Lepidoptera

The Girl woke up on her eighteenth birthday with butterfly wings projecting from her back. Her Mother told her to expect the unexpected, but she had dreamed it would be the used car she had been eyeing, royal blue with a bike rack already attached. She didn’t think her Mother knew she would become part Lepidoptera.

She tentatively opened her wings, enjoying their iridescence—colored like the bubbles her Mother had blown for her in the backyard not so many years ago. She, an only child, would watch them born into the air from her mother’s breath. Then her Father would point at a low sailing sphere of suds, and she would clap at it, uncertain if she were trying to hug it or pop it. Most stayed outside of her grasp, but the delight of those moments of togetherness stayed with her, even as the airborne soap dissolved into nothingness.

She thought the stretching might tear her newly formed and delicate membrane made of scales and hair—but instead the movement opened up a space in her mind that allowed her to think about where she might seek nectar for her family, who had been growing thin since the Great Sequestering.

Not nectar. Food, she thought.

They had no wings, only skinny arms and legs that could traverse blocks at street level, where no one was allowed since the Sickness. She knew others might think of how wings could help you fly away, at least, to a friend’s house—like the girl she knows three blocks down—not so far away, but impossibly distant since everything metamorphosed. She thought instead of the nervous chatter that now wafted throughout her house. She understood that her birthday gift, so surprising, could make her a helper to her parents, who could use a child to float above the city from a bird’s-eye view to find them what they’d need for today, for tomorrow, until the Sequestering was lifted and she might think of her wings differently, like a child would.

But for now, they were a wish fulfilled she hadn’t thought to crave. For now, she was an adult, with wings all her own. As she planned where she must go and how the flapping of her small wings might change things, she hoped she was prepared. She chose not to think about the shock, the scarring down her spinal column, or the danger of her flight.

• 0