Paper Butterfly - Narasu Rebbapragada
A pizza flies through the air and hits the wall. It slides down like a snail, leaving behind marinara slime. Lilly smiles at the idea of a snail made of pizza, but her thoughts are interrupted by the sound of her dad yelling at her mom.
“You’re killing me, Dana.”
His arm is stretched out from throwing the pizza. Lilly stares at the tattoo of a skull on his arm. Its wide, vacant eyes stare back. When her dad folds his arms over his chest, one of the eyes on the skull winks. Lilly stifles a smirk.
“What is it that you do all day that you can’t cook a goddamn meal every once in a while?” says her dad to her mom.
Her mom does not respond. Instead, she rises from the dining-room table, smooths her short black dress, and walks to the kitchen. A drink in her hand, she steps over the pizza, ending the conversation.
Her dad shakes his head and walks to the brown-tiled pass-through counter between the kitchen and the dining room to pick up his keys and wallet. He gently tugs at Lilly’s short ponytail.
“Sorry, Lilly,” he says.
Lilly knows he’s sorry. He’s always sorry after he yells at her mom.
“Can you get me more paper from work? I’m almost out,” she replies, her mouth half full of pizza.
“Sure, kiddo,” he says and walks through the dented screen door into the summer night, gravel crunching under his boots. A few minutes later, the roar of the car’s engine fades as he reverses out of the driveway.
Lilly sits alone at the table to finish her pizza crust before heading to her bedroom at the top of the stairs. Closing the door behind her, she shuts out the beige walls flickering with shadows from the living room TV.
This room is her world, Lilly’s world. She walks on the plush green rug that spreads like a meadow blooming with piles of books. She walks past a twin bed to the left and a portable wardrobe to the right, straight to a large art table in the back next to the room’s only window.
Lilly sits down and smooths a piece of paper on the art table. After consideration, she chooses an indigo pastel from the jam jars filled with crayons, pastels, and pencils. Thin lines flow from her hand in curves that come together to form the outline of a butterfly.
Lilly has been drawing butterflies since last spring. That’s when her mom decided that, at 11-years-old, she was old enough to take the bus to school. During the short walk between her house to the bus stop, Lilly passes a meadow loaded with butterflies. She watches them closely, enjoying their dance with the wildflowers. They are all together and yet each one alone -- graceful, beautiful, and fragile.
The butterflies leave when spring greens shrivel into straw in the Central Valley summer, but Lilly still draws them. She draws all kinds of butterflies. Sometimes, she draws them as they really are. Other times, she adds glitter to create fantasy versions of the real thing.
Lately she’s been drawing the Blue Morpho, a South American butterfly made up of shimmery blues surrounded by a black outline. It reminds Lilly of the makeup on her mom’s eyes when they lived in LA, before they moved to her dad’s hometown. Lilly’s mom gave up her job in LA, so that her dad could have one here. And it seems to Lilly that when her mom gave up her job, her mom just gave up.
Lilly takes the pictures she draws and glues them to the walls and ceiling of her bedroom. Over time, they have faded in the sunlight, so she draws new ones and glues them over the old ones. Now her room is a kaleidoscope of color, filled with hundreds of butterflies.
Every night, as Lilly goes to bed, she turns off the big light in her bedroom and turns on the carnival lights that her dad strung across her ceiling. She crawls under the covers, nestling her head into the pillows to let her eyes wander to the butterflies above.
Tonight, her gaze settles on the fiery orange wings of a Monarch that she drew months ago. Then she waits, as she does every night. She waits for the quiet, and waits for it to begin.
One wing flutters, and then the other, before the butterfly slides across the ceiling and touches the butterfly to its left, a black-and-blue swallowtail that bats its wings like lashes in one long swoop. That, in turn, brushes a butterfly marbled in orange and fuchsia. Like a chain reaction, one butterfly taps the next, which in turn wakes the next, until the ceiling is a sea of undulating wings. Together they gain momentum as they move left and right, forward and backwards. Older, faded butterflies barrel-roll with the newer sparkly ones, like waves tumbling over each other, gliding along the walls and ceiling. Bits of glitter come loose from the paper and fall on Lilly’s face.
When they first started coming to life, she didn’t think it would last. But night after night, it would happen so she started to tell the butterflies about her day.
“Anita was out sick today, so I ate lunch in the library. Oh, and at dinner, Dad threw a pizza at the wall. And it exploded. Mom got so mad that she just walked away. I bet that pizza stays there for, like, two days because she is not going to clean it up.”
Lilly pauses and then says, “I hate summer school. There’s so much homework, and I don’t know anyone. But I guess this is what I’m doing since I heard mom and dad argue that we can’t afford camp this year.”
Then Lilly yawns. “We should get a puppy. A puppy would just eat the pizza off the floor.”
The butterflies lull her to sleep. When she wakes in the morning, they have returned to their original locations, catching the light of the rising sun through her window.
****
The next night, dinner is quieter. Her mother has made boil-in-the-bag chicken. Lilly and her dad eat at one side of the dinner table while her mother eats at the other. No one talks. Last night’s pizza still stains the wall, but the pizza itself is gone. Lilly wants to ask who cleaned it up, but she doesn’t dare. After twenty minutes of the quiet scuffle of silver forks on plastic plates, her dad gets up. He lightly tugs on Lilly’s ponytail as he heads out the door to work.
It's good that her dad has a job now, but Lilly misses the months that he was at home. On mornings he didn’t sleep in, he drove her to school right up to the front door where everyone could see. On nights he didn’t go out with his friends, he read to her. But the new job is at night, so he leaves for work after dinner and goes to bed when the sun comes up. They see each other in the slivers of time in between their comings and goings. She knows he doesn’t like this job as much as he liked old job building movie sets, but this job comes with an unlocked supply closet and all the paper she wants for drawing, so it’s not all bad.
Having finished her chicken, Lilly heads up the stairs but stops at the top to watch her mother pick up plates with delicate hands and bright red fingernails. Those hands used to do makeup for almost-famous actors, which made her mom almost-famous too.
Lilly wants to say something to her mom, but she can’t think of anything, so she retreats to her room and gets ready for bed. She turns on her carnival lights and waits for the butterflies to start moving. And they do.
But one butterfly is acting weird.
It is the blue morpho that she drew when her dad got her pastels for her birthday. Lilly drew this morpho by blending the black outline with the blues, some darker and some softened with white. It is beautiful and sophisticated next to the older glitter-and-crayon butterflies.
But tonight, this morpho is agitated. It unfurls its wings, flapping vigorously and pushing its way to the edges of the ceiling and walls. The morpho doesn’t dance with its siblings but zings in isolation like a pinball. It rams itself against the side of the window, again and again. Lilly gets out of bed and lays her hand alongside the edge of the window to cushion the butterfly’s crash against it. The butterfly slows and stops, and in that moment, Lilly understands. The butterfly wants out, out of the confines of the room’s walls and ceiling. But the morpho can’t do it on its own.
“I’ll let you out,” says Lilly softly. “But we have to practice first because the real world is complicated.”
The morpho flutters lightly against the wall.
“Don’t worry,” she adds. “I’ll help you.”
Creeping down the stairs, Lilly looks out over the living room and sees her mother asleep in front of the TV, oblivious to the screams and cheers of game-show contestants. Lilly also sees an empty bottle of wine on the side table and knows she won’t wake up. Lilly goes into the kitchen to get the step ladder and returns up the stairs. Back in her bedroom, Lilly grabs the scissors from a jar on her desk and then places the ladder next to the bed, climbing up to the morpho, which has returned to its usual place.
“First, I need to cut you out of the ceiling,” she says before placing the scissors between her teeth, using her hands for balance to climb up the ladder. When she takes the scissors from her mouth, she extends the blades and moves one blade to the morpho, who flutters, first softly then furiously.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be careful,” Lilly whispers. She speaks comforting words as she traces an outline around the butterfly with the blade of one half of the scissors, starting first on one of the wings, curving around the side of the head up towards the antennas and then down again towards the other wing, until she has cut all around the butterfly.
But there is a problem. The butterfly won’t peel off the ceiling. Heat from the sun has glued the double-sided tape to the plaster. She will have to cut the butterfly out. Lilly digs the blade of the scissors into the ceiling. Bits of plaster fall and scatter onto her bed. She digs and digs, and then digs too deep to the point where she can’t move the scissor’s blade. She pulls hard to get the scissors out until it slips in her hand and cuts her skin.
Seeing the blood, Lilly gasps. She gathers her breath and climbs down the ladder. In the bathroom, she gets a Band-Aid and hastily applies it to her bloody palm. Back in her bedroom, she once again climbs up the ladder with the scissor. This time she cuts more gently and removes the whole butterfly from the ceiling.
At first, the morpho lies in her hand, motionless. Lilly brushes bits of plaster off its wings, and as the weight is lifted from it, the morpho begins to stir.
“Very good,” says Lilly, encouraging it. She carries the butterfly to the window ledge and places it there. A few seconds pass, and the morpho lifts its wingtips, slowly at first and then faster. And then it stops.
“OK,” Lilly says. “Now try to fly.”
And as if her words were somehow meaningful to the morpho, the butterfly flaps its wings, increasing the movement, so it turns into a rapid blur, like flipping the pages of a book. A small space opens between the morpho and the window ledge.
The morpho is flying.
Lilly shrieks as the butterfly lifts itself up, up, up. But it hasn’t yet gotten the hang of front and back movement, so it hits the glass of the windowpane and falls to the ground.
Scooping up the butterfly, she releases it into the air to try again. This time the butterfly gains a little height before floating down to weave around the room. Up and down, up and down, the butterfly practices flying. It’s not pretty, but flight is happening. It flies around the ceiling, flying close to the other butterflies stuck there. Sometimes, it slows down so much that it loses its lift and starts falling. But then it flutters faster and rises again. Lilly holds her breath each time this happens, breathing only when the morpho regains control, sometimes inches from the floor.
Up and down, right and left, in straight lines and arcs, it starts to circle the room, making tight U-turns to double back. Lilly sits on the upper rung of the step ladder, and the morpho flutters to the top of her knees before taking off again. She watches the butterfly, smiling to herself, so proud of it.
The morpho is developing a sense of direction. It proceeds to the window and traces the edge of the window frame, then it crosses the room and flies along the top edge of the door, scooping out both exit points.
Glancing out the window, Lilly notices that the black sky has lightened to the dark gray before dawn. The gravel driveway, the oak tree on the front lawn, and the road beyond have taken on shapes in the dark. Lilly and the morpho have been up all night. With a hint of sadness, she realizes that the butterfly is ready to go.
She lifts open the window and waits.
But the morpho doesn’t fly out. Instead, it lands on the window ledge.
“Go on,” she says after a few minutes. “You can do it.”
She tries to shoo the morpho out the window with her hands, but it resists, fluttering its wings and lifting off the ledge, refusing to leave. The leap from the safety of Lilly’s room to the bottomless expanse outside is too great for the morpho to undertake.
Lilly goes to her wardrobe and throws a sweatshirt over her pajamas. She picks up the flashlight that her dad keeps in there in case the power goes out. She shines the flashlight’s beam on the morpho and directs the light to the bedroom door. As she walks through the door, the morpho follows her. She points the flashlight down to the living room and starts walking down the stairs. The morpho follows the direction of the beam, fluttering just behind Lilly’s right shoulder. It’s working.
At the bottom of the stairs, Lilly pauses and points the flashlight downwards to avoid adding to the light of the TV. Lilly’s mother lies on her stomach, face down. The crochet blanket covering her lower half exposes her back, rising and falling with even breath. When her mother does not stir, Lilly tiptoes past the couch to the front door and gently opens it. Lilly worries the cold will wake her mother. She points the flashlight out the door and into the yard as instruction for the morpho to follow. But the morpho remains at the bottom of the stairs, fluttering its wings.
“C’mon,” Lilly whispers sternly to the morpho. “The door is this way.” But instead of flying to the open door, the morpho flies towards the living room.
“What are you doing?” Lilly says in a whisper so stern that it scratches her throat.
Standing at the front door, she turns the flashlight towards the living room. Lilly sees the butterfly flying towards the couch and then circling her mother’s sleeping body. Suddenly the morpho swoops down to perch on her mother’s back. Lilly freezes.
The morpho flutters its wings faster and faster, hovering slightly above her mother, circling in smaller and smaller circles until it looks like a paper cyclone. As it lowers itself again, it tilts its wings at an angle so that the edges of its wings brush against her mother’s skin. In rapid movements, it moves left and right, dragging its wings along her back like a saw. Even as thin lines of blood fill the small cuts on her back, those first several paper cuts do not wake her mother. But as the morpho continues to cut, she starts to move, her left hand instinctively touching the sticky dampness of her blood.
When Lilly understands what is happening, she runs towards her mother. Bending over the couch, Lilly examines her mother’s skin. She sees blood and screams.
And at this moment, Lilly’s mother retracts her fingers from her back and opens her eyes. Seeing the blood on her fingertips, she sits up. A crease crosses her cheek from lying on a seam in the couch. Turning her head, Lilly’s mother comes face to face with her daughter. Lilly’s flashlight is smudged with blood from the cuts she got from freeing the morpho.
The morpho retreats into the darkness of the stairs and circles around before accelerating, this time towards Lilly’s mother’s face. The edge of its wing cuts into her cheek, drawing blood.
“What the…” says her mother, instinctively swatting at whatever is causing the pain. She misses the morpho but ends up slapping Lilly, who recoils towards the door and drops the flashlight on the floor. Her mother touches her cheek and feels blood.
“Lilly, what are you doing?” she screams.
“It’s not me,” Lilly screams back.
The morpho banks around and flies back. In the dim light of dawn, her mother doesn’t see the morpho, even as it makes the second cut just below the first. She covers her face with her hands, turning her back towards Lilly.
“Lilly, stop!” she says.
Lilly picks up the flashlight and scans the room, looking for the morpho. She sees his silhouette on the other side of the dining table against the kitchen door.
“What are you doing? You’re free. You can go!” Lilly yells.
With more speed than before, the morpho flies again towards Lilly’s mother, who is covering her face with her hands. Red nails clutch her hair. Lilly smells the alcoholic scent of her disorientation and watches as her mother buries herself in the couch, bracing herself for the next sting. Before the morpho reaches her mother’s cheek for the third time, Lilly thrusts her arm forward, grabs the morpho in her hand and crushes it tight in her fist before throwing it across the room.
The morpho lands at the bottom of the stairs like a balled-up scrap of paper that missed the trash can. It no longer moves, not even when Lilly runs and crouches over it. She waits, holding her breath, but still, it does not move. Drawing her face closer to the crumpled morpho, tears stream down her face, and she starts to shake. Then, the living room lights go on.
“Lilly!”
Lilly hears her father’s voice and turns her head back. He has come home from work and is standing in the doorway. “Lilly, what the hell is happening?”
Lilly sees her mother on the couch, droplets of blood welling up from the cuts on her face and back. She looks at her dad, who now is also looking at the paper cuts on her mom’s cheeks. Lilly sees the familiar seed of anger on his face, a reddish color spreading up from his throat to his cheeks. He is about to yell, but this time, he’s about to yell at her.
“I didn’t do it.” says Lilly, not knowing how to explain what happened and knowing no one would believe her anyway.
Lilly starts crying and drops to the floor, holding her knees and rocking back and forth.
“I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it,” said Lilly between gulps of air.
No one says anything, and Lilly starts to hiccup. ‘I didn’t do…”
Hiccup.
“It.”
But still, no one says a thing, until someone does.
“It’s OK, Lilly.”
The sound of the voice causes Lilly to stop crying.
“It’s OK, Lilly.”
Lilly stops crying because it’s not the sound of her dad’s voice. It’s the sound of her mom’s.
Lilly’s mother slowly gets up from the couch, crouches over Lily, and pulls her up into her arms. Lilly leans against her mother, who guides her up the stairs and into her bedroom, leaving the crumpled morpho and her dad alone downstairs.
Narasu Rebbapragada (she/her) is a writer living in San Francisco, California. She began writing fiction a few years ago to explore the roller coasters of her inner and outer worlds. Her literary work has appeared in Forum Magazine and West Trestle Review. She is still on the lookout for the Mission Blue butterfly. She is @narasushi on Instagram.
