The Last Green Thing

The others went in when the wind turned cold. Emma stayed out. She had one more corner of the garden to check, and Emma always checks the last corner.

The garden had mostly gone to sleep. The cotton blossom had burst to fluff. The wildflowers stood brown and rattly on their stems. The watering can sat empty by the gate. Anyone else would have called it finished. Emma pushed her glasses up her nose, got down on both knees in the damp, and looked under the kale leaf.

And there it was: one small green caterpillar. The last green thing in the whole garden, walking slowly in the cold, and walking the wrong way.

“You can’t stay out here,” Emma told it. She tells things to bees and snails all the time, so she knows how. “It’s nearly winter. Everybody’s gone in.”

The caterpillar kept walking the wrong way.

Emma thought with her chin on her fist. Then she fetched the jar from her own windowsill — the one with the tired old dandelion in it. “You’ve had your turn,” she told the dandelion, and tipped it gently into the hedge. In went a twig. In went a curl of bark. In went the kale leaf, caterpillar and all. She carried the whole thing back through the gate held out in front of her, slow and steady, like a bowl filled to the brim.

Katie came to look. Then Harper. Then Madeline, who knew at once, the way she knows things out of stories.

“It isn’t dying,” Madeline said. “It’s getting ready. If you keep it safe all winter, it comes back in the spring — with wings.”

“Wings,” said Emma. She looked hard at the caterpillar. It did not look like it had wings in it.

“You’ll see,” said Madeline.

By the time the light went, the caterpillar had stopped its slow walking and begun, quietly, to fold itself away. They set the jar on the windowsill above the kitchen sink, in the row of kept things, between Harper’s acorns and the first small pumpkin. The last green thing of the year, put up where the cold couldn’t reach it.

Emma checked it every morning after that, breathing fog on the glass and wiping it clear with her sleeve. Nothing happened. She checked anyway. “Still sleeping,” she reported to the kitchen, every single day, and the kettle steamed along like it was listening.

Winter came. Snow shut the garden gate, and the robin came to the sill for crumbs, and the jar sat quiet between the acorns and the pumpkin with its small sleeper inside.

Emma leaned close to the glass one cold morning and whispered, “Snug as a bug.”

Which, for once, was exactly true.