Jessica Watson's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Jessica Watson stood on the cracked porch with a shoebox of rescued beetles under one arm and the keys to a house she had never seen in her other hand. She had spent every dollar of her inheritance to get here: the down payment, the movers, the used car waiting at the curb. The plan had been simple. Buy a quiet little place in a quiet little town. Turn it into a home where every spider, moth, and cricket she found at her custodian job could live out its life in peace. She was forty-nine years old, and she was finally going to build the sanctuary. The house did not match the listing photos. Green shutters hung sideways. The roof shingles curled like old bread. A window on the porch was already broken, and something small and brown had made a web across the corner of it. Her car sat behind her, a dented coupe in three mismatched colors, its windshield spidered with cracks. The dealer had promised "cosmetic wear." She adjusted her glasses and did not cry. Inside, the smell hit first. Damp wood. Mouse droppings. She set the shoebox on the warped floor and lifted the lid. Six beetles she had carried from her old apartment climbed onto her sleeve. A jumping spider she had saved from a mop bucket last Tuesday peered up at her from a jar, its green eyes catching the light through a hole in the roof. "Okay," Jessica said. "Okay, okay, okay." She walked the rooms. A cricket bolted from under the baseboard and vanished into a crack she could not follow. That was the problem. She had been doing this for years — scooping bugs into coffee cups, releasing them in parks, sneaking moths out of the school where she mopped floors — and every single one she saved eventually slipped away or died in the wrong jar. She had no enclosures. No humidity plan. No food chart. She did not even know what a real sanctuary looked like. She had been guessing, and guessing was how you lost them. She sat down on the kitchen floor. She counted what was left in her checking account on her phone. Forty-one dollars. The repairs on the house would take thousands. The car needed brakes. She pressed her palms flat against the sticky linoleum and made herself think. She pulled a receipt from her pocket and a pen from her bun. On the back of the receipt she wrote: LIBRARY. Then: species list. Then: enclosure sizes, humidity, food, one room first. She underlined one room first twice. She would not save another bug until she knew how to keep the ones she had. The jumping spider tapped the glass of its jar. Jessica lifted the jar to her face and nodded at it. "We're going to do this right," she said. "Starting tomorrow."