My sister and I spent our time in London at Madame Tussauds, holding hands with Hitler and Madonna. We were avoiding parents. They had given us each fifteen pounds. I took mine to the exchange place, trading them in for dollars. “For when we’re back,” I said. Liza spent hers on candy. I thought about the pact we’d made before we left. Collect as much money as possible, so we’d be free to go where we pleased. “Don’t you remember?” I asked Liza, pinching the back of her arm.

We collected living things. Put them in a plastic box from the grocery store used for holding pre-washed salads. When we were in Germany, I picked out a large brown speckled snail and said, “Schnecken is a great name.” My sister agreed. We found two lime green caterpillar in the Tuileries. “We’ll start a zoo!” I said. “We can charge people to see it.” We thought we had really come up with something.

On our last week we found the ladybug. We kept it in a black cowboy hat on a train to Turkey. It was our prizewinner. The one we knew people would line up to see. “She’s our cash cow,” I said. Liza mooed.

I looked at the ladybug and planned my new life. 

On the floor of the hotel room, we were counting the spots on her back. Our father stepped on her fair and square. It wasn’t on purpose. It was in the place where his foot went down right before the bathroom. I heard his steps, and then she was gone. For a moment I thought I might cry. “I know,” Liza said, handing me a piece of chocolate. “Now we’ll never know how old she was.” 

Sophie Rosenblum is the 2008-2009 Rice University Parks Fellow. Recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from SmokeLong Quarterly and Gulf Coast.