Short Story- Butterfly Confessional
My eyelashes are chasing butterflies, the ones behind your head, eager to cast off from their precarious perch on my face and fly away, perhaps along with everything else that makes me except for myself. I wonder what I would look like then, watching that spot just above your ear as my empty shell bounces on the breeze’s waves like a little rowboat on the sea. Nighttime falls like the ink I try so hard not to spill across the page, even though it always does, and we’re still standing here, I think. The butterflies, the grass, the sun, and even the world have become bored with our silence, our blank paper tongues stuck to the bottom of the stack of More Important Things at the roofs of our mouths. I can’t see you at all, and maybe you’ve walked away, shuffling through that pile of thoughts and unspoken words until you can find your voice and make it work again. I doubt it, though, since I can still hear you breathing leagues or inches away from my breath, like chocolate candies being unwrapped by oddly patient little fingers. I wonder if you’ve moved from your shell-shocked stance- did you see another bomb coming before I made it back to the airplane’s hatch? Or did you crawl out from the crater to dust yourself off and launch a counterattack? Perhaps you’re still laying there, rubbing your aching head and grumbling about my choice in weaponry? I’m not sure which way I want to see you when the sun comes up- if it ever does. We’ll be easy targets for anyone seeking to find us, suspended in cellophane, a set for just under twice the price of the individuals.
The gears groan like an audience who knows what’s coming, and with fluidity uncharacteristic of my sleep-loving eyelids, the sun rises, without even a split second of dawn to give us a fair warning. You haven’t moved at all, something I hadn’t quite considered- surely that night was long enough to give you time to shift your feet or scratch your cheek? The wind starts up again with a silent whir; we’re back on set and remembering we’ve forgotten our lines, if we ever knew them at all. I realize now that I’ve been standing still as well, waiting for the butterflies to offer me a ride. I can still see them, pretending to be a halo for you, but still being far too down to earth with me. My foot shifts through the grass, meaning to step up onto the words we still have hanging in the air, waiting to be plucked up and spoken. It wants to get there before we do, to run up and grab the butterflies, ready to pick me up and fly away with me. But I am not my foot, I am not anything at all until my parts remember that they make a person, not a butterfly. As if they’ve suddenly realized what you’re looking at, they rush back and snap on to the floating spaces and raw material that are my arms, my legs, my face. I am me again, I think, still watching you try to process my words from the gunk of their poor presentation. In retrospect, I should have said them louder, with more urbanity and less of your diffused gruffness. You blink, and out of the very corner of my eye, I can see your butterflies behind my ear. I hope you thought some during that long night, because I’m still drawing a blank.