Tomorrow you’ll look up how caterpillars pee and what kind of spiders are big enough to eat birds and why a dragonfly would want to fly backward.
It’s sleepover weekend. The five-year-old can't know how much pain you or your wife are in, the thick ribbon of scar under the partially peeled layer of your surgical glue, the hip your wife tweaked, or is it arthritis, the doctors can’t decide.
When you go upstairs you’ll be sleeping alone, but it's fine, it's just the arrangement. She sets up the spare bedroom, joins your grandson there; she likes it better, it gives you some space, at least one of you may get a decent night's sleep.
She'll sleep with her body curled toward her grandson, the ceiling fan blowing the silver-blond of her bangs. She won't sleep until he does, which won't happen till he talks himself out, tall tales and sleepy ones, tales from the big book on the shelf beside the bed, the spiders, honeybees and dragonflies filling his head as he lies back, facing the ceiling, eyelids fluttering shut.
Upstairs you’ll sleep the untroubled sleep of the sufficiently drugged. You'll be first up in the morning, and after you make breakfast and cuddle your grandson on the couch, you’ll Google his insect questions from the night before. When your wife rouses herself from the spare bedroom, your grandson will run bright-eyed to her with his newest bug facts.
You and the five-year-old will carry the conversation. Your wife will sip her coffee and watch the boy, beam at him, in fact. She will not make eye contact with you.
Caterpillars don't pee but they poop all the time, black blotches on perfectly green leaves. A giant South American spider eats hummingbirds, lizards, and rodents, injects them with poison before drinking their insides, leaves the husks of the corpses behind. Some dragonflies prefer to fly backwards to visit the places they've already been, maybe they think there are happier times back then, something magical before everything started to go wrong.
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