It’s 6pm on a Sunday when Brittany calls to tell me about the mealworms.
The mealworms, she tells me, are laudatory—an honor, a reward for good behavior in this, her fifth year in what will almost certainly prove a lifetime sentence at the Ohio Reformatory for Women. I stand in the parking lot of the local nature preserve, hoist the last remaining stretch of bright blue kayak onto the roof-rack of my SUV and strap it in.
On the phone, Brittany is ecstatic, explaining that this role as mealworm caretaker reminds her of her girlhood, when she was still young and life still possible, when Friday nights meant Dominos and Dorito’s and a slumber party in a friend’s finished basement. When days were soft and sunlight and spent at the public pool in pink chlorined nylon. Those days, dusk fell in Bellefontaine, Ohio, and Brittany rose to meet it in cottoned nightgowns from the local Walmart, bending her body over games of Twister, or drinking 7-Up beside her brothers. She squatted in the front yard of her mother’s home, her body hunched and careful as she hoisted baby birds and voles and mice from the mouths of the family animals and set them neatly into shoeboxes stuffed with folded washcloths and warm water bottles and ramekins filled with sunflower seeds, peanut butter, Pedialyte—these, makeshift recovery units made from boxes that, just a few months prior, held back-to-school school sneakers made of discounted leather.
The mealworms, she tells me, are a privilege and the closest she will ever get now to having an animal of her own: something to caretake, to love, to nurture, to celebrate the way she once did children.
I idle inside my car, watch an osprey glide above the water, and the thought comes naturally: the freedom of a bird with wings, greater than that of a thirty-two-year-old abused since childhood.
Her stepfather, she was nine, no one believed her, and then they did.
Later, after we hang up, I Google the life stages of the mealworm beetle, learn that before it is a beetle, the mealworm emerges in the larval form: an insect yellow and round as cooked spaghetti, the same kind served in heaping bowls to reality television contestants clamoring for money in our mutual childhoods. It is hard not to envision Brittany and I both sprawled out on the carpet of our families’ living rooms, watching competitors in pastel tank-tops consume basins of mealworms by the gaping mouthful, their faces gagging, their pink tongues lolling, the mealworms clamoring helplessly, wanting escape more than men want money.
The mealworms, I read, then form a pupa. Then they turn red, then brown, then black.
Eventually, they emerge as beetles, black and hard as Dominoes. They live for three to twelve months on average, and the females will lay within this lifespan three hundred white, bean-shaped eggs, which will again evolve into yellow mealworms, at which point Brittany’s supervision will no longer be necessary; technicians from the local zoo will return to collect and transport these fresh new offspring to place in the Columbus Zoo’s aviary, where they will be eaten by droves of birds housed forever within thin metal cages—indigo bunting and rose-breasted grosbeak, summer tanagers, orioles—that people like you and I and all of America’s parents with collapsible strollers pay great money to go and see, our toddlers tapping on the glass, cooing innocently at cockatoos.
One small portion of the mealworms remain, their growth and development to be overseen by another inmate in good standing at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, and the cycles—of both worm and convict—continue in this way, ad nauseam.
Every Sunday, I field this call from Brittany, and every Sunday, some new dispatch of what life is like for one in every hundred Americans, the greatest number of prisoners worldwide. Tonight, it is a story of mealworms, of the thirty-year-old tasked with raising them, and for all of the differences now between us—between the nuances of our Midwestern Sundays, between the ways the system failed and did not fail us, between who we are now and who we once were—for a moment in time, we were the same.
Two girls in denim overalls fitted with iron-on pink peace signs and flowered patchwork.
Two girls lip-syncing to the Backstreet Boys and raising Tamagotchi that were always hungry.
Two American girls who became American women whose entire lives became lived responses to enduring and evading sexual violence.
Only now one fields the call from beside her kayak, and one places it from prison.
___
Amy Butcher is an award-winning essayist and the author of two books, including, most recently, Mothertrucker, a hybrid work of memoir and literary journalism that interrogates the realities of female fear, abusive relationships, and America’s quiet epidemic of intimate partner violence set against the geography of remote, northern Alaska. Her essays have appeared in Granta, Harper’s, The New York Times “Modern Love,” The New York Times Sunday Review, The Washington Post, The Denver Post, The Iowa Review, Lit Hub, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, and Brevity, among others. She is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.
1 comment
Jan Priddy says:
Jan 28, 2025
My 6th grade teacher had us raise mealworms, chart their development and create other graphs of noninvasive study. We were children, not prisoners, and undoubtedly some of us were molested—I had been on the playground by a boy my age. I wonder now what happened to the boy to make him do that and what happened to him afterward. He would never have grown wings.