Not alone

I was stuck in the room called the Mobilex. It's super storage - a tiny room with rolling shelves to take up less space but shelve more books.

Except this storage area is full of newspapers and old car/tv/radio repair manuals, beginning in the 1950s. Old stuff.

I sit in there on a chair I bring in myself, with no ventilation, checking through the manuals for missing pages. Really stimulating work. Seriously.

I take a notebook with me, supposedly to record the missing pages or folders in each volume, but mostly it's so I can write something down when I think of it.

I'm always thinking.

Yesterday, I was not alone in the Mobilex. A Roly-Poly had followed me in. I watched him walk over to my chair and I was a bit spooked that he might try to climb up my chair - I don't like Roly Polies that much - but he didn't. Instead, he fell over onto his back when he tried to climb the wall.

Poor Roly-Poly, I said, if you just roll into a ball, you can get back on your feet.

But he didn't listen. He wiggled and he squirmed. He used these extra long legs or feelers on his back end to try to violently flip himself over. But it didn't work.

He'd fight. He'd rest. He'd try really hard to flip, but he never did.
And I knew he was dying. Roly-Polies can't live on their backs. And I assumed that, like turtles, they really can't breathe well on their backs, either.

He couldn't.

My question is this: Isn't the main attraction of Roly-Polies the fact that they roll into balls? As a kid, I loved watching them and tapping them with my shoes or toes to get them to roll up. But this Roly-Poly couldn't do that.

So I began to wonder. Why, he's probably not a Roly-Poly at all. He's an imposter! Like the orange Lady Bugs that aren't Lady Bugs at all, but a transformed Japanese Beetle, or something. Those orange bugs infest everything, and they bite. Lady Bugs don't bite. Maybe, since this Roly-Poly couldn't roll, he was a Japanese Beetle Roly-Poly look-a-like.

And that's why I didn't help him turn over. In case he was an imposter.