. I tagged them when I released them and they seemed to stick with their normal migration route after that. Hopefully these guys will be able to do the same. Until then, they’ll stay here in the lab.”
I knew Ron mostly as a dweebish reciter of facts and an embarrassing squasher of bugs. I had not known he was also a rescuer of soft cute birds. Baker Lake wasn’t exactly close by. I imagined him in his Subaru, asking the quails what radio station they liked and singing along to songs for them. That was just the dweeby sort of thing he would do. I wanted to tell him I thought it was nice, helping the quail.
Instead I pinched my nose and asked, “Where do they go to the bathroom?”
“In the crate, for the most part. Sometimes on the floor.”
I stared at the beige industrial carpet while Rob collected his birds.
“Hey, Kit,” he said, “I think I’ll call it a day here after all. Let me get my sweater and I’ll walk back with you.”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “Mom’s not mad, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I know.”
I did not want his company. I had planned to take my time on the way home, stopping by the gas station mini‐mart to replenish my secret bedroom stash of candy and Cokes.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to be seen with me,” Ron added. “I’ll stay ten feet behind you the whole way.”
I sighed and followed him back to his office for his sweater. He did not bother to retrieve the meatloaf cooler.
Outside, the sun was setting and the sky had turned an exceptional shade of pink, but neither of us remarked on it. Ron kept his eyes on the trees and shrubs, looking for syncathia to swat. Whenever we passed them, he knocked at them with his hands and then stepped on any that fell to the ground.
“I hate this,” he said. “I hate being angry at a butterfly. I feel like a child.”
“There’s worse things to feel like.”
I thought he might apologize for demeaning the emotional states of children, but he stayed quiet and toed another butterfly to death.
“Would they kill the little quails if the quails ate them?” I asked.
“Well, micro quail don’t feed on bugs this large. They would have trouble getting them into their beaks. But if they could manage it, yes.”
I decided I hated that. And I was a child, after all.
We were passing a church. Its grounds were ringed with hedges. One of the hedges in particular was covered in syncathia. I looked for something and spotted a cluster of traffic cones in the parking lot. I ran for one and returned to the hedge with it clutched to my chest. Then I swung it like a tennis racket, taking the syncathia from the bush to the ground in stripes. I used the cone to bash them into the sidewalk. It was a real butterfly beatdown.
When I was done, I looked back at Ron, expecting to see the expression of horror adults reserve especially for acts of violence by kids, particularly girl kids. Instead he nodded and went to retrieve a traffic cone of his own.
I pointed to the bush. “They’re so dumb. New ones came right back to where I just smashed their friends.”
“It’s instinct,” he said. “You can’t fault them for it.” Then he used his cone to bash at the bush and squash the fallen. We took turns until the regrouping stopped. Ron put his cone back in the church lot, but I kept mine and two blocks later when we found another bush, full up of fluttering blue wings, we repeated the process, passing my cone back and forth. We entered the house sweating and smiling, then retreated to our separate spaces so we wouldn’t have to explain to my mom that we’d had a good time.


After that, Ron and I went out on butterfly murder walks most nights. I had gone from finding Ron’s syncathia‐smashing mortifying to looking forward to the thin evening hour when I could engage in it too. I was not bothered by my hypocrisy. I just wanted to crush big beautiful bugs. I kept using the pilfered church traffic cone, though I did try other tools—a flyswatter, a flipper from my snorkel set, Ainsley’s whiffle ball bat. The cone was best.
“What are you two up to?” Mom asked. I had no reason to lie.
“I’m helping Ron with his wildlife genocide.”
Mom rolled her eyes—our family’s signature response to any and all information for which words might fail us.
“Just make sure you take off your shoes when you come back. I’m tired of cleaning blue goop off the tile.”
Ron sometimes tried to make conversation while we walked. He’d ask about school or what I had been watching on TV. I kept my answers minimal. I did not want him thinking that we were friends, or getting all stepdadly. Though sometimes it seemed he did not want to talk either, a heaviness settling over his face as he pummeled syncathia. I wondered if there was more than the butterflies making him sad.


The Chamber of Commerce guy’s grand plans for a butterfly festival never came to fruition. By the time Ron and I were taking our nightly walks, everyone else had caught up in seeing the syncathia as a menace. The butterflies descended on gardens like locusts, looking for nectar; they were more than the local flowers could bear. As Ron had promised, bird corpses became a common sight. Swarms of syncathia cruised the city, making walking unpleasant, and driving dangerous. A car full of high school students crashed after a cloud of them covered the windshield. One of the boys died. No one could like the syncathia after that. Ron was again interviewed for articles and asked to appear on the news. Now he was treated as an expert, even a local celebrity. He was helping to fight a scourge, and return greatness to our city. Though he confided to us at home that he didn’t feel like he was doing any good at all.
“What can regular people do to help?” asked the worried‐looking news anchor, leaning closer to him as she spoke. We had gathered in the living room again to watch Ron on T.V. He was wearing a tie I’d picked out for him. “This one is your least dweebish,” I said, after rifling through his drawers. He rolled his eyes at me, which was how I knew he’d wear it.
“He looks better this time, doesn’t he?” I asked
Mom sneered. “If the anchor bends over any farther, her tits are gonna fall out of that blouse. Who goes on TV like that? Where’s her boss?”
The next morning, Ron said he’d be late for dinner because he was speaking to the local Audubon Society, hoping to enlist volunteers to count birds. Mom, instead of offering to send a meatloaf cooler, muttered, “Well I guess we know where your priorities lie.”
Ainsley and I began to make plans without being told to. I took inventory of my room—what I would need to pack on my own so Mom wouldn’t see, and what was okay for her to help with. One day, I overheard Ainsley talking to a friend at the bus stop, saying she didn’t think they would be in the same class in the fall, because she might have to switch schools again. We didn’t know the details of what was happening between Mom and Ron. We didn’t need to. As Ainsley once put it, “I wish she didn’t have to fight with everyone all the time.”
One Saturday morning, Ron knocked on my bedroom door to tell me he was going to his office to feed the quail. Did I want to come with him? I sneered and said no.
“Are you sure? I thought we might—” But I cut him off, claiming I was busy with homework, even though I was obviously just reading a magazine.
The following evening we were out on our regular butterfly‐killing spree when Ron pointed out the futility of our efforts.
“Kit, cathartic as this may be, it’s not actually productive,” he said.
There were too many butterflies, he explained. Squishing a hundred or so a night was a drop in the bucket. Not even that.
“So you’re saying we need to find a way to kill them more efficiently? More killing and faster killing?”
“Ultimately, yes,” Ron said.
I knew exactly what he meant. “Have you considered something like in the end of the movie Fargo?”
Ron asked who’d allowed me to watch Fargo.
“One of Mom’s old boyfriends, before you,” I said. “If we could get the butterflies to fly into a wood chipper, that would kill a bunch all at once. Like a giant, ongoing garbage disposal.”
Ron nodded. “It’s a good idea. You’re a very creative thinker, Kit. You know that?”
Ron was on TV again the next day. But this time I was the only one in the living room, and when I shouted, “Okay, he’s on!” neither Ainsley nor Mom emerged to join me.
It was for the best. The busty anchor was leaning precariously close again. She was asking about management of the butterflies, by which she really meant eradication. Why couldn’t the city just bring in truckloads of pesticides and be done with them? Ron explained anything that would poison the butterflies would also poison native insects, which we wanted to keep around.
“Any attempts at destroying them needs to be manual, not chemical,” he said. “Which is what makes it so difficult. I only wish we had some sort of giant butterfly‐chopping gyre we could push them all into.”
at this, but I didn’t think it was a joke. He’d said my idea on TV, in front of adults. Which meant he must have thought it was pretty great after all.
I started to draw up blueprints. At the school library, I copied pictures of what I imagined to be similarly shaped contraptions—cement mixers and snow machines. I worked on them mostly during English class, which I hated. The final product was a three‐paneled drawing depicting the butterfly mulcher from the front, side, and back, with butterflies going in one end and coming out the other as blue confetti. I swiped a manila envelope from the school secretary’s desk to keep it crisp in my backpack for the walk home. But there was no need. Mom met me at the end of the block, where the baseball backstop edged the street and I always dragged my fingers across the chain link as I walked by. She was leaning against the side of her car. I could see Ainsley in the back, a big duffel bag and three pillows piled beside her.
“Get in,” Mom said. “We’re going to Aunt Stella’s for the night.”
I didn’t roll my eyes or say anything smart. I got in the passenger seat, then turned to my sister. “You okay?”
“Yeah. She remembered Wolfie and Greenie,” she said, gesturing to a pair of stuffed dogs in her lap, her favorites.
Aunt Stella lived in an apartment complex where all the buildings looked the same. The guest room had just one bed, which Mom and Ainsley shared, while I slept on the living room couch. After three days, Ainsley, over dinner, asked a question I’d been too afraid to. “Are you and Ron just having an argument? Or is this for real?”
“It’s for real,” Mom huffed, then, looking around the table, she asked, “Don’t you girls know me at all?”
In the evenings, I continued my habit of butterfly smashing. But now I concentrated on quality, not quantity. How big of a butterfly smear could I make on the sidewalk? How deep of a blue might I create if I were to, say, stack several butterfly bodies on top of each other and pulverize their sparkling wings with a rock?
At school, I revised my original chipper drawing by adding a funnel and a vat, to safely collect the chopped‐up butterfly parts for disposal. Then I moved on to inventing other mechanisms: a robotic arm that would catch butterflies out of the air and pull their wings off; a thousand tiny butterfly guillotines all operated simultaneously by a single string; a giant double boiler for butterfly melting. I put these drawings, along with short written explanations, into an envelope and mailed them to Ron’s house. I knew my creations were impractical—fantastical, even. But I wanted Ron to know I was still working on the butterfly problem. I thought maybe he’d respond with his own drawings. I thought maybe he’d find a way to mention one of my ideas on the news again.


It was September when he finally wrote me back. The butterflies were gone by then, having migrated off to whatever city they would terrorize for winter. He thanked me for what he called “all your ingenious gadgets,” and said he hoped I would continue to pursue my interest in the sciences and engineering. I was not aware that I had any such interests. Though after reading his words, I thought I might.
“I’m driving the quails down to Baker Lake to release them next week,” he wrote. “Hoping they will find their right path from there.” This was at the bottom of the page and I imagined, as I flipped it over, I might see another sentence inviting me to join him on this excursion. There was only a quick line about wishing me, Ainsley, and our mom all the best and then his signature.
The syncathia did not return, not the next year or the year after. Other awful things happened. But never the butterflies. I wondered if Ron ever found out why. By the time I was a biology student at Western, walking the hallway of animal horrors each day, he was gone, having taken a position elsewhere. I tried to write an essay about him once for an English class (which I still hated), and I intended at first to make it nice. Something about him helping me find my “right path” like he’d wanted to do for the lost quail trio. It didn’t land. So I talked instead about how he’d shown me not all problems can be solved. Sometimes, they can only be stomped on, ground up, and dismembered. Sometimes our anger, impotent and consuming, is the best we can offer.