The Lament for Icarus
Now the Caterpillar enjoyed his meagre wanderings upon the idle greens of the forest, the spill of raindrops about his tread and the brittle support of leaves beneath his feet. It was the soft trace of his crawl amongst the busy flutter of wings. And so with this in mind he rued the prospect of one day becoming a butterfly, to him it seemed so maddening, so disquieting, and he hated this. In a desperate attempt to preserve his peace he decided one day to make a deal with his friend the Woodpecker,
“Would you be so kind, when the day comes, to unpick me from the prison of my cocoon?” he asked in his sweetest voice.
“Why of course I would”, replied the Woodpecker, for he and the Caterpillar had been friends too long for him to refuse this small favour.
And so after a few short weeks the time came when the caterpillar began the arduous task of weaving his cocoon. Whilst at first it appeared skeletal and stark, it quickly became intricate and splendid, a fitting place for his metamorphosis. Lazily the day passed on by, with the Caterpillar sound in his chamber awaiting nothing but the welcome awakening of the Woodpecker's beak. In the high light of the afternoon it came, and how excited the Caterpillar was. His body writhed and wriggled with anticipation as he knew that perhaps he had cheated the birth of the butterfly. However as the holes began to widen and the light streamed through the silk the Caterpillar began to panic, he realised that his cocoon was high on up and that without wings he would surely die upon the forest floor far below. The Caterpillar tried to relate this to his friend, but he could not hear above the sound of his unstitching. After a short time the cocoon was unpicked and the Caterpillar saw the ground that would break his fall. And whilst the caterpillar fell to the ground he had one wish, that he would have been a butterfly.
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