The Butterfly Artist

by Forrest Aguirre

  *

  “That must have been a long flight, indeed, to give you enough time to be brainwashed by such drivel,” Beckwith said, staring off into the wall of leaves that rose and fell along the hills of the bridal path.

  “You doubt the veracity of the government report?” Giles asked, incredulous at her impetuosity.

  “Don’t believe everything you read, my new arrival. Ngome is known to obfuscate what some term ‘real’.” She paused, listening to the quaking leaves bustling in the sunshine. “Enough. Tell me, what was your metier before Chelsea hired you?”

  Giles looked skyward with a pained expression. “I studied art, as you might guess. My family did not have the means to send me to school, so I worked as I studied.”

  “And your work was?”

  Giles shifted uncomfortably in his saddle. “I was an assistant keeper at our local zoo.”

  “Zoo?” her face flooded with puzzlement.

  “Please don’t think it odd. It is an honorable enough profession, and I only did it to make tuition. Besides, it gave me the opportunity to study animal shapes, shades and anatomy in depth . . .”

  “Zoo? What is this zoo?”

  “The one in my home town of Kinderzeit.”

  “The one what? What is this zoo you are talking about?”

  “Zoo?” Giles stifled a laugh, not wanting to embarrass her. “A zoo – a place where wild animals are kept for scientists to study and for the public to view and enjoy, a place to preserve endangered species – this is a zoo.”

  “Is it like a jungle, then?”

  “No, it is like a city for animals of all kinds. They are, of course, kept behind cages lest their natural instincts depopulate the specimen collection or the zoo’s visitors suffer injury.”

  “Collection? Then the animals are dead, preserved, like Chelsea does with his butterflies. This zoo is some kind of sepulcher-city for wildlife?”

  “No, the animals are very much alive. I know, I had to clean up after them.”

  “Alive in cages? That’s savagery!”

  “But the cages are there to protect them from each other and to protect visitors.”

  “Protect? Animals are supposed to attack and defend, to eat or be eaten, it’s the inexorable law of fang and claw. To keep them caged – this must rob them of their souls. Freedom. Animals, like humans, need freedom. It is the nature of the world.”

  The smile faded from Giles’s face. “But freedom must be dictated by someone. Why not the most intelligent species?”

  Beckwith turned her horse around. “But it should be done with compassion, as with my mare. I let her roam free, feed where she wishes, groom her. She, in turn, allows me to ride when I need her.”

  “I see no difference between your relationship with your horse and mine with the zoo animals.”

  “Cages?” And she shot off back toward her homestead, galloping away from Anjema.

  The sun was dropping from its zenith when Giles caught up with her. She sat on her horse in a shaded defile to one side of the dirt path. Something immense lay in the border between the road and the thick forest, a humungous black shape, as large as two horses, half in, half out of the floral wall. Flies clouded the air over the mass while maggots writhed yellow across the creature’s fur, causing a shimmering effect over the area. A rotting stench steamed upward, filling the road with a wavering miasma that intensified the atmospheric scintillation.

  Giles pulled up alongside Ms. Beckwith, stopping short of the death-zone. Putrefied air wafted up to him – the smell of his overheated horse doing nothing to help matters. He felt bile lurch into his throat, burning the esophagus with searing acidity. The other rider did not flinch.

  “What is it?” Giles asked, hoarse from his burning spetum. The blood-matted fur of the carrion bristled slightly in the breeze as a thin layer of dust encrusted its gore. The creature’s impossibly huge limbs were entwined in morbid self-embrace. The morass of rigor mortis caused Giles to count again and a third time – three, four, five and six limbs. Four tree-trunk arms and two piston legs, robbed of animation by the gaping bullet holes sprayed across the beast’s immense chest. A face, simian, almost human, stared unseeing into void as black as its rubbery skin.

  “Oh! An ape! Four arms. Shouldn’t we report this to the constabulary?”

  Her voice wavered, eyes watering: “Someone already has. Don’t you see the wounds? Five bullet holes and there, burn marks from electro-shock rifles. Government troops did this to her.”

  Giles started to ask a question, then fell silent. He prodded his mount on at a trot just as a fly stung the young man in the nape of the neck.

  Emile Beckwith sat in the saddle watching flies burrow into the mutant corpse for a long, long time.

  Bloodmilk

  “Giles, I like the preliminary work you’re doing on the Papilio Odius specimen – thought it is in the wrong color.”

  Chad did not want to upset Chelsea’s pleasant mood, so did not reveal the “preliminary” to be a blob, a splotch, a cosmic mistake. He “hmm”-ed uncomfortably, hoping that conversation would turn.

  “I would like to give you the opportunity to come out to the hills with me tomorrow. We are collecting a number of specimens – though none so valuable as our little skull-emblazoned friend. I feel it might help you to see more of the insects in the wild.”

  The illustrator rubbed the back of his neck where the fly had stung him the day before. The bump had swollen and burned itching whenever he touched it. The physical discomfort matched that within his mind. Was Chelsea implying that his work was not good enough? Had he recognized Giles’ mistake as such and dropped a hint that he knew so? Giles decided to take Chelsea at his word, though doubt raced through his mind and his face flushed red with fear that he might well lose his employment.

  “Yes, Mister Chelsea, that would be fine.”

  “Good, then meet me tomorrow after tea on the road directly south of Beckwith mansion.”

  Relief flooded through Giles head, though the bump still ached. “The road to Anjema?”

  “The road to Anjema,” Chelsea smiled a greasy, thin-lipped smile, looking like some humanoid toad. “I see you are getting to know these streets, Giles. Good. Ngome has a way of enveloping visitors. I’m glad you are finding your way. I’ll expect you tomorrow at noon.”

  “Tomorrow at noon.” Giles scratched the back of his neck and exited the office.

  The bold red stripes of the Bloodmilk Café were an obvious anomaly, even in the cosmopolitan montage of Ngome’s market square. They provided the only architectural splash of color in an otherwise bone-white courtyard. The sparkling square seemed to focus and magnify the heat of the lime-washed heart of the city. As Giles left the pulsating crimson of the Bloodmilk after a fattening lunch, he slowed his pace to absorb the images and smells of the marketplace. Myriad black faces peered out from brightly-dyed kaleidoscope cloth, a smiling calico menagerie of robes and shawls infiltrated by the odors of peanut and palm oil and heady spices from across the eastern ocean. A few, dressed as Giles in the dark suits of the northern literati, seemed sullen and aloof, keeping distance from their chromatic peers as if the commoner’s colorfulness belied leprosy or some other virological contagion.

  Giles had been warned that disease might be a concern here. The water was filthy and the close compaction of so many sweaty bodies into a great carnal agglomerate lent itself to the spread of illness. Even in his native temperate clime the convergence of so many disease vectors would be cause for concern, so much more so, then, here in the tropics. The flurry of hand shakes, hugs and kisses exchanged between members of both genders created a veritable germ mill. But the friendliness itself – utterly alien to his cultured bias toward formality – was contagious. Giles saw more smiles under the market stall canopies that day than he had in all his childhood at gray, rainy Kinderzeit. The stalls were akimbo, on the brink of slumping over,
but the joy in the air buoyed the sagging overhangs as if it shouted “Keep up! Be of good cheer! You are among friends!”

  Song broke out in the far corner of the square, away from the Bloodmilk. Skirts swirled in a sparkling whirlwind to the plunking and thumping of instruments new and strange to the foreigner’s ears. Customers left the unfortunate peddler’s stalls with cries of “Nzi! Nzi!” while women’s voices ululated past him like streams of hiccuping locomotive whistles. He turned to watch the glistening bodies flow past, then looked to the café for a reaction. Mustached whites peered out from behind news gazettes with pursed lips, disapproving and annoyed that their political contemplations should be disturbed by such a trivial matter as a song. A cool breeze spilled over the roofs of the square and on to Giles as he turned his head back towards the stall-keepers, one of whom smiled and shrugged his shoulders as if to say “These things happen. What can be done? You might as well enjoy yourself!” then left the stall for the moil.

  Giles stood, transfixed by the spectacle, ignoring his nagging conscience, which told him there were preparations to make for the next day’s expedition. He slowly walked closer to the gyrating crowd, noting a small group clad in white robes that seemed to form the hub of the human wheel, then penetrated the fleshy circle, weaving between dancing, sweating bodies to get a better look.

  Halfway to the group in white, Giles