Instant Life
These latest pets in our household — following such predecessors as tadpoles, crickets, goldfish, cocooning butterflies, and ant-farm ants, all now deceased — came in a box sealed in plastic that I brought home from the shelf of a discount department store. My daughter Natalie, just eight, awaited me at the door when I returned home. The directions inside the box unfolded in small print on a narrow sheet of paper. Together we unpacked the kit, snapped green plastic plants and rocks onto the floor of the miniature aquarium, filled a measuring cup with tap water, and purified the water with blue tablets. The water went into the aquarium. Natalie, her face serious and her mouth working with concentration, moved with the calm and precision of someone confident in the authority of published instructions.
Soon came the crucial moment, the time akin to Baron von Frankenstein’s flipping of the huge electric switch, when we would bring to life dozens of tiny swimming creatures called Sea Monkeys — a variety of brine shrimp. I cut the corner off a small packet, and we tried to get a look inside: only a mysterious nothing. Natalie upended the packet and a minute quantity of white granules, like a spray of sea foam, hit the water and slowly circled. Her fingers gripped hard as she stirred with a plastic spoon. The spiraling powder held the promise of more spontaneous motion to come.
