The Black Butterfly, a Short Story

I was about halfway along the path when a familiar voice called out: “Where’re you going?”

It was Laurel, the girl who lived two houses up from me. The path led under big, old pin oak trees and past a stand of younger pines that separated our neighborhood from the open fields of a National Park, and right past Laurel’s backyard. Whenever she saw me headed up the path alone, she wanted to tag along.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged, “Just hiking. Guess I’ll go up to the field.”

“Can I go?”

“If you want. I’m just hiking.”

She saw I had my bug net and an empty mayonnaise jar. “You’re going to catch bugs?”

“Maybe. If I find anything I don’t already have.”

“Oh. Are you taking your kite?”

“I wasn’t going to. Why?”

But I knew why she asked; sometimes I took my jar and net with me because I did want to find new bugs for my collection or at least better specimens of what I already had. Then other days I would get to the field, look up at the blue sky and the towering summer clouds that mushroomed like they were growing inside out, like the mushroom clouds of nuclear explosions I had seen in film clips in school, and I would go back home to get my kite. Every day was not a good day for kite flying so the bugs could wait; they would still be there tomorrow.

"I'll get my kite if you want," I said. I did not mind if Laurel tagged along with me, even though I was a fourth grader, and she was just in third. She did not play outside her yard much at all. When the other kids and I rode our bikes around the neighborhood, she would ride hers up and down the short sidewalk in her front yard; we’d all play in the woods while she’d stay in her backyard, usually alone. Her little brother rode his bike and played wherever he wanted, and he was a year younger! I did not know why Laurel just wanted to stay in her yard all the time.

Once I had asked my mom if she knew why Laurel did not like to play with the rest of us.

“I don’t know that she doesn’t want to,” she had replied as she dried her hands on a dishtowel and turned to face me. “Maybe her mother won’t let her, I don’t know." She sat down at the table with me. "But that’s her business Roland and I’m sure she has her reasons. And if you’re her friend you’ll respect her privacy.” Her tone of voice made it clear that was the end of the conversation; talking about other people’s personal business was not something we did.

Laurel’s little brother told me later that their mother did not like Laurel running all over the neighborhood, but thought it was “sweet” that I let her follow me around without complaining, so she let Laurel go up to the field with me whenever she wanted.

"I'll wait here," Laurel said. "But I don't have a kite. Can I fly yours?"

“Yeah, I guess so. I’ll be right back.”

While I went to my house Laurel told her mother she was going up to the field with me. When I got back, she was holding her butterfly net and an empty jar.

“I thought you wanted to fly my kite. Why’d you bring those?”

“Just in case,” she said. “I might see something to catch and take home to show mama.”

Laurel loved to catch butterflies. She would trap them with the special butterfly net her mother had gotten her, the kind that is not supposed to hurt a butterfly’s wings, then put them in a jar and take them home to show to her mother. And then she would let them go.

“If you say so. But if we’re going, let’s go.”

The path to the field led around the stand of pines, but for bug collecting we usually cut straight through. We had been trying to make a new, shorter path by breaking branches and stomping underbrush every time we went that way, but it never worked. There would be a limb down and we’d circle around, hit a briar patch and have to double-back to find an opening, have a clear path for a dozen yards or so, then cut another way… And sometimes, we just saw something interesting and never made it to the field at all.

But we took the long way, the path around most of the pine trees because I did not want to carry my thin paper kite through the woods. I was afraid I would rip a hole in it, and dad only let me get one a year so I could not damage the one I had. Directly behind the neighborhood was a wide open, leaf covered area under a high canopy of huge old oak trees. But the path around the end of the pine stand was one that the other guys and I made by stomping down weeds and grass through a narrow clearing at the uphill end of the stand of pines, but we had never finished it. We had gotten as far as a patch of overgrown wild black berries, then gave up. The last part of it was through the pine trees.

Unlike the oak trees directly behind the houses along my street, the pines were not old, and the branches grew low and dense, weighted with thick clusters of needles. Not a good place to carry a kite but better than the short way to the field which was through the center of the pine stand.

The branches broke easily, and we could stomp through most of the underbrush. Although I had been through that part of the woods many times it seemed a new path had to be found every time; young branches grew, others fell, and briars sprang up almost overnight in every sunlit area…

Nothing up there ever stayed the same.

We came to a briar tangle that had not been there before and doubled-back, found a way around and then crawled under a low-hanging branch. The ground under that tree was mostly a bed of damp pine needles so I tossed my kite and string reel under the branch to the other side.

Laurel handed me her net. She carried her jar and put her other hand on her head to keep her hair from tangling. I had to crouch low, leaning on my jar for support with one hand while I dragged the nets behind. Laurel was smaller than me but kept one hand on her head. She put her jar on the ground, leaned on it with her other hand and moved a short distance, then again, and then once more.

I got to a place where I could stand and waited for her. “Why don’t you just use your other hand?”

“Because” and she threw the mayonnaise jar at my feet, grabbed hold of a branch, and got to her feet, “I don’t want to mess up my hair.”

“What’s to mess up?" I asked. "It always looks the same to me.” Until then I had never really thought about it, but Laurel’s hair always was the same, as far as I could tell. I could not remember ever seeing her hair not brushed or bangs not even; it did not even move when the wind blew. I figured she must use hairspray, like mom did.

“Well,” she said as she patted her hair into place, “Mama says it makes me look like a young Marlene Dietrich.” I had no idea who she was talking about and was not going to ask.

We cleared the pine stand and reached the first part of the field. The grasses grew high and shrubby there, weaved with tangles of vines that made it harder to walk, but at least it was easier to carry the kite there than through the woods. In a few minutes we got to the part of the field that was just tall grass; the Park Service cut that section a few times every year.

There is always wind in places that do not have trees to block it, and that field was immense. From the top of the incline, we could see a quarter of a mile or more and with no trees or power lines it was the only place near the neighborhood safe for kites. We stood there a few moments and watched the wind sweep through the tall grasses and make the field change color, the way that velvet does when you run your hand over it.

“I don’t know how to fly a kite,” Laurel said. “I’ve never done it before.”

“It’s easy. I’ll show you what to do. And once you get it high enough in the sky it will fly itself.”

I put the roll of string on a stick and showed her how to hold it.

“Just keep the line tight. Only let out enough for the kite to rise, but not too much or it will lose its catch on the air and fall.”

I held the kite high by its tail end so it could catch the steady breeze while Laurel held the string and walked with her back to the wind. She kept the line tight as the air caught the kite and lifted it from my hand.

“Alright, Laurel, just let it out easy. Don’t rush it. Let the wind pull it up.”

The breeze was picking up and as the kite rose it swooped to one side and then the other. About thirty feet up a strong gust snapped Laurel’s arms up and jerked her whole body forward as though it wanted to pull her into the sky. She lost hold of the string roll and it scampered through the grass like a scared rabbit. The kite wavered a moment, began to drop tail first and then sort of spiraled to the ground.

"I'm sorry," Laurel said. "I didn't mean to let it go."

"That's alright. I said I'd teach you how to fly it."

I walked down to where the kite had crashed and picked it up. Neither of the wood ribs was broken and the paper was not torn. It was okay.

“Besides, you almost had it that time. Hold the string roll and we’ll try again.”

The wind was still picking up and the paper stretched taut against the frame of two crossed sticks as I held the kite up towards the sky. It practically jumped from my hand and lifted into the air again, the central rib taut at the end of the line. It swayed and dipped a few times, and then Laurel got the hang of slowly letting out just enough line to keep the kite rising without forcing it into a stall. Once she had it stabilized, the kite rose smoothly into the sky.

When the three hundred feet red mark showed on the string, I kicked the stick into the ground at a sharp angle to hold the roll and wedged the string into a crack on the end of the stick. “There. That will hold it.”

We sat down then and lay back on the cool grass, sun warm on our faces. It was that magical mid-afternoon quiet, and we could hear the cars over the rise behind us pass in little wisps of sound. Laurel watched the kite with a delighted smile as though she had never seen anything like it.

“It will stay up by itself?”

“For a while. Until the wind changes or dies down. It’s like I told you, Laurel, if you get it high enough in the sky it will fly itself.”

I watched the kite dance against the sky, flying so easy, so free and wished again I could be up there. I wanted to fly into the clouds.

I had even had a dream one time that I could fly. I saw my house, the oak trees that towered over it and I wanted to soar as high as the clouds, look down on the tops of those trees. But when I flew in my dream, I struggled to get just ten feet or so above the roof of Dad’s old Buick; it was like swimming in molasses.

I watched the kite as it hovered in the air and knew it really was not as high as the clouds; it only looked that way from the ground. Just an illusion of freedom, not the real thing. I decided that day that in flying, the trick was not in how to stay in the sky; the trick, rather, was getting into the air at all.

§

As big cumulus clouds began to move in the wind picked up and the kite began to swing, and dive side to side.

“It’s getting too windy now, Laurel,” I said, and she looked disappointed. “But we’ll try it again another day.” I grabbed the string roll before it could pull the stick from the ground and reeled the kite in.

“You want to catch bugs now?” she asked.

“Yeah, if you want to. Let’s see what we can find.”

We went closer to the pine stand, near where honeysuckle tangled around the wildflowers. The grasses there grew in clumps and clustered, draped onto the ground like a mat. Little flowers called Johnny Jump-Ups-streaked purple on the shaded side of every big clump of grass, red clover bobbed under the weight of honeybees and grasshoppers popped into the air with every step.

“I don’t know why you even bother to catch butterflies if you’re just going to let them go again.”

“They die if you keep them,” she said, something sad in her voice.

“Well, I collect insects and I keep what I catch. When they dry, I put pins through them and stick them on a board.”

“I know,” she replied and squinched up her nose. “That’s gross.”

“I don’t think so,” I said and shrugged. “But you do it however you want.”

“Butterflies need water,” Laurel said, already focused on what she might catch, and she walked down the slope. A creek trickled at the bottom of a long, gradual decline and low areas near it stayed damp in all but the driest months and butterflies flocked to those places. Laurel walked ahead of me, holding her net above her head and then came to an abrupt halt. The ground ahead was littered with white that moved slightly in the breeze like little torn pieces of paper scattered on the grass.

We called them Cabbage moths, but they were small white butterflies and that was why they were out in the full sun. Moths fly mostly at night, and night flying insects never have bright white wings. One of the butterflies flitted into the air, followed by another. They spiraled around one another, separated, and descended, then spiraled up again, like a dance in the sky. Laurel held the net high and waved it back and forth slightly, looking for the best angle of attack. When the two butterflies began their third spiral up the net swooped through the air in a clean arc, took them from above, quickly, and then gently lowered them to the ground.

“You got two with one try, Laurel!”

“Yeah, sometimes you can do that with the white ones; they always fly together.”

I removed the top from her jar, slipped it under the net and set it down over one of the two. When butterflies are too crowded to spread their wings, they will climb a stalk of grass or a tree branch, anything that leads out of the tangle. As soon as the first one crawled halfway up the glass I lifted the jar and set it over the other. When that one had climbed into the jar, I quickly put a few blades of grass inside, and then put on the lid.

She held the jar up against the sky, looked at the butterflies from both sides and from below, and then picked up her net.

“But I need more than just two.”

We walked a little farther down the slope, closer to the little creek, and stopped. The ground ahead crawled with the white butterflies. Dozens of them sipped from the damp ground, fluttered from point to point, clung to blades of grass and warmed their wings in the sun. Laurel scanned the area and chose her target, then trapped two more of the white butterflies under her net, and one of the little violet butterflies we called hoppers. The other butterflies scattered across the field as we put the new ones into her jar. Laurel caught two more of the little violet hoppers and several of the white butterflies that had fluttered back.

“You can’t put any more in the jar, it’s too crowded.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I’ll show these to Mama before I let them go.”

I tightened the lid on her jar, we both took a swallow of water from the canteen I always carried when hiking, and then picked up her net as we headed back up the slope.

“But you didn’t catch anything.”

“That’s okay,” I replied. “I’ve got enough bugs already.” I had not put the usual alcohol-dampened cotton in my jar before I left the house that day because it ruins butterfly wings. “And I think I want to start collecting butterflies, anyway.”

“Well, you can’t have mine. I’m letting them go after mama sees them.”

Just then a huge black swallowtail butterfly glided by with blue and purple flashing from its wings. It did not fly like the small white butterflies with their dizzy fluttering or the little violet hoppers that literally jumped into the air and then beat their wings furiously just to stay there; those reminded me of my dream, when I had tried to fly. No, the swallowtail was graceful in flight. It flapped its wings a few times and glided, flapped again and glided, then seemed to almost float to a landing on the damp earth.

“Give me the net,” Laurel said, and shoved her jar at me. She ran straight for the wet area, jumping clumps of grasses and weeds, towards the butterfly. The Swallowtail lifted into the air, climbed fast. Laurel made a leap for it, slipped on the wet grass and sprawled face first onto the ground, almost completely hidden by the clumps of tall grass, weeds, and wildflowers.

“Hey, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

The swallowtail then landed again, not far from where Laurel had first chased it. I lifted my net and crept slowly toward it. That butterfly would be a perfect start for my new collection. Just as I drew close it must have seen me coming and started to take off again. I swung the net fast and managed to trap it on the ground, being careful to not damage its wings. Touching a butterfly’s wings can ruin them so I did not put any grass in the jar that it could scrape against. After all, a butterfly without its wings is just another bug.

I got my jar over it, but unlike the smaller butterflies it could not get a grip on the glass walled jar to climb inside, so I slipped the lid under the jar until the swallowtail had to climb inside. I quickly flipped the jar upright and tightened the lid. With no alcohol in the jar to kill the butterfly I did not know how long it would take to die. The beetles I had collected, the locusts and grasshoppers, katydids, and the delicate green lacewings, all died almost immediately from the alcohol and even the largest would be dried and ready to mount within a day or so. I would have to wait for this one to suffocate before I could dry and mount it, but it would be worth the wait.

It seemed calm, and unlike the small white ones and the little hoppers, just sat in the bottom of the jar. It was so large it could not spread its wings fully until I held the jar sideways. I slowly rolled the jar in my hands and looked my catch over from top to bottom; there did not seem to be any damage, even to the namesake “tails” on the two lower wings. Shades of blues and purples flashed from the black wings as I turned the jar in the sun. It would be the centerpiece of my new display. Every facet of its compound eyes reflected the same colors and for a moment it seemed like it was looking right at me. Then I realized that of course it was looking at me; for all that tiny creature knew I was about to make a meal of it.

I turned back to Laurel. “Hey, I got it! You can show it to your mom if you want to, but you can’t let it go. I’m keeping this one.”

Laurel was on her knees in the grass, facing the other way. She got to her feet and began brushing dirt and grass from her clothes.

“Thought you could fly there for a minute, didn’t you?”

She turned around, cocked her head to the side and grimaced like she sometimes did. I felt the jar slip from my fingers and thump onto the ground, roll to a stop against a grass clump, but I forgot about the swallowtail. I could not look at the jar or what I had trapped inside. All I could look at was Laurel’s forehead. She stared back for a few seconds, confused, then her face went slack, flushed red, and in one motion she threw her hands to the sides of her head, spun away from me, and crouched low as though to hide in the tall grasses. I watched from behind as she lifted her hair from her head and shook it gently. Her scalp looked even worse than granddad’s hands when his skin condition flared up: cracked, raw skin and scar tissue. She fitted her hair like a cap, pulling it back to front, patted her bangs into place then stood and turned around again.

“Is it straight?”

“Is what straight?”

“My hair! Is my hair straight?”

I looked at her, at the bangs that hung almost to her eyes. “Yeah,” I said, ‘I mean, I guess it looks like it always does.”

“It must’ve got stuck on a briar,” she said, and then brushed a few pieces of dried grass from her sleeves. “I’m sorry; I didn’t know it had pulled loose.”

“Oh, that’s okay.” I knew that sounded lame, but I could not think of anything else to say.

“You can’t see anything?” She turned in a circle, tilted her one way and then the other.

“No,” I shook my head, “It looks fine.”

“I want to go home now,” she said, and started back up the slope. I picked up my jar, the swallowtail seemed okay, then picked up her jar and both nets and followed a few steps behind her. We had walked about halfway back up the slope before she spoke again.

“Don’t tell anybody.”

“I won’t.”

“Nobody else knows.”

“Okay.”

She stopped and turned to face me. “You promise?”

“Swear to God and hope to die.”

She turned around and started walking again. “That’s why I don’t ride the bus. In first grade a boy in the seat behind me pulled my hair and it came off in his hand. He yelled out, ‘Gross!’, and threw it across the bus. It landed on a girl and she threw it on the floor and screamed, ‘What is it?’ Then some other girls screamed, and the bus driver pulled over at a phone and called mama to come get me.”

“What happened?”

“Mama moved us here so I could go to another school. Now she drives me to school every day and doesn’t want me playing anywhere else. Except up here with you, so I can catch butterflies.”

“No, I mean, what… happened? To your head?”

“Oh," she said, and hesitated a moment. “When I was four, mama had boiled a pan of water for iced tea and had it in her hand. Billy was running in the house and bumped into her from behind and the whole pan of boiling water splashed on my head and part of my back.”

I thought then how my mom was really picky about every pan handle turned towards the stove. She was always afraid we might knock one off and burn ourselves if we were not careful. After seeing Laurel’s head, I realized mom knew what she was talking about.

"Only a little bit got on my face and my bangs hide that."

“It burned off all your hair?”

Laurel nodded. “And the skin. Mama said they put skin grafts on it, but the hair won’t ever grow back.”

“What’s a skin-graft?” I asked, but she ignored me.

“Now I get a new wig every year,” she said, her voice sounding a little brighter. “Made special just for me; will you bring my net home?”

I was already carrying her net and jar, so I did not answer. She started to run, ducked into the pine stand with her hand tight on her head. I could come back for my kite later, so I followed Laurel towards the neighborhood.

She was in her house when I got there. I loosened the top on her jar of butterflies so they could get air, then set it in a shaded spot on the back steps, left her net by the porch and then went home. I set the jar with my swallowtail in the shade, then went back and got my kite.

I saw Laurel later that afternoon, holding the butterfly jar on her lap. She slowly turned the jar, watching as the butterflies climbed over one another, then removed the top and set the jar on the bottom step. The little violet hoppers jumped into the air before they even reached the top of the jar, but the larger white butterflies took their time and crawled up to sit on the rim. They opened their wings in the sun and then one after another jumped into the air. I sat on my back porch and watched them spin and flutter into the sky like a spiral of torn bits of paper.

After I watched the last of Laurel’s butterflies disappear into the brightness, I picked up my own jar and looked at what I had trapped in a glass-walled prison. The butterfly sat at the bottom of the jar slowly opening and closing its wings to keep cool, but without room to open them fully so I turned the jar sideways, held it up to the sunlight and slowly turned it. The undersides of the wings seemed a little duller and did not refract the light as much as the topsides.

In the past hour that delicate creature had been cruelly snatched from its home, imprisoned in a container that was dropped, rolled, bounced, and shaken, yet it still sat calmly in its glass prison.

I felt sad for Laurel and the hair of her own that she would never have again, for the freedom to go wherever she wanted, whenever she wanted. Like the rest of us.

And me, I just wanted to fly.

The freedom I had now was all Laurel wanted, yet I still wanted more. I thought of all the flying insects I had killed without a second thought, taking from the very thing I wanted, the ability to fly. Just so I could stick them to a board for my collection.

I picked up my jar again, examined my trophy, that wonderful black swallowtail butterfly, and thought how cruel it was that it could see through the glass, wanting to fly but held back by an invisible barrier. I removed the top from the jar and knowing that it could not climb the glass walls, I found a stick and put it in the jar. The swallowtail climbed slowly, and then paused a few moments, clinging to the top end of the stick. It opened and closed its wings fully a few times, as though testing to see that they still worked, and then leapt into the air and with a few strong flaps it climbed fast, flew towards its home in the field.

I watched until it was just a small, dark spot, dancing against the sky.

~ ~ ~

This was originally posted on Medium.

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