She'd watched from behind the peonies, deciding to punish him, to take his little red race car and hide it under the mulberry bush. Winter rains turned to hard ice and encased the tiny automobile; snow covered it like white frosting on a Danish. She stared at the dream car swerving left, the expression of the Italian driver confident and intense. Oh-u? Oh-u? Oh-u? The bird had attracted others and they were having a meeting, deciding how best to get her out. The blue jays, who thought of themselves more like marines than civil servants, wanted to bust the window, lead her out through the shards of splintered glass. The egret, a coy international spy, wanted to infiltrate the house solo, pin the man to his chair with its long lancelike beak, while all the other birds flew down the hall, pecked through the plywood door, and set the girl free. A flock of seagulls wanted to tear the man's eyes out, then send the water rats in to finish him off. There were other proposals, the robin's call for peaceful negotiations, the owl's for covert night maneuvers. Sandy listened until everyone started to talk at once, and the black crow said that there wasn't much time left and shook lemons from the tree to get everyone's attention back to the matter at hand. But what was time to her? A jewel beetle made its way across the ceiling like a floating emerald. The faucet pondered a melody of drips. The shy gecko stalked a fringy centipede. He was time, time was his heartbeat, time was his breath.
“Fourscore and seven years ago,” the caterpillar began, “all beings were dedicated to the universal notion that every animal is created equal. We were highly resolved in those days to the proposition that the dead did not die in vain, but for the greater good of these woods. That was when,” the caterpillar swayed his body to the right with whiplike rhetorical force, “this place was divine.”
“It still is,” said the bear, who had an optimistic disposition and didn't like anyone running down his home. He yawned, slumped against the tree stump. His bow tie was crooked, his hair matted with leaf bits and broken twigs, and he looked as if he were recovering from another drunken night.
“Don't interrupt,” the caterpillar said, trying to look as large and dignified as possible. He gave a speech every day, but could tell that this was going to be a particularly good one. “It is for us, the animated, to be devoted to the work which they who fought on this hallowed ground here have so honorably advanced. For instance, we had in those days a family of fairies who could make a delicious casserole, using nothing but butternuts and tree bark.”
“I'm glad they're gone,” said the bear, yawning more dramatically, hoping the caterpillar would get the message. All the other animals had already gotten bored and wandered off; only the bear was polite enough to listen. He had a bad reputation, as a rogue and a dandy, but his manners were exquisite. “That fairy, the one who made rose petal slippers, she was a horrible gossip.”
“Shut up!” shouted the caterpillar. “You're making me forget what I'm saying.” He glanced down at his crib notes, etched onto an acorn beside him. “Whenever, if ever, we admit we are created by the four winds, our souls shall not perish from this earth.”
“Amen,” said the bear. “Is that it?”
“Yes,” said the caterpillar stiffly. “I got all fouled up because of your constant interjections.”
“It was a nice speech,” the bear said, “but I'm too tired to hear you practice it again.”
“Well I just might, and it'll be all your fault!” the caterpillar screamed. He was already mad at the bear for drinking the last bottle of champagne. “It's because of you that we need to raise money.”
“We could sell lemonade,” said the bear hopefully, “or paint some rocks? We could make seashell necklaces or weave pot holders, sell driftwood or the tail feathers birds drop onto the ground. I'll collect aluminum cans — they're all over the place — or I could give kindergarten students rides on my back. We could pick blackberries and sell them at a stand on the highway! I'll make floral arrangements out of foxglove and milkweed. I bet they'd bring a pretty penny. I think I'm old enough now to baby-sit, to feed children Rice Krispies squares out of Tupperware containers and referee while the little boys wrestle. I'd be good to the little girls too, read them stories about unicorns and princes, about trolls with bad teeth and white hair. . The troll comes in,” the bear said in his most evocative storyteller voice, “and sits on the edge of the bed. He holds a coffee cup filled with warm water to her parched lips. He's whistling a tune and smiling, calling her his little darling, his baby girl. But the girl watches the zipper of his khaki pants. Inside his pants is a monster; the little girls in kindergarten told her that. Inside little boys’ pants was a monster like a worm.”
The air was a thick-petaled flower swarming with baby lizards crawling everywhere over the idiot grass: skinks and whiptails, chameleons twilling their minuscule dew flaps, hatching even now from a clutch of eggs. Just an inch long, they hunted insects, butterfly larvae and worms, baby crickets and katydids. They sounded like a trillion synchronized, reverberating rubber bands, but wetter and more mysterious. The troll spit a glob of marbled mucus into the weeds. The lumpy spit slid down a blade of fool's wheat. Dung beetles and mayflies hatched from tiny gummy eggs, caterpillars spun branches together to make gray mummies, and moths, convinced the porch light was the moon, beat themselves to death against the bulb. She couldn't think of what she was thinking; every few seconds she lost her way, her thoughts going on without her, being revealed behind a closed door, like when she waited outside her parents’ bedroom while they whispered inside. It made her feel like she was already back with the earth. Earwigs crawled over her arms, gnats chewed her ankles, horseflies bit her neck. She was no different than this aluminum lawn chair, the frame tilting to a dangerous degree, no different than the deformed oranges, than the nightshade gone to seed by the side of the house.
The troll put his pen down and got up, walked over, and pulled the afghan up to her shoulders, covering up her chest. He wheezed. “Smoking,” he said, rubbing his fat tongue over his rotten teeth. He moved one citronella candle, smelling of lemon and a needle's prick, closer to her feet, carried the second back to his table and set it down, careful not to spill wax on his work. In the flame she saw auras of tiny handwriting on onionskin paper. The letters were square and uniform. They looked more like a pattern than characters in the alphabet, and there was a picture of Michael Jackson torn out of a magazine and framed with carefully drawn roses and thunderbolts, a blurry newspaper oval of the president with 666 written on his forehead and one of the Virgin Mary surrounded by swastikas. At the top of the page he was working on was a Polaroid of her. He must have taken it while she was sleeping. Underneath, he'd written, GIRL.
The troll was anxious. He used a toothpick to weed out corn kernels from his teeth, smoked cigarettes one off the end of the other, and reeked of fearful sweat like garbage trucks in summer, like bad Chinese food and smelly feet. He drove leaning forward, headlights off, trying to navigate like a moth by moonlight. The passage was tight, branches flicked against both sides of the van, and the mud road made oozy sounds. The party, Sandy decided, was for the turtle because she was seventy-six. She wore false eyelashes made of spiders’ legs and a wreath of violets around her head, and the caterpillar, who was so much younger and always looking for bits of wisdom to improve his rhetoric, asked what she'd learned in life so far.