Author: Don Morgan

I woke in a large bed with black wooden posts and a thick bed cover. The sun was coming up, filling the light cotton draperies like a wind and biting my head.

The drink the old woman had given me must’ve been pretty powerful. I couldn’t remember going to bed, let alone taking off my clothes. I checked myself beneath the covers.

I was still intact, but I had to pee really bad, I was naked and I didn’t know where the bathroom was.

The bedroom I was in was bright and very spacious, all wood paneled. There were cupboards, dressers, a wash basin and three doors. I could see my trunks at the foot of the bed.

Tiptoeing to the first door, I found a closet. The second opened onto a hallway and thankfully the third was a toilet.

After washing, I looked around for some clothes but all my clothes were all gone.

That was when there was a knock at the hallway door and I got back into the bed.

Bitte came in.

I don’t like flying. I can’t sleep. The seats are downright uncomfortable.

From New York to Cardiff, I drank those little bottles of wine one after another. And I did finally fall asleep. Then felt miserable when the stewardess woke me after landing.

From Cardiff to Wrexham, I took a train and sat in lounge the whole way adjusting to the change in hours and trying to heal my headache with local beer.

It was late afternoon when I arrived in Wrexham and my childhood memories were failing me. I couldn’t remember anything and nothing looked familiar. I gave a cabby instructions and fell asleep on the road.

It seemed like it was the very next moment that the cabby woke me demanding his money.

I paid him and he left before I realized that the house was still some distance off across land that rolled like a crumpled sparse carpet covered with closely cropped plants and grasses, some with narrow blades, others with wide and rounded leaves. Much of it strangled for nutrition.

An old woman met me at the door. She wore a white apron with an frill trim that was beginning to separate and a white dust cap tied with a blue ribbon that she used to hold most of her gray hair.

I can tell you that I was disappointed to see her, I was hoping for one of the cute housemaids that always seemed to be around when I was a kid. But there was only this old woman.

And she was ill-tempered, fat and smelled of mildew. I unpacked my few things and sat before the fire to eat her mutton and cakes- which were good enough and did cheer my mood some. That and her own brewed beer.

But I was sick and I was tired. The old woman brought me a soporific drink she made and told me her daughter would be there when I woke up to take care of me.

The drink was almost as thick as a syrup and very very pleasant, warm as I was before the fire. I slept, straight away, trying to imagine what I might be doing the next day.

I loved my dad and I knew it would break his heart when I quit business school to study entomology. But business school did not work on me. I couldn’t live in a suit all day.

To be honest, I was afraid of what might happen smelling of cologne and manicured, it felt like some sort of death to me.

So I dropped my business administration courses and switched to entomology. I expected it would be bad between my father and myself for a while but I thought he would see that I could be good at something and it would work out. I made plans to tell him about it. We were going to meet.

But I didn’t get the chance to tell him. He died, he was killed when an airplane landed wrong. It is one of those accidents in which hundreds of people are involved but only 20 or so are hurt and 3 are killed and you read about it in the news and you’re just glad it wasn’t so bad.

But three died and one of them was my dad. No matter how remote or small the detail in whatever adventure- well, things happen and they happen to someone and, in this case, it happened to me. Or, rather to him. But to me, too.

I didn’t expect him to die that is all; I didn’t think he was old.

My mother died soon after I was born and my father grieved, but he went on living. He became very successful in business. Rich, successful maybe even famous; there have been pictures of him dating movie stars in the newspapers. Whispered trysts, but nothing you could call serious. I knew him, I think he did have a love but I never met her.

While we lived in Wales, he would go with me out on the moors bugging and told me stories of some of the creatures he has seen there. I wanted to stay but he sent me to school in the US when I was eight, he felt I could get better education there.

He kept his home in Wales but he was so often in the US that sometimes it was difficult to tell. But I never saw the estate again.

But his death changed things.

I was on my way back from the US to London and then to Wales to re-visit my childhood home. I couldn’t be a business man like him but maybe I could bring a whole new series of insects to the world’s attention, put his name on them and publish a big fat book.

This is the story of an young American entomology student who meets sudden wealth and decides to return to his family home in Wales and make a name for himself writing bugs he heard about as a child.