Jessica Watson's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The next morning, Jessica came home from the library with a bag of glass boxes. She had spent thirty of her forty-one dollars on a lot of used terrariums from a yard sale. Now they sat on the kitchen floor of the tired little house, clear walls fogged with dust. She had the enclosures at last. She still did not know a single thing to put inside them. She knelt and sorted her rescues into jars. The beetles she thought she knew. The jumping spider watched her from its glass, bright eyes tracking her hand. But the others stumped her. A gray moth. Two crickets. A pale beetle she had never seen. She had bought empty homes for creatures she could not name. She pulled out her phone and typed what she saw. "Small brown spider, green eyes, jumps." The search filled with photos. She held the screen beside the jar and matched the markings. "Jumping spider," she read aloud. "Dry twigs. Bark to climb. Low water." She wrote it on the terrarium's tape label. One down. She worked for hours. Each bug got the same treatment. She described it, searched, matched, and read the care notes. The gray moth needed leaves and shade. The crickets needed grass and a dish of water. She gathered supplies from the yard: a tangle of dry leaves, thin twigs, a clump of short grass. She built each home to match the notes. Then she reached the last jar. Ants. She had scooped them from a dead nest weeks ago, a dry mound of grass and bodies. Only two still moved. She searched, matched, and read. Ants needed a colony. A queen. Damp soil and tunnels. Two workers alone would die within days. No terrarium could fix that. Jessica sat back on the sticky floor. She had built six homes that would work. She had also learned the one hard truth she had been dodging. Some rescues came too late. Some she could not save no matter how many boxes she bought. She looked at the two ants circling the glass. She carried the jar outside. She found a live anthill near the fence, under the shade of two tall spruce trees. She tipped the two workers gently onto the soil beside it. Maybe the colony would take them. Maybe not. It was better than a glass box and a slow death. Back inside, she taped the last labels. Six terrariums glowed on the counter, each one right. The jumping spider settled onto its new bark and lifted a front leg. Jessica smiled and touched the glass. "Now I know your names," she said. She had ten dollars left and six proper homes. She also knew, now, that she needed real soil, real food, real supplies for every future rescue. The house was full of homes. It was empty of everything to keep them running.