Butterflies

Izzy Christie 

I don’t want to be happy. At least that’s what I tell myself. My heart beats behind the cotton wool of my jumper at the bus stop. Five or six times. Wait. I’ll just get home to my butterflies and then everything will be okay. 

I’ve watched someone have a heart attack before. It was on a reality show where people starve and don’t catch fish. It ends with people starving and not catching fish and tapping out. As they exit the stadium that is filled with grizzly bears and no fish all I can think about is butterflies. 

Butterflies are beautiful but they have no nutritional value. Each monarch butterfly is two calories which means you would have to eat fifty monarch butterflies to consume one-hundred calories which is one twenty-second of the number of calories a nineteen-year-old girl should eat a day. This means that if I consumed the jar of butterflies on my dressing table it would be a chaotically useless act. 

I keep butterflies even though they are useless. No; because they are useless, and beautiful. Butterflies last a heartbeat inside the Earth’s finite body. And I like being reminded of that. As I wait for the bus to exit the city where there are no butterflies to the suburbs where there are butterflies, I think about the heartbeat. About my heart beating. 

Nothing worth having is easy is what someone once said but I’m too tired to Google it. I’m not Googling anything for the next hour actually. Not after Unfortunately we have filled the position and Kind regards, not after Good afternoon and Ngā mihi nui, not after calling my Dad to say I’ve done it, I’ve found a job, I’ve filled a position, I’m useful! Not after the shallow pain of uselessness. Not after all that muck. 

I’ll be eating beans this week, and rice. I’ll probably go out and buy a bag of gummy candy from the dairy and eat it all in one sitting. I used to feed my butterflies sugar water because I knew they had a sweet tooth and also because I knew they couldn’t eat anything else. I would feed them and their wings would crinkle up and then I’d feed them a little more and then they couldn’t fly and then I’d feed them a little more and then they would die. I couldn’t decide what I’d done; if I was poisoning them slowly or drowning them from the inside out. I couldn’t decide if I cared for them. 

Maybe I only cared for myself. My mother always said I was selfish. But then again she was no better. She always filled herself up with people because she ‘cared’. But I knew the truth. Her parties were thinly-disguised puff pieces, her friends were commercial breaks, and she was some soiled producer. She needed people to fill out the slow life that my father built for her. So she had her ‘work’ at the waterfront with all the drama freaks. Angela, Te Kapua, Devon, Phoenix. They would show up on our doorstep drunk on narcissism while she consoled their poor weeping bodies. Joker eyes and jester feet, all tied up in themselves while my mother caressed their broken souls. And she did this all for herself. Helped people so she didn’t have to look at the mirror and see the sad life she’d chosen written all over her face. White suburbia with only the dog and bitch daughter for company. A view of the Waitematā with the salt drying out her anaemic blue eyes. No housewife is content; they aren’t pets or butterflies. My mother had a brain, she was smarter than that, she collected

actor’s souls for fun, she wasn’t a goddamn pet. The only useful animal is one that’s dead. That’s when you can stick it in a jar or stuff it with sawdust and hang it above the mantelpiece next to the family photos. And that’s all I have to say on that. 

Bus creeps up to the bus stop like a parent’s phone call and I get in. Bitch bus driver looks like a fishwife and smells like blue cheese. She’s wearing a cap so I can’t see her eyes. I prefer it this way. 

The city retreats into the suburbs and the kindle wood villas. I’ve missed the suburbs like I missed the city in the morning; restlessly and for no reason except for want of something new to stare at. Preschools and dairies and council housing. Children and mothers are everywhere and I know I missed them. I missed the babies’ Play-Doh faces and the mothers’ tight jaws. And swollen breasts and bath time and grass stains and too much soap. 

I’d still like to own a big house. One with mirrors and glass windows and wooden staircases. Somewhere swans would feel at home; with mouse holes in the walls, and a big ginger cat to chase the mice. Flowers around the windows, hydrangeas that turn purple because the pH of the soil is between 5.5 and 6.5 so it’s acidic but skin-acidic not chemical-burn-acidic. Not Joker-acidic. I’d want beautiful weeds like blackberry, agapanthus, periwinkle. Lots of space for live butterflies. Like the house my grandmother grew up in, in Remuera, with a tennis court and swimming pool. 

I live in a big house now, in the basement, with people I don’t know. It’s a historical house and the windows are quite large with thick curtains. I thought about living on the top floor with all the sun-chipped walls before I moved in. I went to the viewing and realised I’d been relegated to the basement. But the house was cheap which was the most important thing because this was after my parents cut me off. I relented. I lived under the house among the brick foundations. The Wicked Witch of the East — except I kept on kicking. I kept warmer too, warmer than the others who shook their bones above me in the dawn wind. They’re funny and boring, the ones above. One of them has a pair of beige khakis which he wears with assorted movie merch from the seventies. He also has a combover. The rest of them have jobs where you wear suits. I don’t talk to them much, don’t need to: I know we have nothing in common. 

It’s all like shit today and this bus is not helping. It’s because I didn’t eat breakfast. The people here smell like the city and the city smells of congealed shit. Anthropomorphic shit and animalistic shit and especially rat shit. Not butterfly shit, though. Because even butterfly shit is precious. 

It’s called frass and it looks like butter crystals. It gels into calm little spheres that float above leaves or thick heavy curtains. It used to be all over my room back home, all up in the curtains and spotting the walls. I’d draw the drapes so only slivers of light could reach my toes where the floors went cold in June. I didn’t like to put on the heat pump as I thought it would be bad for the butterflies, make their wings crinkle up like lolly wrappers until they became Christmas tree ornaments. 

There’s a boy on the bus and he’s all jingled up. He’s got earrings and a silver chain and he’s not nineteen years old. These are the kind of ones I like. All pallid, sucking and puffing like blue caterpillars. Washed out eyes, gaping mouths and forgotten freckles. Smelling like honeydew, watermelon ice or crushed papaya. And they’re too depressed to fuck. I like how they grind up pills into powders on the weekends and sit watching grown-up cartoons while smoking weed with the windows closed. This one has bleached his hair, so it’s thin like the legs of insects. It’s blue and coloured like iPhone ribs. I can already tell he’s too soft. He may cry when I blow him. I prefer the ones who sit back on their haunches like Roman emperors or substitute teachers. Absent floury eyes and slack dog jaws that just can’t stop dribbling in

a bored sort of way. They finish like they’ve stepped on something rather disgusting; perhaps a sidewalk snail or a small mouse. 

I walk past the boy as I get off the bus and he’s looking right through me with sitcom eyes. Music video style I bite my lip, to shock him. He’s not shocked; he looks disgusted. He grunts under his breath. 

“Thot.” 

I grab his hand and take him off the bus and down the street into a shut down shop’s doorway. I kiss him like he’s never been kissed before and grab at his erection. He’s just like I expected: hungry because all skinny men are. I think about blowing him again, right here in the doorway. I reach down to fiddle with his zipper when an old lady begins shouting at us 

from across the road. She’s a human thesaurus for all the different ways you can say whore. I giggle and run him down the street back to the bus stop. His face doesn’t matter anymore but his mouth is moving. 

“Who are you?” 

I tell him I’m a butterfly and he’s a caterpillar and that’s why we can never be together. I tell him that it’s all very romantic and all very sad. I leave him right there and hop on the next bus. 

On the bus I think about his hand on my tit, nails bitten down to the bone, polish over the top. I think about how I’ll never see him again and about how it’s better this way. 

Today is bleak and grey and it’s been like this for a while. The sky sucking all the marrow out of the sky’s bones. Storm water brewing like television static. A day best spent horizontal, checked out and overstimulated; a death day. I miss my Thursday evenings. Like one of those evenings when the clouds are ultraviolet blue as if they can’t quite weep but they’d like to. Moving like the lines of a novel at 3 a.m. when you’re swimming in exhaustion and fear of the light in the dark. When the clouds come low and don’t touch you but you can see them breathing in the smoke from the city and spitting it out. Like the old lady who smokes a pack a day and only spits straight facts; the lines on her face sink into the floor, and you know she’s more human than you’ll ever be. I liked those skies. I liked watching them with the faceless men I’d bring up to Mount Victoria. Fucking them quickly and quietly behind the pine trees while the planes watched from above. I’d tell them about the sky and how I missed it every day that it turned out different and wrong. 

There was a secret up there, looking over Wellington High’s tennis courts and the vacant war memorial, and the secret was: I felt happy being alone. Dozing beside a stranger who may or may not forget me while knowing that I would forget them. Some of them would fall in love with me, call me beautiful, delicate and strange. It’s a weird kind of feeling when a man calls you crazy. They look at your head and imagine cottage cheese and persimmons, butterflies. They would all remember me but the only thing I remembered was the sky, the smell of pine and the beating of the ground and the wind tunnel. Writhing because there was where I belonged. I yearned to be forgotten, and there. 

My room no longer has high exquisite curtains covered by canary bubbles. It has an opening above my bed, speckled with lichen, mildew, and other microorganisms living off the wood. Instead of acrobatic butterflies dancing on the ceiling, I have mice who scuttle in and nibble at the walls. I don’t mind them; I realise that the reason they nibble is ‘cause their teeth can’t stop growing. They’re just wearing them down. Laptop open on my dresser, Netflix open on my laptop, nature documentary open on Netflix. The most gruesome scene where the lion separates the baby elephant from its mother. My name shines back at me, crowning my childhood dresser, ornamented by aggressive cartoon flowers: Lillian. The individual letters like roman numerals or prison numbers scratched into the egg-shell paint. Below that are my butterflies. They’re dead in the jar on the dresser. 

I’ve never liked being on my own but I’ve never liked being around people. Television

feels safer. I didn’t like hating my mother, but she made it so easy. I didn’t want a job, I wanted purpose. I didn’t want any of this. All I wanted were live butterflies and good sex and for life to be easier. But it’s not going to be — I know this in my liver and in my soul. If God’s real he would agree with me. I pray with swear words and big fuck offs and tell him about my sexual encounters and my trips to the gynaecologist. I tell him about the boss at the Italian restaurant who interviewed me for an hour and did not once look at my face. I tell him about the bitch bus driver on the way home who smelled like fish and mouse urine. And I tell him I don’t care about butterflies anymore or heartbeats or any of it. 

I’ll eat another’s heartbeat. 

I unscrew the jar and I pick up their cellophane bodies one by one. They lay flat in my hands, useless and perfect. Beautiful, and I hate them for it. Wildfire Orange. Monarchs, like the pictures I coloured in primary. I shove them all into my black mouth and they taste like nothing.