Bye Butterfly

“I don’t think they were actually Monarch butterflies”

For my creative writing classes at school, one of the projects we have to do for pretty much every class is write a story or two and bring it in to share. It’s a bit like show-and-tell, except instead of bringing your favorite rock to class you bring in a piece of writing and your classmates critique it for you. It’s called workshopping, and it’s incredibly helpful but also emotionally draining. This is one of those stories I workshopped.

I wrote this for class in my first semester at university, and I think it’s a pretty solid story, overall. It’s also partially autobiographical, so mom, thanks for the story.

“Bye Butterfly,” by Andy Sima (2017)

At about the age where I began to wonder where life came from, my mother bought me a butterfly kit.  It was one of those little mesh affairs you can get at just about any toy store, the kind where you order the caterpillars in the mail later.  I was ecstatic to have “a pet of my own,” even if the butterflies had to be released later that summer. It was enough for me.

And it was enough for my mother, too, as she felt that another pet in the house would have been unrealistic.  My mother and father already had a german shepherd, some off-brand of pitbull, and a scruffy, one-eyed cat. Not to mention my four-year old self and my even younger brother.  Any living thing in the house became the responsibility of my parents, caterpillars now included.

So, near the end of the preschool year, I received the caterpillar house, ostensibly as a gift for behaving well in preschool.  The reasoning did not matter to me, and I could not wait to watch the butterflies grow.

“I have a gift for you,” my mother said to me one day.

“What is it?” I asked, voice squeaky.

“Come look,” she said, and took my hand and led me into the kitchen, where a box sat on the floor.  I couldn’t read, so I puzzled over the meaning before my mother explained. “It’s a butterfly kit. You’ll get to raise caterpillars into butterflies!”

“Where are they?” I asked, unimpressed.

“They’ll be here soon, honey,” my mother said.  Her smile dropped ever so slightly.

“When?” I asked.

“A few days,” she told me.

“What will they look like?” I asked, sucking on my thumb.

“Like caterpillars,” my mother said.  I don’t recall if her tone of voice was pleasant or not.

“Oh,” I said.

I was content to sit and wait for the butterflies to come in the mail, but it was usual for me to pester my mother about when the caterpillars would arrive or how many there would be or how long it would take for them to grow or what we would name them and so forth, but there was one particular instance of this questioning that has stuck in my mind.

The first house I lived in was modest in size, but it made up for its lack in space by introducing me to verticality.  Our house had a basement and a second floor, a concept that was astonishing to little me. But my obsession over a three-story house manifested itself in an early love for throwing things down stairs.  Usually plastic balls. Sometimes one, sometimes a bucket’s worth, but always for hours on end with screams of glee. I threw these toys through the cat door situated at the threshold to our basement, and would listen to them clunk down each step.

There was, however, one small issue with this set-up; I was terrified of my basement.

My mother’s solution to this was to assist me in my gravitational endeavors by helping me retrieve the balls, when she was in the basement.  Which was often, as our laundry machines were situated just off the basement landing. Being a house of four people, laundry was a constant necessity.  So whenever I would grab upon the urge to toss something from a high place, my mother was around to feed my youthful addiction. One day, however, this was not the case.

On a day between the placement of the caterpillar order and receiving the caterpillars themselves, I sat at the top of the stairs, waiting for my playthings to be returned, as they always were.  And I waited, and I waited.

My mother, after a minute or so, called to me from the basement, saying those dreaded words, “Honey, you’ll have to come down and get them yourself.  I’m a bit busy right now,”

I gulped and braced myself to trek into the depths of my home.  Opening up the door into the basement, I took teetering, careful steps into the abyss, feeling my way the best I could.  At the bottom, I could hear the washing machine spinning violently and my mother humming something.

“Mommy,” I said, about halfway down.  “I’m scared.”

“It’s okay, sweetie,” she said from off in the distance.  “Nothing down here can hurt you.”

Nothing down here can hurt you.  Nothing down here can hurt you. Nothing down here can hurt you.  Maybe not physically.

“I’m scared,” I repeated again, lower lip quivering like a leaf in a storm.

“Honey, you just have to come down here,” she said over the sound of the washing machine.  “What are you scared of?”

I had to stop myself for a moment and think.  What was I scared of? I could not be sure. The unknown?  Monsters? Darkness? But what threat did any of these concepts pose to me?  I had no idea. My developing mind could not wrap itself around why I was scared.  Instead, it simply focused on that I was scared.

“Are you coming, honey?” my mother said again.

“Yes,” I said, as confident as I could sound, and made my way down the rest of the stairs.  At the bottom, where the floor leveled out and became the concrete footing of an old foundation, I found the plastic ball and retrieved it.

“See,” my mother said, towering above me while she continued to grapple with laundry.  “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

I looked around the basement in silence.  I tried to avoid this part of the house as much as possible, and I had never really become familiar with its layout.  But the more I looked around on this particular day, the more I felt that there was something that I was not quite perceiving.  Words echoed in my head. Nothing down here can hurt you.

I then remembered, momentarily, the secondary reasoning for my descent into the basement, besides the plastic ball, and asked my mother, “When will the caterpillars get here?”

“Soon, sweetie,” she said, the rhythmic sound of the washing machine in my ears.  “Very soon.”

“When, though?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.  “You’ll have to be patient and see.”

This answer did not satisfy me, but it was no use pursuing it any further.  So I looked around the basement, trying to assuage my own fears of the place.  I ended up hitting upon a space that stuck out from the others in the underground room.

“What’s over there?” I asked my mom, pointing a fat finger at the far corner opposite the basement steps.  The area was covered in shadow, as the sunlight from the windows above my mother’s laundry station did not reach that far.  I could not see anything within the corner space.

My mom looked up from her work to where I pointed.  She squinted at it momentarily, and then laughed. “Oh, just some storage space,” she said.  “Boxes and tables. Do you want to go see it?”

I shook my head vehemently, and ran up the stairs out of the basement.  My mother chuckled behind me, amused at my childish fears.

I did not continue to throw the ball from the top of the stairs once I reached the ground floor.

—

The day the caterpillars finally arrived should stand as rather important in my memory, but many specific details are vague.  I do know, however, that it was a day of excitement in our little household.

My brother and I were vying to get a glimpse of the little creatures, as they wriggled around inside their cardboard box.  My mother has just come in from the mail, where the box had arrived.

“Let me see!” I said.

“No, let me see,” my baby brother whined, voice even higher than my own.

“There’s nothing to see, you guys,” my mother chuckled.  “It’s a box.”

She scraped our tiny bodies off of herself in order to make her way up into the second floor of our house, where my room was.  That was where we had designated the space for the butterflies. The three of us climbed the stairs and found ourselves before the pop-up caterpillar habitat that we had set up previously.

My mother unzipped the fabric of the hutch, placed the box at the bottom of the mesh cage, and opened up the side of it to let the caterpillars out.  She then placed a few branches and some leaves along with the now-settled caterpillar box. She then zipped the container back up, and my brother and I crowded around and waited for the caterpillars to appear.

The green worms slowly inched their way out of the little cage and began to explore their surroundings, feeding on the leaves presented to them after a hectic, shaky trip inside of a space no larger than a matchbox.

My brother and I watched the insects explore their new home in this transitory stage of their existence, but soon grew bored.  We did not want these slow, wingless things; we had expected butterflies. We were young, after all, and had no perception of time or patience.

“When will they become butterflies?” I asked.

“Soon,” my mother told me.  “Don’t forget, though, that they have to go through metamorphosis first.”

“What’s meta-mo-fo-sist?” my brother asked, trying to sound out the word.

“Metamorphosis,” my mother explained, “is part of a butterfly’s life where they go from being caterpillars to butterflies.  They have to be in a cocoon, first.” The actual word is chrysalis. Had my mother explained this, it would have gone over our heads.

“How long does that take?” I asked.

“A few days.  You have to be patient,” my mother said.

“Okay,” my brother said and toddled away, probably to go play with something on the ground floor.  I stood there for another moment, looking from my parent to the caterpillars.

“Do we go into a cocoon?” I asked.

My mother smiled.  “No, we don’t. People don’t have to change forms.”

—

The caterpillars grew slowly, munching on the leaves we supplied to them.  My brother and mother and father and I waited for the moment when they would begin their transformation.  In this time, my parents busied themselves with the hours of work necessitated by jobs, children, a cat, and two canines, and had few opportunities to check on the butterflies themselves.  So it was I that first saw the chrysalis.

Eventually, the monarch caterpillars became fat enough from their leaf-eating to begin their transformation, and they crawled up the side of the mesh habitat to the roof, where they could hang downwards in peace.  I came into my room one day and saw the little bugs hanging there, and thought back to what my mother said about cocoons.

“They’re butterflies!” I screeched, and ran back down the stairs.  I tugged on my mother’s sweatshirt. “They’re butterflies.”

“Not yet,” she said, only glancing down at me momentarily.  “A few more days.”

“Why do we have to wait so long?” I asked, stamping my foot.

“Because I said so,” my mother said, and that was the end of that.

I ran back up to my room and watched the caterpillars change.  The vivid crystal green of the chrysalises sparkles in my memory, shining like stars at night or dew in the morning.  And once the caterpillars were wrapped up, they hung for days. These otherworldly things incubating at the foot of my bed were strange to me, and though they were not butterflies, captured my attention nonetheless.

After a good deal of time, though I cannot say how much, the butterflies began to emerge as actual winged creatures.  It was an evening when my mother was putting me to bed, and as we came into my room, we found that the chrysalises as opened and were strewn about the bottom of the cage.  One by one the butterflies had broken free of their transient prisons and assumed their final form, grand orange and black insects sitting upon twigs and slices of fruit.

As we watched, they fluttered about and dried their wings as they reappeared in the world.  This was what we had been waiting for. This was what we had grown them for. By watching the little things, I felt the information of existence rushing into my still unformed brain.  I knew I was beginning to understand the meaning of life.

“Look, mommy!” I said.  I stabbed a finger in the direction of the butterflies.  “We grew them!”

“They are beautiful, aren’t they?” my mother said.

My father came into my room, then, carrying my brother with him.  “Look, daddy!” I yelled. “Butterflies!”

“Wow!” he said, and set my little brother down so he could see the insects, too.  “Look at that.”

“Lemme see,” my brother said, and sidled up next to me.  We stood, enraptured, before the butterflies, and they fanned their wings.

“We have to let them go soon,” my father said.  My mother probably gave him a look, because he soon added, “but not right now.”

“Why?” my brother asked.

“They have to fly south to be with the other butterflies,” my mother said.

“To help ward off extinction,” my father said.

“What’s extinction?” I asked, and turned around to face my parents.  A half-smiled passed between them.

“We’ll tell you in the morning,” my mother said.  “It’s time to go to bed.”

Thus a few days later it came that we had to free the butterflies.  I insisted upon releasing them through the window in my bedroom, since that was where they had grown up.  Something about it seemed fitting. My mother understood and obliged. So one afternoon that summer, my mother, brother, and I assembled around the mesh container and prepared to open the gateway and let the butterflies out.

Mistakes, however, were made.  My mother opened the zipper door too early, and some of the butterflies fluttered out onto the ground.  There were about seven of them, and I think over the course of that afternoon, five of them landed on the floor of my room.  But this was no big deal, of course.

“Oops,” my mother said, fumbling for the latch to make sure no other butterflies escaped.  Once she had set the container back on my dresser, she leaned down and put one finger to the feet of a butterfly.  It compliantly attached itself to her finger when prompted, making it easy to bring back to the window. Careful not to crush the fragile things, my mother instructed my brother and I to begin collecting them.

Our dog, however, was not so careful.

In that moment, our German shepherd thought it would be a good idea to pay my mother a visit.  So the old man of four legs lumbered up the stairs into my bedroom. He nuzzled open the door and stepped through, sniffing as he went and looking for his family.  As he walked around, he moved across the room. And, inadvertently, stepped on the butterflies.

My brother and I were horrified.  I screamed and cried and ran out of the room, into the hall, and my brother simply broke down in tears and fell to the floor.

“They’re dead!  They’re dead!” I screamed from the hallway on the other side of the door.  Tears streamed down my face, eyes red and nose slick with snot. My brother was in a similar state, but with his head glued to the floor.

 My dog, unknowing of his actions, followed me out into the hallway and revealed the smashed, disheveled wings of butterflies underneath his paws.  This only made me scream louder, and I threw my arms about even more.

 Back in the bedroom, my mother was shooing the dog away and trying to save the rest of the butterflies.  However, my flailing and my brother’s screaming spooked the butterflies we had been attempting to rescue.  These butterflies, in their fright, attached themselves to my dog or underneath his feet. Either way, they ended up in the same state; dead.

My mother was having a terrible time of trying to control the situation.  “Shh, baby, it’s alright,” she said, cooing and kneeling down next to my brother.  “Baby, please stand up. It’s okay. There’s still some butterflies.” And it was true; there were still two in the enclosure on the dresser, but this made no different to my brother and I.

My mother, seeing that my brother wouldn’t stop crying any time soon, heaved a sigh and lead our dog, still wearing his butterfly carcasses, away.  Once she returned, she shepherded me back into my bedroom and shut the door tightly, so that the dog could not come back in.

“Please, honey, stop crying,” she said, sitting on my bed next to me and wiping my eyes with her shirt.  “It’s okay.” She surreptitiously cleaned up what was left of the butterflies on the ground, hiding them beneath a tissue.  And still the tears flowed.

Eventually, however my brother and I cried ourselves out after enough time.  And, with the deceased butterflies now out of sight, they became out of mind, and their living relatives were carefully quarantined in their cage.

My brother and I sniffled and snorted out the rest of our tears, my mother very carefully brought the now-emptied butterfly cage to the window of the bedroom.  With a slow, calculated move of her wrist, she unzipped the fabric and gently urged the two monarchs left to flee while they still could. And my brother and I watched them go, flying and gliding through the air until they were out of sight.  

The view was quite stunning.  Orange and black wings, shining in the sun, reflecting the light as they traveled south.  They had no idea of the torment they had just avoided. Nor, really, did my mother. It was an event that would pass out of mind for all of us, and in the grand scheme of things, there are far worse incidents that could have befallen my household.

—

A few weeks passed and the death of the butterflies locked itself into the recesses of my mind, in a place where I could not quite recall it at that age, to avoid emotional trauma.  And although it was a singular incident half-remembered, there was something underlying my memories now, something intangible that I could not quite articulate, but it did tell me something about life.

It was after those few weeks, when my attention had turned from the butterflies to some other childhood folly, when I returned to the basement.  I had, once again, stationed myself at the top of the stairs and had begun throwing plastic balls down the steps, squealing at the sound they made.  My mother brought them up for me.

“This is the last time,” she said, smiling and wagging a finger at me.  “I need to work.”

I grinned a gap-toothed grin and waited until she was back in the basement to throw the balls back downward.  They clunked cacophonously, hitting each step on their descent.

“I told you, I’m not bringing them back up for you,” my mother shouted.  I laughed, and opened the door to the basement. My laughter fled quickly, as I peered into the inky blackness, but I had done this before.  I descended the steps and crossed the line that divided the floors of my house.

Once I reached the bottom of the stairs, I once again surveyed the surrounding space.  It was still mostly dark, lit only by the sunlight filtering in through the grimy windows.  The far corner was still consumed in shadow.

I retrieved my playthings and wandered over to the dark space in the back of the basement, which my imagination populated with monsters of all shapes and sizes.  My mother took a quick break from her laundry to go over to where I was standing.

“Remember, baby, nothing down here can hurt you,” she said.  “Do you want to see what’s back there now?”

Sucking my fingers, dreading what the lightbulb overhead would show me, I relented and nodded to my mother.  She smiled at me, her brave little boy, and she was swallowed by darkness as she walked into the corner. But only temporarily, as there was the sound of a string being pulled and the light bulb flickered on.

The basement was flooded in electric illumination, revealing all the secrets of that underground space to me.  My mother stood there, underneath the light, and looked at me. “See,” she said. “Nothing very interesting back here.  Nothing scary.”

It was true that there was nothing interesting, nothing scary.  Just more concrete, a grated drain, and an old work bench. I tottered over, and peered at the top of the workbench.  It held nothing but one small object. There, sitting on the old, stained planks, was a simple wooden carving. A little painted butterfly, with orange and black wings.  I screamed and ran upstairs, fleeing my bewildered mother.

I couldn’t say where the carving had come from, or who had made it.  Perhaps it didn’t exist at all, and it is simply my memory now filling in some gaps.  I never did see it again, nor did I want to. Nothing down here can hurt you. But perhaps it can make you understand, and undergo your own mental metamorphosis.  Just maybe, a little wooden carving can remind you of the real thing, and remind you, if only for a moment, that life is short, and death is quick, and that sometimes the line is divided only by the whim of one second.

Nothing down here can hurt you, indeed.