A Butterfly’s Wings

By Jasmine June.

            Sarah Birch killed a butterfly when she was three years old. Her mother had found a monarch on the cement walkway that led up to the house. “This one is old,” her mother said, cradling the butterfly in her hands. “Would you like to hold it, Sarah?”

            Sarah nodded, her blue eyes transfixed on the butterfly, the way its wings moved slowly up and down, as if they were lungs and the butterfly was breathing through them.

            “Be extra careful,” her mother warned as Sarah held out her cupped hands. “A butterfly’s wings are very delicate. They are so delicate that a tiny blade of grass can cut through them like a knife.”

            Sarah heard her mother and weighed her words carefully. She suddenly felt most important, as if she was a guardian entrusted to protect a special treasure. Sarah took the butterfly from her mother, making sure not to touch the wings. Sarah’s mother smiled and walked into the house.

            The butterfly sat quite still in Sarah’s hands, its wings continuing to beat in a gentle pulse. Sarah thought she ought to bring the butterfly inside. The butterfly would be safer there, away from the thousands of blades of grass that now made the yard seem menacing. She took a step forward, and then another, staring intently at the butterfly but failing to notice how the walkway was cracked and filled with holes. Suddenly, the tip of her shoe caught the edge of a hole and Sarah stumbled. Her eyes widened and she gasped as her hands opened up ever so slightly, the butterfly falling to the ground.

            Blades of glass pierced the butterfly’s wings like rays of sun cutting through the clouds. The black and orange monarch patterns now looked like shattered pieces of stained glass. The butterfly struggled to free itself from the blades, but its wings beat even slower than before. Sarah watched with an emptiness that she would later identify as shock as the butterfly eventually ceased to move its wings, lying still and dead in the grass.

            Twenty years later, Sarah stood at the side of her house, steadying a ladder and shuffling her feet in the cold. Her father, Edward Birch, stood at the top of the ladder, repairing the eaves of the house. Sarah kept shaking her head in disbelief that her father was fixing the eaves on an icy and chilly day like this. Her fingertips were numb, despite her thick gloves, and her breath crystallized into small, white clouds when she exhaled.

            Sarah was having one of those days where her mood mirrored the gloominess of the grey clouds in the sky. She had been feeling as if she’d been wading through molasses ever since she graduated last June with a general diploma from the local community college. Her parents had never taken Sarah or her younger brother, Tommy, on any trips farther than a six hour radius from their small town. She had lived in Willow Beach her whole life, and while she enjoyed the calmness of the lakes and the enchanting beauty of the surrounding forests, she was filled with a desire to experience something different.

            Visions of Mayan ruins and fiery volcanoes, of looming pyramids and hidden tombs, of Arabian nights and faraway lands were beginning to suffocate all other thoughts. She knew that one day she would have to take the plunge on her own; all her life she had been waiting for the universe to give her a push out of the door and it had yet to materialize.

            Ed and Sally Birch had always been encouraging. They were the sort of parents who waved cheerfully during little league games, who ensured that dinner was eaten as a family, who baked cookies, gave good advice, rarely became angry, and watched with tears in their eyes as their daughter left for her high school prom. As role models, they had this kind of passive encouragement to offer, but what Sarah wanted was aggressive ambition. Sarah’s mother worked as a waitress at Kate’s Diner and her father worked at the General Motors factory the next town over. Both seemed content in their jobs, but Sarah was often offering up ideas on new financial ventures. When she suggested that her mother contribute produce from their garden to their local farmer’s market, Sally had said, “Oh dear, I’m not sure I could handle being a business woman. That would take all the fun out of gardening!” When Sarah suggested to her father that he start a side business as a handy-man, he had said, “Oh, I’m sure there are already people out there who are handier than me.” Yet the Birch’s always seemed to be tight on money, which was the excuse given as to why they did not venture very far on their family vacations.

            “Okay, Sarah,” her father’s voice boomed from above, “Make sure to be careful with the ladder. It’s pretty icy down there.”

            Sarah rolled her eyes. “I know, Dad. Don’t worry. I’m being careful. I wish you’d do this another day, though!”

            Ed had a habit of doing chores on the spur of a whim, which resulted in the wood being chopped in the middle of the night, the television antenna being fixed during a rainstorm, and now the eaves being fixed in the dead of winter. Sarah’s mother was different. She followed a tidy schedule, ensuring that the house always looked spotless and that the garden was always weeded. When Sarah and Tommy had been younger, this meant that their mother had enforced strict homework and curfew rules, while their father would spontaneously alter these rules in order to take them out to a late night movie or play a game of baseball after school.

            Sarah gritted her teeth and shook her head again. Damn, it was cold. She released the ladder for a second to rub her hands together through her gloves; she needed to put some feeling back into her fingers.

            In that same instance, however, her father shifted his weight at the top of the ladder, and the reverberations caused the ladder to move ever so slightly, and then the ladder jerked out suddenly, sliding on a patch of ice that was hidden beneath the snow.

            Sarah heard her father cry out at the same time as she saw the ladder move, but everything happened so fast that she was helpless in the split second it took for everything to come crashing down, as if the clouds themselves were falling from the sky.

            In some trick of the mind, Sarah saw the butterfly falling down to the blades of grass instead of her father falling fast and suddenly through the winter air and landing with a crunchy thud on the snow and ice covered ground. Her mind had somehow spared her from the memory of watching her father break his back and fracture his skull.

            The memory of the butterfly, however, only lasted for a split second, as long as the time it took for her father to hit the ground, and then she was at his side saying, “Daddy?” with tears already streaming down her face.

            Her father’s body was stiff, but Sarah could see the muscles twitch in his face like sudden sparks of electricity. His eyes opened slowly but briefly. “Didn‘t I ask you to hold the ladder?” he said, his eyes holding hers before he closed them for the last time in his life.

            Sarah could not tear her eyes from her father’s face; she was much too aware of how the rest of his body was slowing down, gently pulsing like the butterfly’s wings, and that his body would soon cease to move at all.

            Although it had only been a butterfly, some part of Sarah had carried the guilt of its death around with her for all her life. What she had wanted was to turn back time, to have another chance to show that she could be trusted with something as precious as life itself.

            She could taste the bitter irony like blood in her mouth, warm and metallic. She wanted to spit it out, to erase the tragedy that a split second of carelessness had caused her. And yet, hadn’t she got what she had been longing for? The universe had allowed her to hold life in her hands for a second time, and after all the years of guilt, she had somehow failed to alter her nature.

            As Sarah watched her father fade from life, she saw how her second chance had slipped through her fingers like childhood dreams. Sarah took off her gloves, placed a hand on her father’s forehead, and sat with the price of her awareness.