The Painted Lady

Southern California.

Thousands of black silhouettes float, backlit by the sea. Migrating in passing shadows, a collection of fragments. Almost without gravity, like cottonwood when it falls. A broken tessellation. An unformed image.

Some have been known to fly 2,500 miles across the Sahara. Now they pass along a vista of the Pacific. Big blooms in the desert this year, ruptures of golden poppies engulfing the mountains in swaths of burning vermillion. Rain across the valley measured 3.5 inches on Valentine’s Day alone.

Under stinging nettle leaves, the eggs look like opium seedpods whose round bases have been closely cut. Scored lines reveal a milky latex that escapes in a dotted pattern. No different than a net of paper, which flattens the globe into a printed image of the world. Traces of void expand from top to bottom along the widest diameter, cut like marquise diamonds. Parallels of green space showing through the graticule.

(Time lapsed eruption of a volcano filmed by a satellite.)

Before they fly, they crawl, blindly making tents out of silk, visible behind a thin blue veil. Into chrysalises, they retreat and just

hang there

from the branch

like a dead leaf.

Emerging molten like panels of stained glass, their under-wing could fool you for a moth—save for a single pane, burnished like armor. It burns like the fiery blush of a sunset before it is extinguished by the skyline. The anomaly goes unseen among them as they are colorblind to the color red.

Camouflage is little more than a trick of expectations. If you fix your gaze upon the horizon, millions of Vanessa cardui enter the frame and leave just as quickly. Migration is an experience of disguise; it strips all conspicuous characteristics. Flight without wings. Portraits without features. Anonymous ladies.

Trained in the transitory ballet of disappearance, they are not here for long. If you relax your eyes, the portrait of a single butterfly emerges from the emulation of many. A dark cloud sweeping over a blue sea.

An omen for sailors closing in upon land. Swarming standstill cars on the freeway.

*

The faint shadow of an hourglass stretched over the pages as Ada read one of the last entries recorded in her mother’s worn black leather notebook. Her fingers traced the indentation of the black ink, feeling the imprint of her mother’s pen upon the cream paper as she lifted her gaze toward the window. The diffused light of winter emanated from the snow-capped landscape beyond the walls of her office in the observatory—mountainous and severe, like a distant dagger.

Here was far away from California, where she had climbed among the hills of golden poppies with her mother, a lepidopterist, in search of butterflies. Far away from the fierce El Niño that had swept the valley with winter rains, which measured more than the collective annual rainfall of previous years on a single day in February. Her mother’s writing of that spring was magical; over 1 billion Vanessa cardui, known as the Painted Lady, took flight from Northern Mexico to their breeding grounds in Oregon. Her field notes, poetic and enigmatic, imbued images into Ada’s consciousness. As if she could see that everywhere from La Cienega Boulevard to across the Interstate 105 butterflies saturated the blue skies, transforming the air into a glinting expanse, wings suspended in the atmosphere like the particles of a snow globe.

It had been only two months since the landscape once consumed by butterflies had been engulfed in flames, devouring homes and her mother’s body, never found, in the inferno. Denied a funeral, Ada liked to imagine that her ashes were scattered among the arid soil that would grow the same vermillion flowers next season, lifted by a warm squall once the blaze had quieted into embers.

Before knowledge of her mother’s final disappearance (she was used to weeks without contact; her mother detested technology and would often withdraw deeply into her work) Ada watched as images upon her phone screen telegraphed the landscape around her home falling beneath a pale and sullied auburn. It was as if the poppy’s pigment was mixed with the greyish white of the smoke itself. Distant friends spoke of the smell of burning pine that drifted across the continent. The atmosphere did not smolder as it appeared to—a cold ash blanketed everything. While the sun set in an apocalyptic glow, the moon shone a pallid apricot against the muted blackness.

Climatologists had speculated that the heavy spring growth would make for dry fuel later in the season—greater abundance leads to greater loss, they said. Combing over the few possessions sent to Ada by her mother’s colleagues at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, she could not say the same. Of the four objects she now held onto—the notebook, along with a framed species of the rare albatross she was named after, a childhood drawing of a constellation (specks of white pencil crayon on black construction paper), and an heirloom cocktail ring valued at $20,000, lifted from the ashes of her home—none of these objects amounted to a life lived. It was in this scarcity Ada felt the most grief.

The setting sun shone more sharply at dusk in the mountains. The silhouette of the hourglass, the edges of its form, cast a ribbon of shadow (twisted like the symbol of infinity) upon the blank front page of the notebook. It was getting late, almost time for Ada to return to her telescope and observe the stars.

Placing the page between her fingers in an attempt to close its cracked spine, she felt the paper come undone from the first sheet to reveal an inscription. Ada read this as a secreted dedication, a palindrome meant for her to deduce:

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.

(In circles we go into the night and are consumed by fire.)

It was the riddle of a moth.