A Sighting

 

This was just yesterday—Saturday.

I’d sat myself at the porch steps, I think to pull some burrs from Buster’s fur, but suddenly something on the coneflowers swam into view. What in the world. I stared. A cocoon, I guessed, but unlike any I’d ever seen. Straight out of Stranger Things, it had a solid, shiny black casing that even sealed off the creature’s apparent nostrils.

I rounded the corner of the house, summoned my husband, led him to the porch. Look, I said. What in the world.

He peered.

Some kind of amorphous protozoan, maybe a slime mold, he thought.

He pulled out his phone, snapped a photo. He sent it to his iNaturalist app. But the species that popped up on his screen didn’t even come close. His specimen lacked any features of an insect larva. His specimen lacked any features of a slug. That it might be an organism made no sense.

Then he understood.

I can tell you what it is, he murmured. I was still trying to get a good picture. Instead of going off for a jar so he could carry the whatever-it-was inside and examine it under his microscope, he plucked it off the leaf and snapped it in two. Just a foam blob.

Weeks before, he’d plugged up the wall, the crack up at the top, above the porch, with spray-on polyurethane insulation to keep our weirdly sociable black snakes, or anyhow, the one, from slipping indoors again and making itself at home. The little bit, when it squirted out, had missed the crack and fallen down into the flowers. What next we’ll find, here in this land of strange things and stranger, who can say.





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