InSects

InSects follows VIOLET, a pre-teen girl dragged by her mother and stepfather from Arizona to the rain-soaked coast of British Columbia. Violet now has to cope with losing her home, her friends, her family, and everything that made her who she was. At school, she is the oddball, the quiet, anxious new girl.

BILLY, the ringleader of her tormentors, begins with small cruelties, starting with a jar of flies thrust in her face. But his harassment escalates steadily. Flies. Dogshit. A dead mouse. Each act isolates Violet more.

The only bright spot amid this isolation is when Violet finds a new friend in LINA, the one person who seems to understand her. It's a brief, tentative lifeline. Around the same time, Violet finds a chrysalis in the mud-displaced, vulnerable, and alone, just like her. She recognizes something of herself in it and determines to protect it, investing hope in what it might become, even as she retreats deeper into her own cocoon.

The violence at school reaches a breaking point when Violet is falsely accused of attacking Billy. She is suspended, her mother is frustrated, and her stepfather is mostly indifferent. Now face to face with her parents' inattention, Violet attempts to flee, impulsively trying to board a bus back to Arizona, but it becomes one more reminder of her powerlessness. She returns home to silence, her absence unnoticed.

Once again seeking escape, and excited by the promise of the chrysalis soon to release its captive, Violet leaves early one morning for a nearby forested park. Billy finds her. His suspended rage erupts into violence, and he attacks her with a devastating fury, breaking her legs. Violet is only spared when the chrysalis finally opens. The strange, unfamiliar, beautiful insect that emerges distracts Billy long enough for her to strike back, knocking him unconscious.

In her attempt to escape, Violet falls into a hidden cavern. Trapped in this alien underworld, Violet undergoes a slow healing and metamorphosis. As her body changes, so does her understanding. 

When she emerges, Violet knows she no longer belongs there-if she ever did.

Through this process, Violet sheds what remains of her former self. The girl who arrived on the island-isolated, overlooked, and powerless-gives way to something new. 

As this transformation completes, Violet's grandmother arrives on the island, driven by an unshakable sense that something is wrong, that her granddaughter is meant for something more. She searches, determined to find Violet.

From a distance, with her new, inhuman senses, Violet is aware of her grandmother's presence. She pauses, considering what this relationship means now... and what she'll do when they finally meet.

The story closes with Violet in this moment of reflection, no longer defined by what she once was, or what she's lost, but by what she has become, carefully collecting her thoughts for what comes next.