Bernard's Last Ride

It's been a pretty exciting day at work so far. A pretty exciting one indeed.

Just when I thought it was going to be an ordinary day, cloudless and plain, up walked a most extraordinary creature. Smaller than my thumbnail, Bernard (known by those of us who have grown to love him) is green as a rain forest all over from his head to his feet except for one tiny spot on his back-end which is purple. Bernard, though beautiful and stunningly quiet, seemed like an ordinary bug for the first 30 minutes or so as I went about finding a cage for him (my pen holder) and some grass to eat (I assume he eats grass mostly because that's what color he is).


Before too long I learned that Bernard is quite the climber, scaling up the walls of his cage as you can see from the aerial shot looking down into his container. This prompted the piece of paper which I placed over the top. 3 minutes later I looked back at the cage and Bernard sat on top of the paper suspiciously eyeing me as if to say "how dare you?"

But all I cared about was Bernard's protection and safety. So I gently lowered him back into his cage and replaced the paper with a heavy envelope which I then anchored down with two bic pens. It wasn't 20 minutes later that I looked over at Bernard and was utterly shocked to see him standing on top of the envelope exactly between the two pens, again staring at me with his mysterious beady eyes.

I then had to take a lunch break and asked my boss (faithful blog readers know him as Meryl) to watch Bernard for me. The bottom picture is Meryl completely ignoring me at his desk when I was trying to introduce the two. Just as I started to walk away Meryl informed me that Bernard would be dead by the end of the hour. But I knew a little something about Bernard's perseverance and was quite confident that he could withstand the blows of Meryl even on his worst day.

I was correct; Bernard was not dead by the end of the hour but was nestled down comfortably in the grass at the bottom of his cage. Over the course of the next hour, however, Bernard became quite irritable, climbing all over the place seconds after I put him back into his cage. I loved that little bug so much but he seemed determined to undermine my authority in any way he could.

Just when I thought I had all of Bernard's tricks figured out, he did the unthinkable. He opened up his back and spread out long wings and VERY quickly flew across the room, slamming hard against the closed window. Yup. That's right. Bernard, though on initial inspection didn't seem to have any place on his body for the 12 inch wings that spread out on either side in one of his final moments of sheer panic, could fly.

I cautiously approached Bernard and looked down on him. He looked up at me with a hatred in his eyes which were narrow and dark but despite the hate they seemed to acknowledge that there was little he could do. His eyes drifted until they met Meryl, sitting far away oblivious to the situation, passing the same hate he clearly had for me to him as though that hate was all they had left in them. I knew that the hate that emanated from this bug was far from anything human. His eyes contained a darkness that was so far removed from anything that I had ever learned to be the attributes of purity and peace that it was painful for me to be around him for long. An evil existed there; some sort of satanic influence had penetrated his life and as I looked at him for that brief moment, I felt as though I could do anything but understand the creature that stood before me. And he stared a few seconds longer, sucking the life out of the cool crisp air, until he turned quickly and hauntingly strolled across the tiled floor, back the direction we had come. I watched him go, my heart wincing each time he glanced back at me until he disappeared into the crowd.

But Bernard was really beginning to piss me off. So I found him and squashed him.