I get Butterflies...

When I was eight or nine, we used to stay with the grandparents in Wexford, down by the beach. We’d walk out to the dunes in summer and grow so thoroughly tired (could loathsome work here?) of the beach that we had no interest at all in going back after the first week, sick of sun and sand we'd sit around and mope.

From time to time, our father would be busy enough with school or work that we’d spend a week around Easter there too. The place was dead in Spring, the shops all seasonal and shuttered up, everywhere so different without the sunshine. We’d amuse ourselves as best we could during those pre-summer weeks when the weather was poor enough that we couldn’t visit the beach for fear of windborne sand.

We’d go anyway though and shield our eyes against the gritty gusts. Only to stumble through the dunes, cracking the wet-brown surface shell of sand to reveal the whiteness beneath. One afternoon, the sun breaking through for a warm few hours, we’d find a chrysalis hanging from the scrubby thorn-bushes that lined the shallow hollows of the dunes. We had found it just as it had begun to unravel; the first time I’d seen a cocoon and I’d be there to see it opened. How fine a process of life (thing is an ugly word, replace D:<) it was.

From that husk emerged first a tiny speckled head and with great effort, the legs, the abdomen and crumpled wings followed, slowly unfolding to drink in the sun, to dry and prepare for flight. As we watched though, the butterfly extended further, sliding gradually from the limp shell to reveal a stretched, conjoined abdomen: a second set of wings, unfolding in turn. The second set of legs clutched at the stem as the wings unfolded, two butterflies laid end-to-end, hanging as they dried.

We were curious of this being, beautiful as it was, in the way that only a child’s perception of a butterfly could be: splashes of red deepening in the warmth of the sun. For reasons I cannot at all remember, we had with us a jam-jar (all one word, in the way of the granny), and knowing this was too fine a thing to let escape. We filled the glass with plants and grasses, perhaps a little sand, and snagged it straight from the branch, using the lid to clip it free.

Once inside, the two flapped about in a confusion of compound eyes and glass, the black and red-orange of their wings a blur among the twigs and flora we’d scraped together. We grew afraid then, afraid that we had hurt them and that they might hurt themselves. We’d been convinced that their condition would prove fatal eventually, whether they simply couldn’t fly correctly, could never properly feed or would tear one another apart… it had seemed very unlikely they’d live.

So we did what any children would do. We walked down to the shore, the tide already going out, and flung the jar into the sea. Sadly, having only the throwing arms of kids, the jar failed to clear the sandbank about fifteen feet out, and we waded across to it, the jar heavy enough to have sunk to the bottom of the six-inch deep sea across the sandbar.

Under that thin pane of seawater was our glass, shining in the sun, the soft-green grass and bright red-on-black of frenetic floundering in that delicate bubble. One end was already an inch or two submerged in sand. We hadn’t the heart to cast the thing further into the sea, so we left it alone.

Maybe the tide drew them out along the bottom, our sweet Siamese submariners.

On May 30 2011 10:25 Sleight wrote:
I actually want to disagree with Torte de Lini about saying "our father" instead of "the father" and such. I think there is solid evidence in literature to not use possessive pronouns. I like the feel. Kids don't think about the difference of their parents and others, so the current speech feels authentic.