This one. Dark wings dipped in blue. A smattering of white dots along the border.
It’s been pinned for 14 years now, preserved behind a wooden-rimmed glass case and hanging in a cool corner where it feels the sun on its delicate membrane for brief moments.
It pulls you towards it with a kind of irresistible magnetism that can come only from an odious desire for an unsatisfying satisfaction, a walk through a tunnel that has no end besides the one that resides in your hope for it.
On sterile plastic on a wooden desk with glistening metal tools without a smidge of rust, you lay it bare for observation—expose it for a dissection for a resolution that has long flown off, leaving you picking at the scraps, at the fragmented shell of a barely metamorphosed body, at the grainy shadow of what once maybe was.
Right there! This little white scale, hidden under its neighbors. Tug on it gently, coax it out.
A marshmallow floats to the surface, oozing gooey goodness that rests lazily, swaying with the
waves made from unsteady, chubby hands on hot ceramic. You blow gently on the milk because you like seeing the way it laps against the sides of its prison and the way that the marshmallow dances.
You’ve found this one before, as it turns out. It has a page dedicated to it in your journal, a journal in turn dedicated only to this one creature. A journal with a start date etched into its front page, but a journal with no end.
Keep looking. What of the hind wings? Where they nestle ever so slightly under the forewings. Peel open that overlap, and let sharp light uncover anything you might have missed.
You both rise with the sun, and, in the cool dew of the morning, you huddle by a vent, staring outside as warmth tickles your legs and sunlight floods the yard, the deck, the not-yet-but-soon-to-be-rusted swing (the swing that’s gone now). He makes a bagel and hot chocolate for you both. With 2% Horizon Organic Milk and Hershey’s Chocolate Sauce, and maybe some Kraft Jet-Puffed Mini Marshmallows. The microwave whirs—then beeps. You both sit and sip. It’s quiet, but that’s just how it is between you two (how it was and is and will be).
This too, holds no new revelations, no new pieces to the puzzle that you’ve created and are determined (desperate?) to complete.
Tell me your secrets, you beg. Give me the key to finding others like you. With time and tools, you ask, plead, demand, because there must be more to this story, to this little fledgling butterfly memory that means so much to you but reveals so little.
There may have been once. But some things can’t be recovered, because the things that stay, stay, and the things that leave, leave. They flutter away and leave pretty little butterfly bones, a pretty little butterfly exoskeleton with some shimmery scales and chitinous membranes. Pretty, but becoming less so. Pretty, but empty.
Lay it down to rest. We must bury the dead.
by Ellie Huh
