Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: Confused (05/21/26)
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TITLE: The Walnut Wanderer | Previous Challenge Entry
By Corinne Smelker
05/28/26 -
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I crouched, magnifying glass at the ready, and watched him. He paused, waved his antennae, then executed a neat about-turn and marched straight back the way he had come. Ten paces later, he changed his mind again. Round and round he went, describing smaller and smaller circles until he resembled a clockwork toy whose key had been wound once too often. Confused, I decided. Thoroughly, splendidly confused.
Mother had warned me about poking at things that might bite, but this beetle seemed too preoccupied with his existential crisis to bother with dentistry. I scooped him gently into a jar lined with dock leaves and carried him home in triumph, though triumph felt oddly hollow. Why did he spin like that? Had some larger beetle offended him? Or had the world simply tilted on its axis while he wasn’t looking?
Our garden at the edge of the village was a miniature continent of wonders: a compost heap that steamed like a volcano, a pond that hosted newts, and a patch of long grass where field mice were in constant peril. I placed the jar beside a cracked flowerpot and sat cross-legged on the warm flagstones to observe.
The beetle explored his new glass kingdom with renewed purpose, scaling the dock leaves like a mountaineer, only to slide back down with comical regularity. Each time he reached the top, he paused, antennae twitching as though listening for instructions only he could hear.
Uncle Bert wandered past, pipe clenched between teeth, and peered into the jar.
“Lost his bearings, has he?” he rumbled. Uncle Bert knew things. He could coax a reluctant rose into bloom and had once mended a hedgehog’s broken leg with nothing but string and optimism.
“He keeps turning round,” I explained. “Like he doesn’t know which way is forward.”
Uncle Bert tapped the glass with a blunt finger. “Give him time. Things have a way of settling when you stop interfering. There’s an order to it all, even when it looks like muddle.”
I left the jar on the bench, but that night I dreamt of vast meadows where every blade of grass pointed in a different direction, and beetles marched in hopeless circles while distant stars looked on with mild amusement.
The next morning, the jar was empty. A single dock leaf lay neatly across the rim like a gangplank. I searched the flagstones, the flowerbeds, even the compost heap, but the beetle had vanished as thoroughly as last week’s pocket money.
I felt oddly bereft. For two days, I haunted the garden paths, peering under leaves and behind stones, half hoping, half fearing I would find him still circling. On the third afternoon, I saw movement near the old stone wall. There he was, my beetle, climbing steadily up a stem of cow parsley, antennae steady, direction purposeful. At the top, he paused, surveyed the green world spread before him, and launched himself into the air with a decisive whirr of wing cases. He flew straight and true toward the far hedgerow, a small brown speck vanishing into the vastness.
The beetle was gone, but the garden felt suddenly larger, more kindly disposed. And for the first time, I understood that confusion was never the end of the story. It was only the quiet interval before the order revealed itself: steady, patient, and sure as the hand that had set the stars in their courses and the seasons in their turn.
I never saw him again. But every now and then, when I find myself marching in small, anxious circles, I remember a walnut-coloured beetle and the quiet certainty with which he finally took flight. And I smile.
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I really liked all the places you took us to find that beetle that got away. It really keep my attention through the whole story.