The Green Butterfly, Chapter Three

Silently but for a rustle of reeds swooped a shape which occupied most of the dell, not descending but rising from where the roots were, so that in an instant what head it had was upreared against the luminous looming clouds of blue-black. Most of this monstrosity however was wing, and these aurora-sheets were spectral and lurid in the gloom, ephemeral fans sweeping sickly chartreuse as though they were a nearer and more menacing sky. The tableau was like something straight out of an entomologist’s nightmare – a butterfly-predator bearing down on a little beige-coated aphid, while a brave boy-bee in black and yellow put himself before her.

“Stay back, 4-H-N,” said he, just before the creature’s first lunge threw them apart.

4-H-N scampered, on all fours at first, panicking prey with a stripy abdomen. Oh, the horrid thing didn’t even fly as such – it flopped through the undergrowth, possessed by her, heaving lusty suspiration out of its titanic trachea. In truth 4-H-N never switched from hands and knees. The contours of the land, which a full-sized human being might have trodden on and barely registered, were to the fitful fleeing girl a steep bank down whose incline she tumbled with tunic-skirts screwed waistwise and lacy knicker-legs showing a second time.

Over her prone form bulked the ravine, and over that the giant greenish ghoul-wing, plus a million eyes clustered across two bulgy rounds all tipped to the ditch to pin her.

But where was Flashbee?

She saw him, etched against the supercharged firmament.

He had scaled a great overhanging flower hand-over-hand as if its stalk were a rope, and now from beneath the belling bulb he leapt. 4-H-N charted the course of his bold-hued figure and was fearful in a new way, one which had nothing to do with herself. For in the flicker of vision before Flashbee dropped past the butterfly’s shoulders and was lost to sight, 4-H-N had spied where his hands were anxiously fumbling. She knew what was next. He’d told her.

A noise unimaginable issued from between the lepidopteran’s mouth-mandibles. These like open lips flew howling to the heavens. 4-H-N was no stranger to adversity, a novice only in Flash Club rank, but death-throes such as these were a first. She trembled beneath primal insect passions blacker than the thunderheads behind as they thrashed and raged out their last.

At length the phosphorescent flanges left off their curling foo-fire, and sank as grey as all else under the storm’s penumbra. The butterfly’s body slumped lifeless on the ridge. Outstretched upon its back was Flashbee, head down amid a terrible mess, unmoving.

It was then, and only then, that 4-H-N thought of bees on Planet Earth.

Specifically, what happened to them when they used their stingers.

“No,” she whispered.

Hiking her skirts she blundered up the bank, bombed by the beginning orbs of rain.

“No, Flashbee, no,” 4-H-N pleaded again. “Not like this.”

There was no breath between mounting the hummock and clawing her way onto the carcass. How could she have she been so stupid as to not think of it before? And how could he have been so stupid as to try and keep it a secret? Where did stupid, stupid boys ever pick up these notions? Why had he thought she’d find this any way preferable to having him safe and whole by her side?

He was starting to stir.

4-H-N’s tears of thankfulness would not be held in check. Those had been a long few seconds in the world where it was her fault for showing off her knickers.

Flashbee looked up at her, bleary and weak.

“You smell different,” were his words.

The downpour was setting in now as if it meant business. 4-H-N helped Flashbee to stand and led him stumbling down the hill of hide to a place she’d spotted, where the grass bents were arched and densely entwined to form a round roof. Both Mini-Flashes were sodden by the time they arrived, but it was dry in the hollow, and there they were snug. Flashbee murmured softly, and 4-H-N held him.

Depending on your relative size, a shower on this planet could be made of cannonballs which hammered and blammed overhead. It was no bad thing though as far as 4-H-N was concerned. Even hunters like their flappy friend wouldn’t want to go out in this.

Flashbee was trying to speak again. His voice was feeble, but insistent. 4-H-N leaned in.

“Are you?” was what she heard. “Are you hiding them? The Special Program?”

His pallid feverish face implored her.

He’d earned it. That had been a win in anybody’s book. 4-H-N didn’t even know how many points you scored for a butterfly that big. Always provided, of course, the rules of their game applied this far from the nearest flight-simulator.

And even if they didn’t.

She drew him close, and whispered:

“Yes.”

Dazzling sunlight was flecking the den even through the thick lattice of its ceiling when Flashbee woke, as from the most wonderful sleep of his life.

Never had he felt so rested. It was bliss in every one of his limbs.

He was alone, but his feelers told him the indentation to his left had been vacated only recently. Flashbee exited the shelter likewise, emerging upon a bracing bright world washed clean of the last dregs of clagginess, where every giant blade of grass stretched to greet the morning and the living earth sang.

It was time they were making a move, so Flashbee set off to find 4-H-N. His trusty antennae led him to the tall rushes at the clearing’s border. These he parted, and saw.

The rain had left a puddle and there she was bathing, pale pink all over, shiny and slick. In place of the ponytail, long hair darker than its usual brown clung to the supple curvature of neck and back as if lacquered, and each dip below the surface renewed its luscious smooth sheen. Then 4-H-N would shake her head from side to side, smiling contentedly with eyes tight shut, as droplets bounced glittering from her nose. Flashbee, concealed in the reeds, watched.

It was different to how it would have been yesterday.

Which wasn’t to say he was looking on anything less than the loveliest thing he’d seen. Change, was all it was. Flashbee knew now the universe held possibilities it hadn’t before, ways of feeling he’d acknowledged theoretically without guessing their magnitude, but which had at last disclosed themselves and invited him in. The younger Flashbee with his flight-simulator flusters, gasping at the little glimpses 4-H-N afforded him by the co-pilot’s chair, seemed strangely distant. That same girl had asked him what he was going to become. Flashbee still didn’t know for sure, but this morning he was one step closer to it than he’d been.

He withdrew, and waited for 4-H-N outside the hollow until she returned dried and dressed.

“Some nature-ramble, huh?” was her verdict.

“I don’t think I’d have changed a thing,” Flashbee told her truthfully.

“Even using your stinger?” she asked. “Looked like that took it out of you a bit.”

And she really had smelled different in the immediate aftermath. Today though, the familiar stuffiness was back like never before. It made Flashbee feel equal to a dozen large butterflies.

4-H-N fidgeted, picked at her tunic-bodice, then did the same for her bum-bloomers.

“So,” she began.

Flashbee was already trying not to grin.

“Big night,” 4-H-N declared again. “And like I said, I’ve never had a stinger. I only saw the state it left you in, but I was wondering, um…”

“Oh, you can’t imagine,” he told her kindly. “I couldn’t either, until it happened to me, but wow. Talk about a mind-wipe. Alarming, really, because you know my problem-solving, my data-analysis. Never thought there was a part of me that could cut right through that. But on the other hand, it’d be hard to forget that cousin of mine we ran into. We bugs have a whole other side, I guess. It’s not just intellect and total recall. There are states of our being that swallow those up.”

“Oh,” said 4-H-N, all in a big gladsome rush. “Then, you don’t remember…?”

“It’s just like a dream,” Flashbee assured her, with a tiny smile, and together they set off for where the rescue-ships were landing.

THE END