Metamorphosis
By S.R. Koch
People
always ask the wrong questions. “What is the meaning of life?” is the most
common. Philosophers and other great thinkers tend to worry and ponder over the
big questions, when in truth, it’s the little ones they should be asking. “Why
do socks always disappear in the laundry?” is a good question, and happens to
be one that I can actually explain. There are other questions, of course, like,
“Why does toast always land buttered-side down?” or “How do cats always know
when you don’t want to be bothered?” Those ones, unfortunately, I can’t answer,
though I suspect there’s someone out there who can. Someone who, like me,
stumbled into something they weren’t meant to see.
It was the middle of February, and
about three months after my eighth birthday. It had been a cold year, and though
I don’t normally mind snow or cold, the fact that our socks seemed to be
disappearing at an unusually rapid rate was becoming really irritating. Nine
days out of ten, I had to wear mismatched socks, and my poor mom was making
weekly runs to the local department store to buy bags of socks for everyone. It
was ridiculous, and it never seemed to matter how careful my mom was when she
was loading the washer. The socks just vanished, and even after several
searches behind the dryer and numerous sweeps of the corners of the laundry
room, we could never find them again. I suspected that my dog was stealing them
out of the hamper or that my brother was playing a joke on everyone, so I came
to the conclusion any sensible person would; I needed to go on a stakeout.
At age ten, I was a slightly unusual
specimen of my gender in that I had absolutely no interest in ponies,
princesses, or dressing up dolls. My passion was spying, and my Barbies were
usually armed with GI-Joe weapons and sent on daring missions around the house.
I owned a dozen code-writing books, I had secret notebooks with invisible-ink
pens for all my spy information, and even a pair of night-vision binoculars
that my parents bought me for Christmas. Seeing the strange sock shortage as a
perfect opportunity to exercise my spying skills in a real-life mission, I went
to work full of excitement.
Our laundry room is a small, cramped
room that actually used to be an oversized closet. The washer and dryer take up
one entire wall, while the other wall has a huge shelf structure with storage
cupboards all along the top. It is there that we keep the canned veggies that
we harvest from our garden every year, along with spare quart jars and a couple
huge, black pots. I’ve discovered, through intense games of hide-and-seek at my
birthday parties, that I can fit into the cupboards if I scrunch my knees up to
my chin and squeeze myself between the two big pots. It’s a perfect place to
hide, because the divider on the door hides me even if the door is opened, and
if I leave it open a crack, I have an excellent view of the room. I use the
place whenever I need to avoid practicing piano or when my brother’s being a
jerk. No one, to this day, has ever discovered it.
On the night of the stakeout, I
waited until my mom had kissed me goodnight and both she and my dad had gone to
bed. I then, very carefully, rose, grabbed my spy pack from under the bed, and
padded downstairs on bare feet so as not to make a sound. I left all the lights
off, and clambered into the cupboard mostly by touch. It was a tight fit and
hard to do without light, but I eventually got myself in and was able to settle
down with my notebook and invisible ink pens in my lap and my night binoculars
in my hand. I was all set.
For the first half hour, my
excitement kept me awake and eager so that I didn’t even notice how cramped I
was. I scanned the room with my binoculars every five minutes, and I kept
running scenarios through my head where I leaped from the cupboard and caught
the sock thief red-handed when he attempted to make off with the contents of
the laundry hamper. Some of the stories I came up with were pretty exciting,
and often involved some ulterior motive for stealing the socks that was usually
along the lines of there being a secret code or priceless jewel hidden in with
our dirty clothes. I had a pretty fantastic imagination, but truth be told, I
think my stories were rather tame in comparison to what really happened.
My exhilaration kept me going strong
for little over half an hour, but at around ten-thirty, I suddenly realized
that my butt had gone numb. As my excitement eventually waned, so did my
enthusiasm. I checked the room less and less often, and shifted a lot in a
futile attempt to relieve the various numbed surfaces on my back, legs, and
rear. I began thinking more and more of my bed. I thought of how soft and comfy
the covers were, and of how much cooler my bedroom was than that stuffy little
cupboard. I began noticing every sharp corner and angle poking into me from all
sides, and soon that was all my brain could focus on. The only reason I didn’t
leave was because I was, and remain to this day, one of the most stubborn
people on the planet. I was sleepy, too, but I couldn’t drift off because of
all those corners poking me. In the end, it’s a good thing they were.
Otherwise, I never would have seen what happened next.
I don’t know what time it was,
really, but I like to think that it was midnight. Sleep was actually beginning
to overcome discomfort by that point, and I had my chin resting on my chest
despite a bad neck cramp, my eyes slowly drooping closed. I was just about to
drift off entirely, when the sound of something moving in the darkness caught
my attention, and I jolted awake with an electric tingling of fear and
excitement.
The sock thief had arrived.
Very quietly, I moved my binoculars
up from where they’d been resting on my knees and trained them on the crack I’d
left in the door. From there, I could clearly see the sliding door that led
into the room, the laundry hamper, and one corner of the washing machine. Since
I was expecting my thief to come through the door, I focused on that. You can
imagine my surprise when the brief flash of movement that I caught in the
corner of my night binoculars came from somewhere entirely different—the
hamper.
The lid had jumped.
Startled, I quickly swung the
binoculars around to look at the hamper, just in time to see the lid snap closed.
I frowned, confused, and squinted through the lenses.
A soft rustling on the floor drew my
attention away from the hamper, and I quickly shifted my gaze to the base of
the wash machine. I just caught a glimpse of something scooting out of sight
behind a mop bucket. In the green of the night binoculars, I couldn’t tell what
color it was, but it was small and long of body, like a rat. A sour feeling of
uneasiness settled on me at the thought that there might be rats in the room
with me, and suddenly my stake-out was beginning to seem like a really bad
idea. Another snap from the hamper made me jump slightly, my nerves tingling.
I still couldn’t see what was making
the hamper open and close, so I decided to watch and wait for it to happen
again. I stared at it for a full minute, ignoring the soft rustling noises from
the floor and the rising sense of panic building in the back of my throat. My
eyes started to water from holding them open for so long, and I think I was
holding my breath. I was just on the verge of blinking and heaving a loud gasp
of air when the lid opened again, and I finally saw what had been making the
noises.
A sock.
I recognized it—one of my white ones
with a blue heel and toe and a gaping hole where my big toe had poked through.
It slid through the gap that it made by pushing the toe end of its body against
the lid, and then crawled, inchworm-style, down the side of the hamper towards
the floor. It looked to be in a hurry.
There were now three of them
gathered on the floor, including the newcomer. The first two—both big ones from
my dad—had come out of hiding from behind the mop bucket, and were sitting in a
loose half-circle with their toe-ends facing inward. They looked like a
gathering of flat, oddly-colored caterpillars. I heard the hamper snap twice
more, and two more socks joined the first three—one from my mom, and one from
my brother. The five of them sat in their little circle, occasionally waving
their front ends in a manner that looked to me like some form of greeting. At
that point, I still wasn’t entirely sure what I was watching; they looked as if
they were gathering together for some purpose, yet they hadn’t done anything
since they’d crawled out of the hamper. A minute later, however, I figured out
what was going on.
As if by some sort of signal, all
five sock-caterpillars suddenly let themselves drop flat against the floor, and
they all stopped moving. I watched, fascinated, as they began to spin some sort
of silky thread from the heel-ends of their bodies, each of them encapsulating
itself in a cocoon of silk. Soon, all five where completely covered, and the
flow of silk stopped. All that was left was five white, bean-shaped lumps on
the floor in a little circle.
I was absolutely ecstatic; I was
witnessing the metamorphosis of socks. It was just like the monarch butterflies
that we sometimes caught as caterpillars and raised to adulthood, only it was
taking place over the course of a few hours. All thoughts of my soft, comfy bed
were long gone, and I waited expectantly for the cocoons to hatch and for the
adult form of the sock creatures to emerge.
I
didn’t have to wait long—after all, the change had to be done quickly in order
to avoid detection by humans, so it stood to reason that it wouldn’t take long
for the adults to develop in their little cocoons. Within an hour (which went
by in the blink of an eye), the cocoon that my sock had spun was beginning to
hatch. A long, ragged crack appeared down the side of the white surface, and a
segmented leg poked its way through the shell of hardened silk. The legs were
immediately followed by a big, furry head with feathered antenna mounted on top
and tiny, black, beadlike eyes positioned directly below the antenna. The
thorax followed the head, along with the creature’s fat, fuzzy abdomen and the
drooped, rumpled form of its wings.
Two others—my mom’s and one of my
dad’s—were beginning to hatch by this point, and the remaining two were
beginning to wiggle and rock. As the two latest ones tugged their way free,
mine proceeded to twitch and shiver its rumpled wings, drying them out and
removing the creases. By the time the last two had begun to crawl out of their
cocoons, mine was completely dry, and was giving little experimental flutters
of its wings.
The entire creature, though cast in
green by my night binoculars, was a pale, off-white color from head to abdomen.
Its wings were the same color, with odd, cross-hatched lines running up and
down their length. The tips of each lobe of its wings were dark blue in color, with
patterns at the base that looked suspiciously like stitch marks. As my mom’s
sock slowly unfurled its wings, I noted that it was a bit different—the
wingtips were dark gray instead of blue. Each sock-moth, I realized, matched
the pattern of the sock that it had changed from, down to the spiderman pattern
on my brother’s red and blue sock.
When all five of them were completely
hatched, they promptly set about eating the remains of their cocoons. Their
strange, multicolored wings shivered as they audibly munched on the dried husks
of silk, making them almost look like a flock of pigeons (they were, as you
might imagine, quite huge). When they were done with that, they proceeded to
test out their new winds, hopping and fluttering about across the laundry room
floor in gradually-lengthening bursts of short flight. I was so entranced by it
all that I didn’t even noticed that I had been unconsciously leaning forward
against the door, balancing on my toes with my free hand gripping one of the
big black pots for support. I suppose what happened next was inevitable.
I eventually reached the point where
I was leaning just an inch too far over my center of balance, and my weight
became too much for the pot. With a startled shout, I began to fall forward,
the cupboard door flying open under my weight and the heavy metal pot falling
out after me as I tumbled out into the open, my eyes wide.
I never saw what happened to the
sock-moths—I was too focused on the assortment of jars and sharp corners that I
caught on my way down. I managed to curl into a fetal ball on the trip
floorwards so as not to injure myself too badly, but the corners and edges that
I hit left some uncomfortable bruises, and I must have knocked every jar on the
shelf off to judge by the noise. Me, the black pot, a dozen jars of canned
beans and some other random things that had been stacked on the shelf all hit
the ground at roughly the same time, producing an almighty crash of metal and
shattering glass that could have woken the dead. I just sat there, stunned, and
watched the patch on the floor where the sock-moths had been. They’d fled, as
could be expected, though where to, I never found out. A minute later my mother
burst into the room, and promptly shrieked in horror when she saw the state of
me and the laundry room.
I tried to explain—how I’d noticed
the unusual number of missing socks and how I’d done the stakeout to catch the
thief, and then how the socks had crawled out of the hamper and turned into
moths. I did it calmly and with plenty of descriptive facts to back up my
claims, yet I might as well have not spoken. My mom, and no one else for that
matter, believed me—there wasn’t even a shred of cocoon silk left on the ground
as evidence of the strange nighttime transformation—and I was accused of
stealing the missing socks in order to make up the story. Never mind that one
of them had been my own. In the end, I was given a bath and sent back to bed,
and my night binoculars were taken away for a week as punishment for trashing
the laundry room.
I knew I was right, though.
I’ve tried, multiple times, since
that day, to catch the metamorphosis of sock-caterpillars again. Ours must have
moved somewhere else, though, since I never saw them in the laundry room again.
I suppose I don’t blame them; after all, I intruded on something no human is
meant to see, and in order to protect themselves, they had to find somewhere we
can’t find them to go about their business.
In the end, I answered one question:
“Why do socks always disappear in the laundry?” Yet I ended up asking a hundred
more. For instance, “How do cats
always know when you don’t want to be bothered?” and “Why does toast always land buttered-side down?”
Or even, “If socks can turn into
butterflies, what does it mean when one’s underwear goes missing?”
Perhaps, someday, we’ll find out.
THE
END
