Butterfly City
by Lesley Warren
It was Iris’ eighteenth birthday the day the last butterfly died.
For five solid months, January to May, people had been metamorphosing.
The first butterfly, a pale yellow panicky thing, was an unprecedented freak of nature, so nobody paid much notice. The first hundred insects were a medical curiosity. The first thousand, and people were rightly starting to twitch a bit. Looking back many years later, Iris couldn’t pinpoint the watershed moment when the tragedy of the few had become a universal plight. All she remembered was that it seemed like there had never been a world without it. It was all anyone ever talked about anymore. Case numbers were rising every day, and the doctors couldn’t work out what was causing it. Stay home, don’t mingle with others, the radio barked one week; a few days later, the new official advice was to take a brisk walk and cast the windows wide in order to circulate the internal air. School continued as normal until it became apparent that the young were not immune to the disease. They merely transformed into smaller, more active butterflies, flapping demented circles around their mothers’ heads and squeaking in a pitch above audible frequency. The maternity ward at the local hospital had succumbed to an outbreak and was steadily filling up with fat little caterpillars, wriggling forlornly in their cots.
Things escalated to the point that everyone knew someone who had turned, as the medical establishments euphemistically took to calling it. The degrees of separation were becoming ever fewer. In the Butler household, it started with Iris’ father.
Mr. Butler was not given to panic. In fact, he was in denial for a good few days, saying he must have caught something from a colleague at the firm. Just a bug, he said, which was true, in a sense. A couple of aspirin and a good night’s sleep should do the trick.
Except it didn’t.
In keeping with his law-abiding, highly obedient nature, his illness was a textbook case, passing neatly through each of the reported stages exactly as expected. First, he became almost comically corpulent, a great cannonball of a man, in spite of the fact that he ate nothing at all. Violet Butler wept into her mixing bowl, conjuring up all sorts of delicacies to try and whet his appetite, but he asked for nothing but tea – tea with two sugars, then four, then six, and eventually just sugared water.
“I’ll be right as rain soon, don’t you worry,” he said, gulping down the contents of his fifth mug. His fingers had become cold white sausages, his hands puffy and bloated like those of a drowned man.
They brought in a little table and played backgammon, whist, draughts to pass the time, but it was difficult to look at Harry’s face. It was the only part of him that had stayed its old size, and was beaming mildly, as always. He knew he was dying, they knew he was dying, and each party knew that the other knew – and yet nobody was going to say a thing. The elephant in the room and its lepidopteran cousin in the bed made Iris want to tear at her hair and scream.
Instead, she went downstairs to get the tea things. She opened the cupboard doors with such force that they ricocheted off each other, then slammed them shut. She hacked at the Victoria sponge with her mother’s sharpest steak knife, but there wasn’t enough traction to soothe her frustration. She stirred the sugar into the four china cups, clinking the teaspoon as loudly as she dared. Pallid tea sloshed into the saucers, lightly freckling her tight white knuckles.
Harry Butler took his teacup with a nod of thanks. “Well, isn’t this quite something!” he said, trying to make light of the situation as his family stood silently aghast over his body.
“Yes,” said Iris, staring at his pregnant stomach, which looked fit to burst. She pictured his guts splattering the Jacquard wallpaper, his blood becoming part of the intricate pattern.
As the transformation progressed, no-one slept. It didn’t seem right, somehow, not while the marital bed was groaning under the weight of the silently suffering patriarch, his nightshirt struggling to contain the tumescent body that dwarfed his head in contrast. They sat up in their nightgowns in the kitchen over endless mugs of cocoa and took it in turns to check on the invalid. He had tried to be a good sport, but the metamorphosis was taking its toll now. His eyes were dull and unseeing, his skin delicate as paper and cold as bark, strangely powdery to the touch. As his limbs fused to his torso, the doctor was called once more, tall and solemn with long yellow hands. A nightmarish sight in his gas mask, he gently rotated the patient and saw exactly what he had feared – two large protuberances sprouting from the shoulder blades, the scaly skin splitting to permit their eruption. He told Violet Butler he was very sorry, but there was nothing that could be done for her husband now. Violet burst into hot, noisy tears. The doctor was discomfited. He patted her hand gingerly and discreetly put a couple of leaflets on pandemic funeral arrangements on the crowded bedside table.
After that, it was just a matter of time. Harry stopped speaking. The brown blades continued to erupt painfully from his back, forcing him to lie on his stomach, and two fine protuberances began to sprout from the top of his head like errant, overlong hairs. On the final day of his transformation – nineteen days since he had first shown symptoms – he began to shrink. He’d never been a large man until the swelling, so this was a visually arresting development. As the hours passed, his head sank further and further down the pillow; the duvet flopped limply over the space his feet had once occupied. Eventually he was small enough to fit in the pocket of one of his own work suits.
“Oh, Harry!” his wife cried, wringing her hands.
“Don’t fuss, Violet,” her father said in his tiny moth-voice, crawling up the mattress. Then he folded his wings together, shuddered a little and died.
Iris’ mother and sister instantly collapsed into paroxysms of grief, caterwauling in each other’s arms. It was numb Iris who busied herself with the practicalities – shaking the dust from the bedclothes and calling the company and scooping her father into a drinking glass. Harold Butler had been a weak and ultimately ineffectual guardian, but he had always meant well. When it became apparent that the disintegration of his body would tip her mother over the edge, she took Rose’s clear nail lacquer and gently froze him into sticky stiffness for time immemorial. She put him on a cardboard beer mat purloined in a cheerier decade from a now defunct pub and stuck him through with a pin. Then she hung him above the fireplace. It had been his house, after all.
It was strange how quickly things returned to a state of near-normal at number twelve, Wilbur Drive, in spite of the metamorphoses taking place all around. As long as nobody went anywhere, the microcosm of the homestead was a safe haven. The three women subsisted on their store of canned goods, cobbling together strange meals – corned beef and baked beans followed by stewed prunes; boiled potatoes with a side of limp spinach and tinned peaches for dessert. They got up when they felt like it and occupied their time however they saw fit – Iris reading in a nest of dirty laundry in the bathtub, Violet patching the girls’ stockings and knitting enough lumpy socks and scarves to keep an entire Russian battalion warm, Rose beautifully and tragically doing absolutely nothing.
Things might have stayed that way, had Rose not suddenly and fatally recovered her spirits. It occurred to Iris a couple of months down the line that her sister had stopped whimpering in her sleep. Instead of slouching around the house with matted hair, wrapped in a blanket and crying in her mother’s lap, she started wearing curlers to bed, appearing at the breakfast table with painted lips and fingernails. She began to sing around the house like a forest fay, twirling her wrists and pointing her toes in a little dreamy dance of her own, just as she had done since she was old enough to speak. It wasn’t her fault; she had not yet seen enough of the world for anything to depress her buoyant spirits for long. She invented piano lessons and babysitting errands and went out on secret trysts with the bashful boys who used to call for her with their caps doffed and their nervous twisting hands, and when the government ordained that such close contact was no longer allowed, she crept out of the house under the cover of night to do giggling, rustling things in the overgrown garden. At fourteen – particularly such a sylphlike and shimmering fourteenhood as hers – she still secretly thought herself immune, immortal. Iris, meanwhile, harboured no such delusions. She felt no desire to expose herself to unnecessary risk, but she wasn’t particularly afraid of contracting the butterfly sickness, either. She licked her fingertip and turned a page of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It would be the most interesting thing to have happened to her so far in life, no doubt.
For a long while, Rose seemed to get away with her little indiscretions scot-free. It wasn’t surprising; this was exactly how she had lived her life thus far, waving away danger, rebuke and blame with an airy hand and a winning smile. Then, in mid-March, she came home from her athletics club complaining of stiff joints. She sat on the kitchen table in her white shorts and T-shirt with the red stripe and let down her rippling auburn hair from its tight band while her mother rubbed arnica into her coltish knees. When she had her head tipped back like that, she looked like something out of a catalogue, Iris noted without emotion. There was no cause for concern yet. Growing pains, probably, since the girls had taken to training on the school racetrack, several wingspans apart. Personally, she thought her sister was milking it. Rose had always liked to be babied. She bundled herself up in all of her nightdresses and some of Iris’ too, the tip of her slightly upturned nose a fetching shade of pink. She drank her mother’s hot homemade soup and sipped delicately at steaming mugs of tea with honey, her big green eyes innocent and beseeching.
But then Iris woke one night vibrating like a struck gong, electric panic zipping from the tips of her toes all the way up her spine to the top of her head. Chill sweat prickled under her arms, at the backs of her knees. She sat up and looked over at Rose’s empty bed. A sense of numb futility slowed her breathing. Slowly she slid her feet into her slippers and padded softly down the stairs, taking care to tread only on the corners to prevent them from creaking.
Nothing could have prepared her for the sight that awaited her in the kitchen.
A shadowy figure stood at the open fridge. Iris tiptoed closer, unsure what to do; they said you should never awaken a sleepwalker. Rose’s head was thrown back in rapture as she guzzled apple juice right from the carton, her white throat rapidly convulsing in tight little gulp-gulp-gulps. This was so unlike her that Iris stared.
Somehow sensing her presence from within her trance, Rose’s gaze swivelled in Iris’ direction. Caught in the frigid glow, she froze. She tried to lower the carton from her moist mouth, but couldn’t. Her throat gurgled like a drain; sweet juice overflowed and ran down her arm, pooling amber on the tiles. A terrified squeak escaped her beaded lips.
They changed her nightgown and put her to bed. Iris couldn’t get back to sleep after that, so she mopped the sticky floor in the pale light of false dawn.
Rose’s illness progressed far quicker than that of her father, but perhaps by virtue of her age, perhaps due to sheer luck, she did not appear to suffer much – then again, when had she ever? The chicken pox, the measles, the flu had never done more than ruffle the placid surface of her dreamy tranquillity. She slept perfectly, a little smile even haunting her lips, a sleeping beauty. Her limbs began to fuse smoothly to her adolescent torso, turning her into a marble statue – quadriplegic, helpless, but somehow still creamily exquisite. On the tenth morning, Iris woke to see the bedclothes crumpled and a little skipper butterfly coquettishly flirting its flame-hued wings on the bedpost as if to say, “Look at me! Look at me!” Even their mother clapped her hands to see her, through smiles and tears.
In the seventeen days of Rose’s life, she and Iris made up for fourteen years of half-hearted sisterhood.
As in her previous form, Rose was keen to feel the sunshine, the breeze. Curling her tiny strong feet around Iris’ forefinger, she was borne out into the garden. She fluttered her wings in glee.
“Oh,” she said in her tiny furry voice, “how glorious!”
“Why don’t you try to fly?” Iris said, setting her gently on the gently bobbing head of her namesake – a blush-pink tea rose, her father’s pride and joy.
Rose’s antennae twitched eagerly. “Oh – do you really think I can? Truly?”
Of course she could. She seemed to have been born for flight, her body streamlined and aerodynamic, darting effortlessly from flower to flower. She moved so fast that Iris had to strain to see her, a blurred speck of colour blending into the pointillist canvas of the summer garden.
Finally Rose returned to her perch on her sister’s shoulder, breathless with joy. “Oh, Iris!” she said fuzzily. “That was so much fun! Oh, dear Iris, how I wish you could fly with me! If you get sick too, let’s fly together! Oh, do let’s!”
In their father’s absence, the Butlers’ garden had become a little jungle of sorts, teeming with colour and life. Other neighbourhood butterflies wove in and out of the ivy, the adults clustering in the dry birdbath, the children giggling and shrieking as they narrowly avoided head-on collisions with fat bumblebees. It was like a magic eye picture; the longer you stared, the more you saw. One of Rose’s local beaus even appeared, brown with handsome cream-yellow spots on his wings, jealously haunting the same bushes as his muse. For several idyllic days, Iris played with them all – something she had never done when the children had been human. Nobody had wanted her, then. Her mother even dragged her favourite armchair out into the garden and sat for many sun-drenched hours with her knitting untouched in her lap, smiling fondly the entire time.
But the summer couldn’t last forever. It gradually became apparent that Rose’s time was running out. Her flight began to look accidental, drunken. She kept alighting on Iris’ shoulder, tiny body heaving, pretty wings limp.
“Don’t go,” said Iris, suddenly afraid; she didn’t think she could manage their mother alone.
But Rose’s antennae drooped, tickling Iris’ cheek. “I can’t help it,” she said mournfully. “My wings just don’t have as much strength as they used to. Everything takes so much more effort. I’m awfully tired.”
They looked in unison at their mother. The brim of her rarely-worn sunhat drooped over her eyes; she was sound asleep. Another butterfly, this one large and black, skittered haphazardly across the ground at her feet, trembled one last time, then fell open like a Bible and died in the grass.
To her credit, Iris tried to save Rose. She brought her fruit juice, honey, sugar water, served in a thimble. She lay lengthwise in the grass with a bunch of flowers and fed her nectar from the tip of a paintbrush. It was no use. Eventually the little skipper grew too weak even to feed, merely pressing her antennae to Iris’ palm from time to time to let her know she was still alive.
Eventually Iris fell asleep in the garden, and when she woke at dawn, stiff and cold and disorientated, Rose was dead in the cradle of her hand, eternally ornamental. Her beautiful little wings were parted like lips exhaling their final sigh. A fine layer of shimmering dust shaded Iris’ palm. Careful not to damage Rose, Iris carried her into the house on tiptoe and gently folded her flat between two silk handkerchiefs. Then she took her father’s whittling tools and carved out a square hole in a book of fairytales.
“Iris?” Her mother stood in her dressing gown and shabby slippers in the bedroom doorway, arms folded, hair tousled. A band of sunburn had reddened her nose. She looked very old and careworn, her cheeks still bearing pillowslip creases. “What’s happening? What are you doing?”
Iris couldn’t speak. Violet crossed the room in two strides and opened the soft little parcel almost angrily, her lips preemptively parting to deliver a scolding.
Then she froze. Her hands flew to her face.
Gently refolding the silken shroud, Iris placed her sister into the tiny book-tomb and set the lid in place. The finest of shimmering dust powdered her fingertips.
Silence ruled the household for the next few days. The two women did not avoid each other intentionally, but equally did not seek out each other’s company for solace; they dealt with their grief alone. Violet shut herself up in her room. For the first couple of days, Iris left cups of tea and bowls of soup at the door, but stopped when they were left standing untouched, flies sucking greedily at the tomatoey scum. She read in her bed until her eyes gave out and her forehead felt stretched tight as a drum. Her nightgown clung to her like a second skin. She peeled the sheets off, put on her slippers and shuffled across the corridor. Her mother’s bedroom door was ajar.
Iris went in to see her, but she wasn’t there. The marital bed was unmade – something she had never seen before, not even in the days after her father had died. It gave her a strange seasick feeling deep in her guts. Her head swam; the room was stuffy, the window tightly sealed. She put her hand on the mantelpiece to steady herself and felt her fingertips sink into a thick layer of dust.
Oh no.
Closing her eyes, Iris took a deep breath and tried to walk backwards – away from the alien bed with its covers thrown back, away from the eerie silence, out of the room and back to the safe, ignorant haven of her books. But –
Crunch.
With a sick shock, Iris raised her foot and opened one eye a milimetre at a time, knowing what she was going to see.
Her mother’s dull butterfly body fell apart beneath the sole of her shoe like a disintegrated leaf.
The Butler house may as well have been completely deserted for all the movement that took place within its four walls over the next few weeks. A greenish fuzz haunted four family members’ worth of plates stacked in various dusty corners of the kitchen. Fuzz and hair scudded across the unlit floors like so much domestic tumbleweed every time Iris moved, which was not often. She sank herself deep into any crevice – an armchair, an armoire, an old apple crate – and read book after book, picking up the next as soon as she had set aside the last. The side of her index finger grew a little callus from the continuous turning of pages. When one location began to hurt her bones, she found another. Scouting for snacks in the kitchen, for there was nothing left to cook, she read the backs of food packages. When she brushed her teeth in the mornings – one of the few routines of her old life to which she still adhered – she read the backs of the bottles and jars in the cabinet so as not to have to look at the scum in the sink. Her eyes continued to scroll from left to right even when she slept, reading the blank backs of her eyelids. At the outset, the mail had piled up on the doormat, but this was the one thing she did not read. She kicked it under the shoe cabinet and forgot about it, and now there was nothing coming in from anywhere. All contact with the outside world was finally gone.
Iris stuffed a fistful of pork rinds into her mouth and lay listlessly on the sofa, half-watching television. The constant news reports blurred into a background drone. Accelerated course… unprecedented numbers… public coffers empty… scientists struggling to devise a vaccine…
With an effort, Iris peeled herself off the sofa. A grey-faced reporter said in gravelly tones, “In severe cases, the time between onset of symptoms and full metamorphosis may be only a matter of hours.”
Iris walked out of the room and regarded herself in the hallway mirror. Her familiar face stared solemnly back at her – a pale heart narrowing into a pointed chin, almost swallowed up by the mass of her pin-straight hair dissolving into the darkness of the hall behind her. The television flickered and an inane, syrupy tune poured out over the airwaves:
“If you don’t want to grow a pair of wings
Buckle up and listen to the words we sing!
Staying safe is easy as one – two – three:
STAY INSIIIIIIIDE! (Say it again!)
STAY INSIIIIIIDE! (Tell all your friends!)
‘Cause home’s our favourite place to be!”
It was so saccharine, Iris felt the urge to spit. Her thoughts, sluggish for so long, were slowly beginning to whir. An unaccustomed warmth crept to the surface of her skin.
Here’s what I know: I am seventeen and in good health. With regular exercise and a fair diet, I might easily live another sixty years or so.
Sixty years. That was older than her father, older than her mother. It was an absolute eternity. Was she going to spend it cooped up indoors simply because her family was gone? There was no sense in that. She saw it now. Staying indoors because she wanted to was one thing. Staying indoors because the stuffy old men with their full pockets and their fat bellies had told her to was quite another.
Slowly, deliberately, she opened the cupboard under the stairs and pulled the cord to turn on the light. Then she hunted for her boots. It had been months since she had touched them; a thin film of dust clouded the patent of the toes. She sat down in the clutter of raincoats and bent-spoked umbrellas and pulled the laces taut in slow motion, each cord strange and rough against her unaccustomed fingertips.
Steeling herself, she eased the front door open and, for the first time, looked out upon the new world.
The first few days were heaven. She had lived in this city all her life, but there were so many things she still hadn’t done – and that had been because there were always too many people around, fussing and clucking and staring and judging and putting her off the whole idea. Now, with so many dead and most others in a state of transformation, she practically had the whole place to herself. She waltzed into empty ice cream parlours and gorged herself on triple scoops of strawberry swirl, of peach sorbet, of mint choc chip with extra sprinkles, sucking glacé cherries off each fingertip. She shattered the windows of boutiques with Rose’s lacrosse stick and tried on expensive dresses and absurd hats that cost ten times her father’s annual salary. She broke into the library with some difficulty, finally shimmying up a drainpipe and squeezing in through an open window, and read until it got too dark to see. There was something so wonderfully naughty and illicit about her escapades. It was like being an archaeologist, unearthing secrets and gems that had been slumbering just below the surface of the city all this time. She wandered from screen to screen of the cinema and watched whatever had been left playing, idly shovelling popcorn into her mouth and lying across a whole row of seats. Usually at nightfall she went home to sleep, but sometimes she just made up a makeshift pillow of her coat and slept wherever she was. There was no danger anymore. The constant flutter of wings around her was soothing; it reminded her of autumn leaves caught in a sudden gust of wind. Some of the butterflies were obviously family groups, their colouring virtually identical, solemnly sucking at spilled drinks at shop counters or picking at mouldy cakes in the bakery’s display cases. They seemed resigned to their fate. The occasional loner, skittering through the sky in a frenzied panic, might alight precariously on Iris’ arm and ask for help, but she could sweep them off, pretend she hadn’t heard them. Husks of anonymous butterfly bodies littered the streets, clogging the gutters, cracking satisfyingly underfoot; the windows of all the shops were fogged with their dust.
She did still see the occasional human being – it was a rude shock every time, an intrusion on her absolute freedom – but they always seemed to be hurrying home, guiltily clutching haphazard parcels of stolen medicines or groceries to their chests, or avoiding her eye as they trundled down the street with wheelbarrows of goods, and paid her little heed. She was relieved not to have to interact with them. These encounters grew less and less frequent until she realised one day that she hadn’t seen another living soul for an entire week. One week turned into two turned into three, and then she knew she’d won a game she hadn’t even realised she’d been playing. Nobody asked her for money on the street or yelled at her to do her chores or hogged the bathroom or told her “No”. It made her heart swell with wicked joy she tried to suppress at first, but ultimately allowed to swell and flourish like a poisonous vine sprouting deadly blooms. How incredible it was that her heart’s secret wish had been fulfilled! How lucky, lucky, lucky she was to have her very own world!
On a fine day that had suddenly turned overcast, she got caught in a sudden deluge. A hundred thousand butterfly corpses instantly turned into mulch, their scent rising sweetish and sickly from the pavement. Iris pulled her coat tighter around her throat and ran for the nearest shop awning. Out of habit, she picked up a stone to crack the window, but when she tried the door, it was already unlocked.
She entered and glanced around inquisitively, her lank hair dripping. She squeezed it out, then did the same with her skirt, making small puddles on the tiles.
The shop smelled musty, and some of the shutters were down, but only partly, as if they had been tugged at with great haste. It had the air of a cave. A swallowtail floated in a recently-abandoned mug of coffee. Behind one changing room curtain, a single cabbage white, disintegrating in a tangle of sequinned cloth. Iris reached up to touch the hems of the bleached white tennis skirts, remembering Rose. The pretty pleats swung gently overhead. Half-dressed mannequins stood to attention; Iris derived childish pleasure from manipulating their limbs into compromising poses, until one heavy white arm sheared clean off in her hands. She left the female mannequin crudely groping the flat plastic crotch of the male, and used the arm to sift through the racks of costumes.
A gauzy lavender gown caught her eye. Iris was not usually one for finery, but this was something else. It was somewhere between a ballerina’s tutu and a ballgown, with a stiff satin bodice and a long, rustling skirt comprising featherlike layers of tulle. Before she could stop and think about it, she gave into the urge, wriggling into the dress and lacing a pair of discarded ballet shoes all the way up her calves with satin ribbon. Then she posed.
A stupid gawky girl glared out of the mirror – flat where she should have been rounded, stiff where she should have been malleable, black-eyed and black-haired and black-hearted. Resentment turned to ashes in her mouth. She wasn’t Rose. What was she trying to achieve?
Her own clothes were still soaked through; she was loath to struggle back into them, a sticky second skin. In a sudden burst of rage she hurled the mannequin’s arm at the mirror. Glass fragments exploded all over the shop, coating the chairs and the floor with dangerous glitter. Iris turned away and headed home.
The house on Wilbur Drive was as cold as a tomb. Her breath billowed before her as she tiptoed through the hall.
Shivering convulsively, she hastened to ignite the fire in the kitchen with numb fingers – but of course, there was no gas. Her dead father could no longer pay the bills.
She sat back on her heels and considered. There was nothing stopping her striking a match, setting her mother’s romance novels alight – that was really all they were good for, wasn’t it?
But no – she knew she wouldn’t. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She couldn’t bear to move the ironed school uniforms or the newspapers or the Teach Yourself French cassettes because they were just as her mother and father and sister had left them.
Suddenly the house no longer seemed to belong to her. It was a museum, a memorial to untimely loss. A great weight of sadness settled like sediment in the pit of her stomach.
It was her eighteenth birthday.
She was cold. Her ballet slippers were already filthy and wearing through at the toes. The dance costume was starting to look tawdry now, the hem unpicked, the skirt trailing lace and satin, but still she kept moving, hastening through the ruined streets with a sob in her throat and a chill in her bones. It was the end of the party. It was the end of the world. It was time for all this to be over forever.
Where was she going? She didn’t know, but she had to leave this town. She half-walked, half-ran, blinded by tears, through streets she had never seen before – overturned dustbins, bicycles without wheels, homeless encampments. The stench of wet cardboard and urine. Out of breath, she finally pressed her palms to a graffitied wall and leaned against it, hair hanging down, staring at the ground. Desperation yielded to calm, which became clarity. What was she thinking? She couldn’t just leave. She was being impulsive where she needed to be rational. Whatever awaited her beyond here, it wasn’t going to be good. She would need warmer clothes, proper shoes, candles, matches, tinned food. Supplies. She was profoundly hungry, she realised – hungry not for stolen sweets but for real food. What she wouldn’t give for a hot stew of real meat and veggies grown in the garden! Even if she were somehow able to find the ingredients now, she wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to prepare them. Violet had tried to teach her, but she had never listened, thinking herself above such household drudgery…
She was hurting now, yearning in a deep-down place she was unable to reach. Having stepped across the threshold of adolescence into adulthood, she wanted more than anything to be mothered, to be babied. She looked around, praying for a sign, waiting for direction.
In an upstairs window of a terraced house across the street, a single light was burning.
She crept through the unkempt grass of the front garden, strewn with crisp packets and empty cans of energy drink like so many strange flowers. The door had been left ajar, or – more likely – prised open at some point. In the pitch black hall, she stepped on the rim of a dog bowl, which spun and clanged as she stepped back, startled. Pressing her lips together, she followed the subtle glow along the landing…
A moon-shaped nightlight glimmered faintly in what would once have been a child’s bedroom. Covering every surface was a fine coating of butterfly dust, thicker than anywhere she’d seen it yet; the floor was invisible under layers of brittle and broken butterfly bodies. It brought tears to Iris’ eyes to picture them – fluttering in their thousands around this abandoned beacon, clinging to light and life. Gently, so gently, she picked it up – it was lighter than she’d thought – and carried it to the other bedroom.
The adults’ wardrobe was mostly empty, save a few odds and ends. Sifting through them, she found a shift of grey wool. It had a small tear in the back, but that could be mended, and it would keep her warm.
The blankets of the couple’s bed were like ice, but she pressed her hands between her knees and hunkered down and gradually, a small pocket of warmth formed around her. She turned on the radio on the nightstand and left it running all night, trying to convince herself that the missives of doom and the shipping forecast were the soothing burble of her parent’s voices.
The radioactive quality of the light woke her at dawn. Blinking the plum-coloured blurs out of her vision, she padded slowly down the stairs, her hand trailing along the dusty banister. She ate a handful of nuts from a packet and picked the mites out of a small bowl of dry cornflakes. Old orange stains of baby food blemished the formica table. Pale rectangles marked the walls where family photographs had once hung. She put the empty bowl in the sink and headed out.
The lake was placid and still as a sheet of grey-green glass. The dry reeds said hush, hush as she ascended to the boardwalk, but there was no-one left to whom she could have betrayed their secrets. Sitting at the edge, she let her legs hang into empty space, tendrils of hair softly rising and falling in the occasional breeze, watching the nothingness for a long time.
Then she spotted it.
A timid whisper of colour; a mere suggestion of life, balancing on a single bulrush stem.
She made a curved bowl of her hands and closed her fingers around the city’s final butterfly.
Instantly six hair-thin legs braced themselves against her palm: confused, waiting. Two tiny antennae drooped dolefully, soft as a sigh. Maybe the little creature was saying something to her, some profound last words, a final message to the world: she listened, but could not hear. She felt the fragile wings flutter like eyelashes, tickling her palms, then fold against each other with subjugate grace and fall still.
Iris lifted her thumbs. There it was. A compact, dead little parcel. A life story folded into a pretty envelope.
She put the envelope into the pocket of her skirt and walked towards the seared white scar of the horizon as the sunset bled crimson and flame and gold over Butterfly City.
BIO
A translator by trade, Lesley Warren lives for language. Born in Wales and now resident in Germany, her work encompasses themes of alienation, identity and “otherness”. Her poetry and prose have appeared in a variety of journals, anthologies and a podcast.
