When Grandma entered her chrysalis three years ago, everyone thought she would come out looking completely different. We all got super excited to see what kind of disgusting or beautiful creature Grandma would become, and we assumed this would give us all sorts of interesting things to look at and talk about. Sadly, it turns out that we’ve been left with nothing but a huge letdown, because Grandma just emerged from her chrysalis looking exactly like she did before.
What a huge disappointment. We waited all that time and wound up with the same exact Grandma we started with.
Everyone remembers exactly what they were doing on that fateful day three years ago when Grandma tapped on a glass in the middle of dinner to get everyone’s attention and calmly said, “It’s time for me to transform,” before getting up and walking into the living room. When we finally checked on her a few days later, we discovered that her body had become fully enveloped inside of a shimmering green and gold chrysalis that hung above one of our recliners.
That first moment of realizing Grandma had entered her chrysalis form was filled with so much hope and promise. We all remember how everyone in the family was hugging and cheering at the sight of Grandma’s chrysalis swaying slightly as it hung from the ceiling. We were all so excited about the possibility that Grandma would crawl out of her chrysalis looking completely different.
For the next three years, everyone in the family was speculating wildly about what Grandma might transform into when she finally emerged from her chrysalis. Dad thought she might come out looking like an angel with enormous feathered wings and gigantic biceps who could lift him up over her head and fly him around town while he shouted curse words and flipped people off.
“People would look up in the sky and scream, ‘Stop saying curse words! Stop flipping us off!’” Dad used to say, his eyes glazed over with a faraway look as he imagined Grandma’s helpful new body. “But they wouldn’t be able to do anything because my mother-in-law would be flying like a thousand miles in the sky and carrying me around, so if they wanted me to stop yelling swears at them from above, they would have to use missiles, and those are hard to get if you’re not the army, so there’d be no way to stop me.”
Mom said that she hoped that Grandma would crawl out of her chrysalis looking exactly like Vladimir Lenin so that she could enter Grandma in the county fair’s annual Lenin Lookalike Contest and win the set of golf clubs they offer as the grand prize every year.
Grandpa hoped that she came out looking like “a big swarm of flies” so that he could “see what it was like to be married to a big swarm of flies.” He also sometimes imagined that Grandma would emerge from the chrysalis looking like “a monster who is half donkey, half car, and half monster” so that he could “kiss a weird thing for free all the time.” Everyone in the family agreed this was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said about another person in the history of human civilization.
The rest of the family also had all sorts of amazing dreams for what Grandma might be turning into during her three years in the chrysalis. Some of us thought she was going to come out looking like a big ball of wriggling human fingers, others thought that she was going to become a big spider or a small spider or a normal-sized spider as big as a bus. Cousin Dorothy speculated that Grandma would turn into “a mysterious antlered beast that will only emerge from the forest during lunar festivals.”
The possibilities seemed endless, and yet they all came crashing down just this morning when Grandma clawed her way out of her chrysalis looking exactly the same as she had when she first went in three years ago. She just fell out of the chrysalis onto the living room floor, stood up, looked at the whole family who were staring at her in shocked silence, and said, “I’m new,” before immediately going into the kitchen to start shoving fistfuls of potato chips into her mouth. When we asked her what the deal was, Grandma explained that she “became goo” inside the chrysalis, but then she apparently just reconstituted herself right back into the same exact body she started with.
Dad got so emotional that he punched a hole in the drywall.
Needless to say, this is one of the biggest letdowns our family has ever had. This is the kind of chrysalis-related anticlimax you always imagine happening to other people, but never to you. Now that it has, we’re all still trying to process how she could have spent so much time in there without a single visible transformation. Grandpa even cried a little bit when he realized that he was never, ever going to know what it’s like to be married to a big swarm of flies. Here’s hoping our family is able to pick up the pieces after this and we can find a way to heal in the wake of this catastrophe.
