Butterfly Wings (Short Story)

Butterfly Wings

By: Oshane Johnson

 

 

 

For Sabrina

 

 

She wears tall sleeves over her tattoos of dragons, ladies in cycles of plunge pools and words that run concurrent with infinity. Laying on her back is the image of a butterfly that had grown larger wings since she had been fifteen. She was now twenty-three.

The tattoo artist couldn’t make the body of the butterfly, stuck between its own wings, grow as she did. The wings were much easier to manipulate with his needle of dies and ink. And at twenty-three she still smiled at the sight of her butterfly.

She smiled a smile crescent in shape. It was a grin with a grimace. Her father said she had pain behind her eyes. They were wells dug deep enough to relieve the earth of dark sap. They were much like her mother’s eyes in that way. Much like her father’s in colour and placement away from each other. Her nose was also her father’s but her chin was her own. Her back was also hers to do as she did as well as being her father’s, broad, and her mother’s in shape and her grandparents and their grandparents in texture.

Her mother had died with her eyes wide shut, grey and vacant. She, her mother, was stuck at a distance sitting on a chair her daughter wheeled to the veranda at six o’clock in the evening, on one of her visits to the home. Her mother had enjoyed the sun setting against the hills at a period of her life when her eyes were still full. When they were still full of christenings in spring, baptisms and weddings before the winds fell the ruffling leaves in autumn.

She, the woman’s daughter, took a lighter from the corners of her arm as any magician or specialists in apparition would. She fished it from thin air along with a carton of cigarettes that she had grown to comically refer to as fags. It was an expression she learnt from the pages littered by her giants that were old, decrepit, and fragile English men and women deemed authors.

She, her mother’s daughter, sat under the roof built by bricks slabbed by her grandfather when he was a stone worker and puffed smoke convincing herself that her mother was fine with the wings she had spread. She imagined her mother’s dreams in the trees on the distant hills complaining of the heat, wiping the sweat from her forehead as her daughter wiped the sweat from her eyes that she had convinced herself was sweat before taking another puff of her cigarette. The sweat stung the corners of her eyes before falling the length of her face.

She, her mother’s daughter laid on a bed between four pale walls with a window behind a drawn curtain and sunlight at the corners of the curtain that were above the air conditioning unit, that rattled, with an infant on her chest that she had chosen to give his father’s name. This place she called home.

His hair was his father’s. She imagined her boy’s wedding as she did her mother’s time spent in trees from the veranda. She saw her boy walking down an aisle to a woman in white with a pale face tucked under a white vail. She heard his “I love you” from the congregation said in the way she said it when he laid on her chest causing an ache in her breast as she stared at the top of his head.

For no reason that she could think of she imagined herself with a scar along her jaw. It was one of those blade injuries she saw make those men in the cartoons and movies she watched when she was a girl. Those men that lived there lives at sea and in taverns and any other dark place of dark corners far removed from the social graces of a day’s sunlight.

It was the summer after she knew her mother could no longer dream of the trees in the distance from her veranda. Her mother’s procession was a small one. It was one of black and white gowns, the words of a pastor, car engines that murmured in coming and going and dry eyes that had already done their weeping ever since she had been diagnosed with the Alzheimer’s.

She, her mother’s daughter fell again that summer at work. Her tongue had rolled to that space in her throat, her eyes to that space in her head, her arms were pressed to her sides again and the bones behind her butterfly cricked with every ticking twitch. She awoke to strange faces asking her about her food intake and her stress level while she thought about her son then her mother’s hugs.

Two days after she had fallen she sat in the mirror, as she always did, thinking about killing herself. She thought of it hurting less than the spasms in her butterfly before thinking of her mother’s hugs gain and eyes, before they were dead. She thought of buying another gun and hiding it in one of her drawers again. She thought of this time her mother not being able to find it. There would be no hugs this time, no weeping for a corpse that was still as colourful as a bright morning covered in dew and no one would be called anyone’s “big butterfly”. She thought of her wings growing pale as she did.

A loud shrill sound broke her contemplation upon flowers with dew on them. She found herself in the mirror with more painful sweat falling from her eyes. Her son was crying. She made her way to the bedside before taking him up and laying him on her chest. She laid there staring at his head.