A chubby bright-green caterpillar crawls toward me on the city sidewalk. My son once loved catching creatures like it. Now he’s in college and I’m late for work, but I stop to lift the wayward crawler to a patch of foliage. “Be safe,” I say, as if I’ve learned nothing.

DK Snyder’s creative work has appeared in Cool Rock Repository and Dollar Store Magazine. Find her on Twitter at @millioncandles.