My sister and I drive home in the desert on Lone Mountain Road. We approach a dip in the street as a sea of hornworms—Manduca quinquemaculata—shimmy across the August asphalt in our path, their mass a river. We don’t know another way to get home, so I steer over the chunky jade-hued worms as we scream caterpillar 911 to cover the sound of the crunch. We always did that as kids: announced perceived emergencies to cover the disaster itself. We roll over the possibility of hundreds of sphinx moths without promise of water to wash away what’s left behind.
Suzy is a writer from Arizona. Her work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, South Dakota Review, Rejection Letters, Variant Lit, Monkeybicycle, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Seattle with her cats.