mindless.

I was walking down to my English class this morning, which is in UVU's basement floor. I was staring idly at the patterns in the stairs, while keeping my head down to avoid eye contact with anyone in the halls. On the last step, the pattern was interrupted in the corner of my eye. I looked, adjusting my vision to focus on this discontinuation, and I still had trouble seeing what I was looking at, exactly.


It was a dragonfly. A large one that had a body as long as my middle finger, speckled with beautiful patches of blue that matched the sky it had flown in, coupled with a deep mud-brown that only made the blue more extraordinary. Its large face was made of two eyes that housed millions more, and its thin needle legs were set gently on the ground. It was motionless, resting on its body instead of its feet, but I knew there was still life in it. I knelt down, not to look at it, but to go as far as to pick up the stranger. My fingers awkwardly pressed into its back as I tried to grip the insect like so many before it. The secret is to do it between the head and the thorax, or the "neck" you could say. More often than not, the insect won't be able to touch you with its legs. Don't use this technique on a praying mantis, though. Its forearms are pretty flexible. I hadn't done it with a dragonfly before, because it was impossible to get this grip with the four giant wings rigidly spanning from its back. And this experience proved that fact to me again.

As I pushed into it with my large clumsy fingers, its wings beat wildly. They beat against the stairs like frail tissue paper -- so fragile, stiff, like a thin sheet of perfect glass, but strong enough to move a dragonfly around in a way that still mesmerizes me. They slapped every which way at a risk of being torn and shredded. This dragonfly, however, was weak. The wings flapped for a few seconds, whipping the air at a speed not capable of flight, propulsion or any controlled movement at all. The dragonfly jostled around, its body flopping every which way, and it stayed on the ground. It was apparent. This dragonfly didn't have much longer to live. I didn't want the dragonfly to perch on my finger so I could take it back outside; I'd heard that even small dragonflies bite, and it's not pleasant. I didn't want to risk finding out the jaw force of this one. I tried grabbing it a couple more times, but the reaction was the same.

I shoved it around with my shoe a bit, hoping it would catch on. It took several nudges, and the dragonfly continued to batter its ferocious wings at such a rate that made me worry for its safety. It finally grasped the life raft that was my shoe's front. I wanted to take it back upstairs and outside, but I was walking so awkwardly with a passenger that I decided to take it out of harm's way. Under the descending stairs was a large unoccupied area, so I limped over to the farthest corner, away from all the students, and gently left the dragonfly on the ground. It instantly began buzzing, dragging its body across the carpet. I felt awkward to idle around any longer since a student had been on her phone at the bottom of the stairs during this entire wrestle with my dragonfly, so I left the bug alone and went to class.

An hour later, class was over. I walked to the stairwell and looked intently for the dragonfly. It wasn't squished or stepped on; it had simply vanished. I stood around for a little while longer, making sure nothing remained, but the carpet was clean. I walked up the stairs and away from this tomb.