“Oh my God.” Ruth covered her mouth with her hands. “Get them off you. Judith, get them off you.”

Her voice was pitching up so high that I worried one of the supervising teachers would come. “Shut up,” I told her. “Quit it.”

I got down on my knees in the leaves. “Look,” I repeated. The ants that were not scrambling up my leg were swarming now, their legs scuttling like breathing. With their delicate mandibles, they lifted little white sacs, dots like the teeth of very small animals. “Look.” They were rushing their loads into tunnels, under the earth. “They’re burying their babies.”

I interfered with a stick, causing a small riot amid the swirl of their bodies. The eggs were too small for me to touch, but I lifted one delicately with the stick, trying to get it into the sunlight. I wanted to see the shape of a miniature ant inside it. And then it moved, and startled me, squirming at the end of my stick, horrible because of its suddenness. It fell backward off the stick, wriggling in a miniature, awkward motion, and landed a little ways away from the nest. The bell rang then, but I watched a moment, wondering if one of the sister-ants would notice and reclaim it.

* * *

“Did you know there’s a kind of butterfly,” I told Ruth, our sweating knees slicked together in the backseat of my dad’s car—he was driving us to the hospital—“that makes ants raise its young?”

“How does it do that?” My father craned his neck to look back at us through the rearview mirror. His radio blared cheerful, innocuous country music.

“The larva of the Alcon blue butterfly smells like an ant baby to an ant, so the ants take them back into the nest and raise them. And the ants feed them more than even their own babies.”

“What happens”—Ruth had turned her face away from the window; her mouth was cinched up small—“to the baby ants?”

“They starve to death,” I told her, “or the butterflies eat them.”

The hospital seemed extraordinary at the time, a catacomb of brightly lit tunnels. It smelled of cool hand sanitizer, and, going in, we were given masks that lay flat against our chins and the bridges of our noses, cutting us off from the air.

“Do you think someone’s dying here right now?” I asked Ruth, thinking of a room down a tunnel, and down another tunnel, and around a corner, a fluorescent identical hallway, a soul escaping.

“Maybe,” she said, her wide, staring eyes. “Maybe someone just did.”

“Stop that, Judith,” my father said. “Stop that, girls.”

“They’re like changelings,” I told Ruth in the elevator, “the butterflies.”

“What’s a changeling?”

We came into Aunt Vera’s room then, which we entered by pulling back a curtain. Aunt Vera was contained like a dead bird in a cardboard box, set in four small white walls. On one side of her bed was a window, which looked out over the hospital parking lot. It was winter, and the sun was already setting, spreading a low orange glimmer over the parked cars.