The Boy and the Butterfly... (a love story)

 
​He isn’t big, or particularly athletic, so the trajectories of bigger boys wash over him like waves over weed, far above in turbulent eddies of froth and light. He feels the currents of their passing, but his world is a different one.

This boy listens. His ears stick out like autumn leaves, curled and nut brown. The boys call him Radar like it’s an insult, but he knows better. Radars are for listening to the things nobody else can hear. Radars are for mapping the underworld, for calling tiny secrets into the palm of your small and sweaty hand, smeared with stolen chocolate and the dirt from that beetle with jewels in its eyes, the beetle that crawled around looking for a crack to crawl into, and found only the warm pulse in your thumb, upon which it rested, throbbing in time to your own life’s drum.

He has a brother, one of the loud, shining boys, who is good at all the things. Cody somehow looks like he has been collected from captured sunlight, Cody of the big laugh and best games and sudden flashes of cruelty that pass like summer storms, leaving the boy bewildered and bruised, and now Cody brings a gift of his own to make up, no hard feelings eh. There is no solid ground with Cody around. The boy knows nothing but this; Cody has always been there, he was first, will always be first, always be bigger, brighter, smarter, stronger. The way through is to listen to the places where Cody isn’t, and burrow into them for mysteries. To cling to the bottom of the sea while the waves crash overhead, and in the gardens of coral and fish find other, sweeter music.

The boy loves the veggie garden full of green and growing things his mother sings to with her knobbly knees flecked with dirt and her back crooked in the sun, her hair a shimmering pale curtain trailing split ends into dirt until he doesn’t know where she ends and the garden begins. She comes here when his father is in the big black chair, reading, which is often. Words fall from the side of her mouth in burbling rivers, they trickle into the flowers and herbs, he hears them with his wide papery ears, and wishes he didn’t. His father doesn’t hear them, even though they are for him. He doesn’t hear anything from his chair, except the slow rasp of pages turning, and the clink of ice against glass.

There is a lemon tree, it’s been there as long as forever. Its blossoms shed perfume so sweet his eyes water and huge black butterflies flit and swoop over its glossy leaves, laying small eggs which hatch into speckled grubs that munch munch munch. Papilo Agaeus, his mother murmurs, ruffling his crown of salt-streaked hair, cooking under the Australian sun. He is in his favourite spot again, belly on a hot rock like a beetle on a boy’s thumb, feeling the pulse of the earth in his soft places. From here he can watch the tree and the bees and the butterflies, until the tracing patterns of their flight paths make some kind of sense, written in calligraphy he can almost understand, a hidden language of life in flight.

So it goes. Brother storms, mother garden, father pipe smoke and whisky in the big black chair, sometimes if he is quiet he is invited to share a lap and squirm against the rough scratch of whiskers on his cheek. He presses the place afterwards, wondering that one day his skin may sprout bristles like this, it seems impossible, like a Marvel hero changing from human to superhero. His father smells like places he will never really understand, but he wants to, if only the door was open. He waits, doglike, just in case there is a chink, but they don’t come often, or last long. His father smells like regret, and the absence of him sounds like the high looping contrails that take hours to dissolve, up in the sky where he can never reach.

A butterfly lays her eggs in the lemon tree one day, taking her time, her wings fluttering with every hunched deposit, and when she is done she simply vanishes like she was never there, but the green-yellow pearls remain, and they grow hard, and they hatch. He watches the tiny mottled fingerling grubs eat their way across the leaves like spiky aliens, and squeals when his mother pinches them between her fingers in a sticky smear.
-It’s the way it is, love. But don’t worry, I can’t get them all. Just you watch. There will be more butterflies from this batch.-

He doesn’t just watch, he listens with his fluted translucent ears that catch the sounds of hidden hieroglyphics; swallows swooping all electric in the big blue bowl of sky, small cracklings of bark expanding in the heat, the sound of his mother’s teeth grinding as she stares at the black chair and its silent occupant, the inexorable tearing turn of pages, each one a ragged blade to cut his heart to bloodless slices, the book is more interesting than he will ever be. He listens with all of his ears, fed by warm and branching capillaries, a kiss of seabreeze fanning the tiny hairs at their borders like small furry antennae. 

The lemon tree is a universe and he turns his ears toward it, scanning its constellations. He listens until he can hear the crunch of jaws working through cellulose. He listens until he can hear the deep crack of root through rock. He listens until he can hear the moon calling all the water in his body up to ring in his ears and eyes. And one day he hears the delicate thunder of huge fat grub, and he finds it, no longer mottled, but sleek and emerald green, shaped like a spaceship or a train that hovers on magnets, and he knows that something amazing is about to happen.

It stops moving one day over hours, slowing down like his father’s watch when he forgot to wind it, and now the grub’s squishy skin goes hard until it is lacquered and immutable, hanging from a stem like a piece of frozen fruit. He takes it gently, carrying it attached to its piece of stick, and shows his father. 
-Look, Pa, it’s going to hatch into a butterfly.-
His father is just home from work and has forgotten something important, it is not in his briefcase or his pockets, which he pats over and over, as if patting them will bring it back. He looks at the grub, not seeing the incandescent verdant majesty of its sweeping lines, not understanding that inside the carapace a miracle is taking place. Flesh is dissolving and reforming and at its essence it is becoming an angel.
His father’s gaze falls on the miracle and glances off again. He pats his pockets for the umpteenth, scowling.
-Take it to your room, love,- says his mother, so he does, hanging the stem and its three leaves near the light, so it will be warm.
-It’s not a chicken egg, silly- says Cody. -You don’t have to bake it.-

He is torn between bringing the pupae to school or leaving it. One one hand, if he brings it, he will be there to see it hatch. On the other, any number of tragedies could strike on the school bus, or in the carnival zoo of school chaos. He decides to leave it, and frets all day, his ears turning for home long before he gets there. His first stop is to check on it, but all that happens is the shell gets harder and darker and the sense of something sleeping grows stronger. Days crawl by like sleepy ants. After a while he thinks it is dead after all. It is so still and solid he can’t hear anything at all, not even a faint tickle of breath in the last hour before dawn. Nothing.

When he wakes and checks from habit, it takes a moment to understand what he sees. For a second his brain can’t make sense of the shape of it, but then it clicks into place and he gets it, all at once. There’s a split growing down the back of the glassy monster and a soft black creature scrabbling to escape, but the halves of the shell are tight and it can’t get out. He watches, entranced, cheering it on with breathy sighs.
-You can do it, Rosie,- he says. She turns her furry face to him as if she hears, then scrabbles some more. After an hour he grows worried. Is she stuck? He reaches out with fat fingers and pries the shell apart. The butterfly slides her abdomen out in a smooth curve and sits gently moving on the corpse of her past life, and he realises that he is seeing her breathe life into her wings.

They are crumpled bits of paper, curled twists of vine, useless and deformed, but as she breathes they start to plump and unfold, so thin he can see through them. In pops and starts they unroll, flattening out until they glow with some inner fire and he sees that they are made of dust and light and vitality. Veins track and trace along their surface, and tiles of colour interlace to create patterns of incredible beauty, in white and blue and red and black. They are impossible. Nobody could make them up and yet here they are. She flicks and flutters them, whirring. It sounds like tiny propellors.
There is something wrong though. One wing is partly bent and will not straighten.
-You did that when you tried to help,- says Cody, flashing through like some dark comet on his way to big boy mischief. -Look, you can see the place where your finger bent the cocoon. It will never fly now.-

He is right. There is a dent in the carapace right over the place where the wing was. The butterfly rolls and unrolls her proboscis, tracing it along the brittle shell of her grubself, whirring her wings. The boy is horrified, that she has come through so much, grown these beautiful wings and now she cannot fly. His heart howls and heaves in his chest like a living creature, and he wonders if it will burst from its cage like the butterfly burst from the cocoon. 

-I’m sorry, Rosie,- he whispers, but sorry is not enough, her whole purpose is to fly and he has stolen that from her, broken her in his desire to help. He feels like he might die for shame. The butterfly whirrs and whirrs, but she cannot take off. After a few more attempts she starts wandering, trying out her feet, bent at their tips like little question marks. He puts out his finger and she stops. She unrolls her long proboscis, probing his finger in tiny velvet dabs, then steps on. She is so light he can barely feel her. And then she mimics the beetle from long ago and simply rests on him, her thousand eyes seeing whatever a butterfly sees as he carries her to his mother, she will know what to do.

-Her wing won’t work,- he declares, and she puts on her glasses, the ones that perch on the end of her nose like a teacher and she tuts and regards the butterfly.
-You’ll need to feed her then. She needs nectar, from flowers. Honey water will do.-
He mixes some up, licking the spoon for good measure, then spills a drop onto his finger. She sticks her proboscis into it and then rolls it up, over and over.
-She’s drinking,- he cries, and his mother smiles, though his father rattles his book in that way he does when the house is too boisterous.
After she has drunk, she wanders up his sleeve and sits on his shoulder like she means it, like she wants to be there, and he pretends he is a pirate and she is his parrot.

Just like that he has a pet. He cuts blossoms from the lemon tree and places the leafy sprays above his bed and she rests there until he fetches her. He doesn’t take her to school, she is too fragile. When he gets home he has to hunt around to find her somewhere in his room. In the afternoons he takes her to the garden and lets her visit all the plants with flowers. She is the most beautiful thing he has ever seen.

He forgets to watch for Cody’s moods. When it comes, the attack is merciless and quick. One minute he is talking to Rosie about a possible walk to the beach, the next she is a crumpled shape on the floor, one wing in tatters, the other bent in half. Her legs still kick but her body is squashed.
-Stupid butterfly, can’t even fly. Best to put it out of its misery,- says Cody, his eyes glittering, the pupils so big and black no light can find the bottom. He shoulders the boy hard, knocking him over, then thunders off to shout at their mother.

The boy cradles the butterfly as her legs kick, her multifaceted eyes reflecting light like rainbows. He has read about resuscitation, and he blows air to her face, just in case she needs it. It ruffles her black fur. Dust from her broken wings smears his hands, his face, catching on his wet cheeks. He can hear himself with his big wide ears, hear his whu-whu-whu sounds as the sobs that come shake his chest to breaking. His hand feels so hot, he hopes he isn’t burning her, but it’s past that for the butterfly, the kicks become more sporadic and then her body convulses in one spasmodic arc, and she moves no more.

She is gone. Whoever was in there, whatever Rosie was, she is not any more. He moves her body around his hands, and more dust falls from her wings, which aren’t bright any more but ratty where the colour has rubbed away. Her eyes see nothing. He takes her out to the lemon tree and places her high in its top branches, but the wind just knocks her out and she tumbles to the ground. He can’t see through the tears and snot. He picks her up and this time places her into a crook, but the ants find her and he can’t bear to see them carry her away. He takes her back inside, and wraps her in tissue paper and puts her in an envelope, which he labels ROSIE in texta that smears and runs when his hand presses on it.

He falls asleep, rubbing dust from her wings into his eyes and nose. And then he dreams. He dreams that he has the most perfect wings, they stretch out on either side of him in glittering magnificence, and when they beat, his feet lift from the floor and he flies. There’s a voice in the dark, singing some song that fizzes in his blood, and the ache inside him is so huge he splits in two, and falls and falls, and then the dream goes somewhere else and he can’t follow himself any more.

His heart breaks many times in his life, but this is the first rending, apart from the slow cold cracks that spider along the glaze of him in the lap of his father, and the deeper pain as his mother turns from the earthy richness of the garden to rows of shiny plastic flowers from the chemist, the small bottles that promise a kind of numbness, when she tends this garden her eyes go empty, and after a while she doesn’t go outside any more. Cody flies away to drag races and binge nights, he gets a girl pregnant and leaves her after a year, but the boy loves to play with the little one, and babysits whenever he is asked, and tells her stories of butterflies and lemon trees.

Older now, his girlfriends tend to be blonde and fine, but they all have a cold veil somewhere deep, and a strand of cruelty like a streak of stinging venom, it seems he needs to walk into the wall over and over, to feel the pain of it, to know he is somehow alive. His heart grows layers of grit, like an oyster, until it no longer breathes and dances, and he can’t quite remember what it felt like to listen to the wind. Over years he stops listening, because if he listens he can hear that whirr and flutter of broken wings, and he knows that just like Rosie, there is something wrong with him, and he will never fly.

The man isn’t big, or particularly athletic, and his ears stick out like jug handles. She notices him the first time when she sees him sitting on a rock, looking at clouds while all around him lunchtime workers scoff sandwiches and talk about mundane things. The park is strewn with humans bathing in the sun like seals. He isn’t, though. He’s watching something and she strains to see what it is. And then she does. It’s an azure butterfly, dancing in erratic arcs across the council flowers.

She sees him the next week, and the next. In her mind she makes up stories about him and his funny ears. She wonders what it would be like to trace their edges with her fingertips, or even her lips. She wonders why he looks so sad, and whether she could make him laugh, just once. In all the weeks she never sees him talk to anyone, although his lips move sometimes, like he’s singing a song only he can hear.

He’s sitting on the rock again, and her heart hammers, because she knows she is going to do it. Her skirt is long and made of strips of silk in many colours. When the wind swirls it flutters around her like wings. Her hair is out, dark as coal and shiny because she washed it this morning, just in case she found the courage today. She kicks off her sandals and clambers up the rock. It’s sandstone, and rough under her heels. He doesn’t look up, but she could swear his ears twitch.
-I reckon you have the best seat in the house- she says, all breezy and casual, though her heart hammers and her knees feel strange. She sits before she falls off and makes a total fool of herself.
He turns to her then, and his face is ordinary but there is something in his eyes, some breath of wind from a far land, and she keeps talking, her words tumbling over each other like water.
-I’ve seen you up here a lot. I work in the bank, just there, you can see it. It’s nice here in the sun, isn’t it. And these flowers, the butterflies just love them, Look, there’s one there.-
He startles like a cat flicked with water, and his head jerks to watch, and yes, there is a butterfly, a small white one, looking for all the world like a piece of tissue paper pulled on an invisible string. It lands on the rock near his hand, its wings flexing. The corners of his mouth turn up and he stretches out a finger, so gently it’s like he’s moving through honey. The butterfly steps onto it, for a moment, then launches skyward again. His face turns to follow it like it’s the sun.

She loses her nerve. -You must think I’m such an idiot. I’m sorry for bothering you. I’ll leave you in peace.-

The wind gusts, sending her skirt into a frenzy of flight. She tries to trap stray panels, but they’re everywhere in a cloud of blue and white and black. Something lights in his eyes and he cocks his head, like he’s listening to her heart beat, but not in her chest, in her bones, in the spaces between her cells. Like the moon has fallen into her and he’s listening to its tides.

-What’s your name?- he asks as the gust falls and her skirt behaves itself, for now. His voice is gentle and deep, richer than she would have imagined. The sound of it causes her heart to flutter.

She holds out her hand, brushing hair out of her eyes, knowing she’s blushing but she can’t stop, he’s so peculiar.
-Really? Yes. I'm, oh, hi. I’m Rose.-

His eyes widen just a little, like an earthquake has gone off deep in the mighty earth of him. He cocks his head again. She realises he’s tilting those huge ears toward her breath, although that can’t be right. 

-Rose,- he says, tasting her name in his mouth, taking her hand with a tenderness that makes her want to cry. And then he smiles, so brilliantly it’s like he’s swallowed the sun and the shadow in his eyes retreats to some cave she can’t reach and he’s seeing her entire now, taking her in.

-Rose,- he says again, shaking his head as if to clear it of dew. She feels bewitched, like she has been sucked through the looking glass and the whole world is upside down, but it all makes sense somehow. Everything is going to be alright.

He releases her hand, but his eyes don’t leave hers, and his ears glow backlit like beacons. Above him, the white butterfly whirls. It really is a beautiful day.

-Hello, Rose.-