Content warnings

Insect imagery. Disordered eating. Blood. Parental abuse.

Jie, are you listening?

I want to tell you this story the way you would want to hear it. Which is to say, I want to tell you this story as a procession of facts. I want to lay it out as a sensible chronology.

Let’s start with this: long ago, a population of arthropods had a scarcity of resources, and their feeble bodies had to adapt. Populations with many distinct forms are able to exploit more sources of nutrition. Butterflies drink the sap—caterpillars devour the leaf. In this way, certain populations survived and flourished. This is how metamorphosis emerged in insects, 320 million years ago.

Metamorphosis saved ecology once. Ma believed it would save us from hunger once more.

Do you remember the first day Ma brought us to the lab with her after school? She was convinced it would be a good supplement to our history unit on Ecological Collapse.

The two of us watched an opalescent pair of wings twitch on a synthetic blade of grass beneath the blue light. Ma kept the lacewing in a box of borosilicate glass. The air machine droned as it pumped—you had to take off your glasses because they kept fogging up in the heat.

It was the first time we saw a living animal from Terra, and the two of us pressed our noses to the glass, sharing a look of awe.

“Isn’t she beautiful?” Ma crooned as she threaded her cool fingers through our scalps. “My girls will grow up to be just as beautiful.”

It was one of the rare times I remember loving her.

In Lepidoptera, metamorphosis is spurred on by hormonal changes in adolescence. Around the time of the fifth molt, programmed cell death readies larvae tissue for maturing. In the pupa, this tissue is digested to grow the adult body. The genome of Lepidoptera has not changed in 250 million years—this is what always happens.

Ma had it in her head that hearing about the traumas of bug puberty would put our minds at ease regarding the changes happening to our own body, but all I remember was how we used to sleep in a larval curl around each other at night, holding our bodies close.

Do you remember, Jie? When I got my period, Ma took me to the last herbalist on the station three modules away, only for the wrinkled woman to prescribe me a sachet of brown sugar the color of ash. When you got your period a month later in the middle of the night—the barest pink smudge in the toilet paper you held for me to see—Ma rushed you down to the laboratory. I cried out in unfairness for being left behind, there was no one to hear me in our empty housing unit.

Later, you told me how strange that night was: Ma distanced by her pair of loupes as she made you undress. You, dripping your first blood all over those white tiles while she appraised you for hours without touching you. Your feet, slimy and numb. Your knees, quivering. You didn’t try to move at all, obeying Ma’s every word even as I defied her.

Do you remember how I once described my period pain to you? Like a bug was trying to crawl out? Was it like that for you too, Jie? I never asked back then. I didn’t want to hear it at all.

Ma chewed on her morning nutri-block with indifference as Tau Ceti’s blue gleam blotted the sky. After you showered, she finally took you into her arms. She folded your laundered clothes and ushered you to the veiled infirmary to dress. You came home alone with a glistening apple in your hands.

“Don’t make that face,” you said, “Look what Ma sneaked us from the lab. Aren’t you tired of the ration blocks, Shiyang?”

She gave it to you alone, not me. I knew you were lying about this, but I sunk my teeth greedily into the sour flesh and refused to speak to you.

I keep asking myself why we grew apart as we grew older. I know the answer, but still I can’t help but to ask, time and time again.

Ma told us entomologists once proved with neuroimaging that the associative memories of caterpillars persists through metamorphosis. Despite the traumas of the chrysalis, butterflies know to avoid odors it once learned to avoid as caterpillars.

We do not know if Lepidoptera have episodic memories, or if it, too, would endure.

Ma has always believed that it would—that the caterpillar remembered itself. She had to, if she found metamorphosis beautiful at all.

What I keep remembering, Jie, is the night we broke into Ma’s study while she was gone and found the old discs. She was always so fond of collecting vintages. She kept the metal slate on the wall and it took no time for us to figure out where to slot things. The flat screen buzzed, then glowed.

An accented voice spoke over a video of Terra. Sol blushed past a forest, the strange atmosphere clean blue and teeming with condensation. The lens focused on a lone figure in a field of tall grass—an antelope with glossy hide and strong coils of horn.

“Is it only me,” I said, biting my lips, “Or does it look like Ma?”

We laughed, tried to quiet ourselves, then laughed harder. After the film ended, we lay on our backs as we felt along the woven thread of her Persian carpet that we were never supposed to touch. You turned to me, and your eyes were serious. “Sometimes you’re too hard on her, you know?”

“You’re kidding.”

“I mean it.” Then you looked up to the low ceiling where there was nothing, stretched your hand out to the nothing. “It’s people like her who’ll save us.”

I’ve always hated that look in your eyes—like you already knew where you would go, what you would be. “Is that what you want to do with your life? What Ma does?”

You considered this deeply. “Of course.”

I remember the cruel bark of my laugh. “That’s never going to happen. You know that, right? You can’t possibly think that you’re worth—”

I’m sorry.

I won’t repeat it to you. You understand, don’t you? That when you love someone too much, it spills in these terrible, ugly ways.

Like many things, the intricacies of biology is only a marvel in retrospect. Many pre-Collapse animals underwent metamorphosis as they matured—insects, fish, amphibians. Yet there were no known mammals that experienced this process.

That is, until Ma had an idea.

“Shiyue,” Ma said to you one morning as she collected your half-empty bowl of nutri-slop, “Have you been eating enough?”

You looked away, pinning the threads of fine, black hair behind your ears. It was around then that you were growing taller. I couldn’t keep up. Our once homogeneous distribution of body fat sat elegantly on your lengthening femur and tibia. Your full cheeks were thinning out, and the boys at school wouldn’t stop talking about you each time they spoke to me.

“I think she’s making herself throw up,” I said, though it wasn’t true.

“I’m asking your sister,” said Ma. The bowl hit the sink louder than usual.

I wanted you to bite back, but you were never willing to hurt me in the ways I hurt you. I wanted you to look me in the eye with scorn for once, instead of looking away—to make what I did to you fair.

You sighed. “Don’t listen to Meimei. My appetite’s been all over lately. It makes me nauseous when I eat too much, that’s all.”

Ma ran out of the kitchen as the words left your mouth. Soap suds dripped from her fingertips and sank into the carpet. The water was still running in the kitchen. When she looked at you, it was like I wasn’t in the room at all, like the oxygen I took with each breath was a waste.

“Shiyue, we need to go to the lab,” Ma said, and I waited for the two of you to disappear, used to abandonment by then.

I wish so desperately that I had said something to you—anything at all.

I wanted to tell you how it all happened in a sensible chronology, the way you would tell it, if you were telling it to me. But I’ve never been good with facts the way you were. Even now I can’t make sense of all that has happened to us.

If there’s anything that matters in all the kludge I’m telling you, it’s this: long ago, a scarcity of resources forced a larva to digest itself to survive. 350 million years later, and 12 lightyears displaced on the Tau Ceti Station Entomology Lab, Dr. Han impregnates herself with two embryos—both fertilized by the same sperm donor, and yet irreconcilably different by genome.

She will name one after the sun, and another after the moon. She will find one to be more beautiful.

That was all we ever were to her, Jie.

When I saw you half a year later, Ma promised me you would wake up soon.

“Han Shiyang,” she said. “Pull yourself together. Don’t be immature about this.”

I could not speak to her. I could not look at her. Or at you.

Ma lay her hand against the glass. “When I told her what was going to happen, Shiyue understood at once. She always understands. Why can’t you be more like your sister?”

She kept you in a box of borosilicate glass. They had strung you up by the crook that was once your elbow, now shrunken yellow and pustulating. The pupa dripped a brown mucus to the floor.

My stomach churned. It was nothing like the textbooks, Jie. I’m so sorry.

All I could see was your protruding once-heart, black and cancerous. All I could smell was rot.

Is it true what Ma says about memories? Do you still know who I am? If it is true—if you are really listening—I need you to understand why I’m doing this.

I know you’re hurting in there.

I can make it end.

I never stopped loving you, Jiejie; I only stopped saying it. I love you, and this is the only way I can save you.

END

J. Y. Zhang

J. Y. Zhang codes by day, writes by night, and doomscrolls Reddit in the hours between. They are fascinated by the melancholy, the macabre, and pictures of cool bugs. Their work has appeared in Heartlines Spec and The /tƐmz/ Review.