Dinnn spent the first few sunny days of spring walking around the empty parking lot He learned on his own how to lean and sip sweet water from trampled candy wrappers bottle caps and flowers in the flat grass near the garbage cans One morning he woke up before dawn That way he could get a head start to wherever his siblings were flying that day For the first hour or so Dinnn walked in darkness By the time he reached the road the sun was up Moving slowly on his six legs he felt the warm sun on his back Suddenly he heard his brothers and sisters coming up behind him They buzzed overhead A few hundred of them quickly passed A couple of the slower ones called down Hey weirdo Crawl back home They never slowed down to be with him and they pretended not to know him when other bugs were around His siblings were embarrassed to have a brother who walked everywhere But Dinnn didn’t mind having to walk in the dust or make his way around puddles
What’s the big deal he thought I just take a little longer (cid:3) One morning as the orange sun rose behind the drive-in theater Dinnn looked at the sky I wish the sky wasn’t so high up he thought His nose trembled as he watched the clouds move fast above him The thought of leaving the ground terrified him Leaving the ground would mean letting go plummeting into the sky Insects crisscrossed the air from the garbage dump all the way to the lake All of them seemed to know something Dinnn didn’t He kept thinking about the day he was born He stared beyond his nose at the clouds remembering the exact moment he fell into that puddle Dinnn could never shake that awful feeling of falling and of being left behind And so each morning he walked beside the road He walked to school his light wings resting on his back Meanwhile all the other young mosquitoes caught the gentle breeze They floated up above the gravel and drifted over the grass At the insect crosswalk the crossing guard an old
ladybug made Dinnn stand and wait even though the road was always empty Dinnn hunched his shoulders waiting for her whistle to chirp Then he walked across the road Finally he walked down into the ditch toward the old discarded air conditioner that was the local school for mosquitoes He usually arrived late Instead of flying through the front vent like the other mosquitoes Dinnn walked around the side and crawled through a hole in the air filter Then he sat in the very back row He sat with his skinny hind legs stretched out acting cool But he wasn’t cool at all and the other mosquitoes could tell (cid:3)
