He squeezes her hands a bit tighter and she’s looking at him with her liquid eyes, grey today, choppy like the ocean, waiting for him to say something. And he thinks he will, but he still doesn’t know what.
He knows they’re still young and that they probably won’t be together forever. But she’s so cool when she’s her, not the depression, and he wants her for as close to forever as she’ll have him.
He watches her walking around the house sometimes, imagining her pregnant with a big fat belly and her boobs grown enormous, growing someone inside her as perfect and sweet as she is.
He daydreams about her and their kids on the sideline, cheering for him when he’s playing, buying a house together, getting married even.
Then he remembers he can’t even deal with this.
She’d told him once that when the black dog comes, it’s like she goes away and she can’t do anything until all of her comes back.
‘I love you baby,’ he says, and his voice comes out like Simon Dallow reading the news. Her eyes get bright and pop like she’s frightened.
‘Are you breaking up with me?’ she asks, small, pulling back her hands and losing them in her satin hair.
He’s thought about that too. He can’t lie. It’s not easy. Even the easy stuff isn’t easy with her.
She’d gone to the doctor once. On a good day. The doctor had told her she didn’t look depressed to him. What could she say? No one takes teenagers seriously. Not until they make people have to.
She’d told him that she couldn’t bring herself to ask for help again. After that.
‘I’m not breaking up with you,’ he says and goes back in for her hands. Her fingers are long and soft and she doesn’t wear any rings. He thinks she holds magic in them, the things she can create. He likes looking at their skin together; hers porcelain peach and his like bark, turning golden where they met.
He wonders if he can say the right thing this time.
‘I can’t let things go on like this any more though eh babe,’ he starts, and she looks down, like she’s ashamed, and now he knows he has to finish, be what she believes him to be before they both start to hate him.
He admits to her all the things he’s been ashamed and afraid of, and she goes from looking murderous to guilty, and he knows she’s thought about the Schick Quattro effect too.
He thinks the air gets colder around them, but it’s just his skin trying to be rid of him, and his stomach feels sick and heavy.
He tells her that he will go to a doctor with her. A different one. That he will make them listen, tell them the things she can’t. Ask for all the things she needs when she is unable to do it. For always. For forever.
She makes a funny sound in her throat, and he knows it’s the fist that was holding her in letting go, and her eyes spill onto her cheeks. He thinks he could put his finger in the air and touch her relief the same way that he could touch her nose.
He goes around the table to her and holds her head against his chest. He smells the sweat under her hair, fear clinging in a film over her skin. Then he looks down his arms, at his body, expecting something to have changed. Thinking that he should look different now, a man, but he sees everything is just the same. He looks past her, into their little kitchen, looking through the fading sunlight for something.
He sees only the cups of tea growing cold. The steam rising from them is faint and lazy. Just steam, disappearing, becoming air.
He feels light, and strong. He pulls back, and looks, really looks.
At her.
He sees her suffering and he isn’t afraid of it now. He brushes it from her skin, and where they touch is golden.
The Sick Chrysalis
Terence Rissetto
Gentlemen, you have been called to this meeting to receive a short overview of the case that has been given a lot of airing in the media over the past few days, particularly since the alleged sighting of an unidentified flying object around the time this person of interest disappeared. Apparently the guy, one William Jeremiah Borges, also known as Butterfly Bill because of his aggressive campaign to make butterflies a protected species, is an etymologist or epistemologist or something like that. A world authority on something called chimeras, whatever they are: some zoological term. May pay to look it up when you get a chance.
When the Armed Offenders Squad went in and secured the area under review and commenced a grid search they found the remains of three unidentified males, probably the missing opossum hunters, and one female, who appears to have been the guy’s wife. They also found the missing female child who was the reason for the call-out in the first place. She was unharmed and in the custody of her aunt, and had been looked after well. Several time-lapse cameras were also recovered from the site. They give an intriguing and enlightening view of what appears to have happened. What I’ll now do is talk you through some of the tapes as we go. What you’re seeing at the moment is footage from the campsite itself, probably best described as a home movie type of record.
The first five minutes are pretty standard, but give an idea of what the guy and his wife look like before everything happens. Ordinary looking folk going about their business. Just a note: we haven’t worked out what the time settings on the cameras are yet, because they seem to fluctuate. Here it can be seen that three young men, one of them armed, so probably the three hunters, happen onto the scene and catch the woman unawares while she is having her morning shower. They proceed to struggle with her, hold her down and take turns to rape her and commit all sorts of extreme indecencies and indignities. As that breed of animal tends to do. When they’ve finished, the guy with the weapon can be seen apparently beating her into unconsciousness and decamping the scene in extreme haste, leaving her in a bit of a mess on the ground. Very nice wee chappies.
Shortly thereafter the husband turns up, rushes to her side and appears to bring her round. He puts a black overcoat on her, which incidentally belongs to one of the assailants, to keep her warm and covered, and then takes off, presumably after the offenders. Some time after he has gone, she can be seen getting to her feet, stumbling over to the tree where the shower was previously, climbing up and, after tying a scarf around her neck and the branch, jumping off and appearing to hang herself. A couple of the giant butterflies they were apparently monitoring can be seen landing on the woman’s mouth area, presumably for the moisture, and then several more are seen hovering around the genital area. I mention this only because the butterflies figure in later shots in their hundreds, but have vanished from the actual campsite.
The male returns, injured, covered in blood, carrying what appears to be three penises. He sees his wife’s body hanging from the tree, slumps to the ground at the base and remains there for some time staring at the body, until he appears to be roused by a similar pair of the same butterflies landing on his head and face. He eventually gets up and can be seen cleaning his wounds before crawling into the tent, where he appears to remain for some days. When he finally emerges like a moth from its cocoon, still somewhat the worse for wear, he can be seen setting up a camera directly on the body of his hanging wife. For the next few weeks he follows the same routine of getting up, checking on his wife, chasing off animals, setting rat and possum traps and so on. We haven’t managed to recover that particular camera at this stage. About three or four weeks into it, depending on the time lapse sequence, when he is absent the wife’s remains fall to the ground; whether that is because of the neck or the scarf rotting is not clear. He comes back from wherever he’s been carrying provisions, possibly sourced from the hunters’ campsite, and notices the body has dropped and is covered in butterflies. He goes over, bends down and uses a stick to poke through the remains before wandering around the trees and grounds, looking up in the foliage for something he doesn’t seem able to find, followed by a stream or kite tail or gaggle or coterie, whatever it’s called, of the ever-present butterflies.
About two days later he wanders into the camp with a set of crumpled and torn
hang-glider wings. We now know that the hang-glider itself belongs to a female nudist hang-glider, would you believe it, who has leapt off the cliff above the campsite. Incidentally, this particular launch pad is known locally as the place where jilted or star-crossed lovers have a final fling. Legend has it that some bodies are never found. Hence the name ‘Spirits’ Leap’. Anyway, she jumps off in the altogether and something goes wrong and she crashes through the trees and is knocked unconscious. Her partner leaps in her bubble car, drives down the side of the cliff and somehow manages to find her lying in a clearing. She takes one look at her beloved one lying there, panics, throws her in the car after unclipping her wings, so to speak, and forgets to put her sister’s newborn baby they are looking after back in the car. She drives off at a great rate of knots to the local hospital, leaving bubs behind. It is only that night, early next morning, while going over the day’s events that she remembers about her niece and a strange-looking man with a shotgun she glimpsed as she drove down the track. Sick with worry, she drives back to the site and finally locates our guy’s campsite by, she says, following a lot of butterflies.
Meanwhile, back at the camp, the cameras show our guy bringing the baby into shot, unwrapping her, changing and feeding her, with ubiquitous butterflies all over the place. The next day the baby’s aunt is seen sneaking into the site and making off with the baby while the man is taking a nature break. He comes back, surrounded by butterflies, and once again he’s frantically running around looking for something, which in this case we know is the baby. At this point the aunt becomes frightened, and once safely in the car rings us and tells us she and baby have been threatened with a firearm, which is not strictly true. Our guy has decided to climb a tree, probably for a better view, and spends some time sitting on a branch looking out into the distance, until, suddenly startled by something, he tries to stand up, slips and knocks his head and falls, and the cord of his parka leaves him suspended from the same branch his wife was. He hangs there for a while and gradually stops struggling. It’s not clear if he has been strangled or is just dangling. Suddenly he’s covered in hundreds of these giant butterflies, and they just perch there on his body, flicking their wings. Towards dusk, and this is where things get murky, there is a huge flurry of activity and the butterflies leave en masse. What appears to be the guy’s oilskin is left hanging there, but no sign of the guy.
A short time later the helicopter carrying the AOs must have landed because they are seen coming into view from off camera with torches and infras. They cordon off the area and stay the night. However, next day an extensive search of the area, including the base of the cliff, fails to turn up any trace of the guy, living or dead, and strangely, no sign of the butterflies apart from scores of empty chrysalises of a type, I have been told, never seen before, here or anywhere else in the world. In terms of offending, we seem to have rape, assault, attempted murder, interfering with a body, murder or manslaughter or both, threatening to kill and kidnapping. We also have an apparent suicide, an apparent death by misadventure and a missing person file for someone world famous in obscure circles. Pity the chrysalises can’t talk. For those arty farty types among you, I have been told they look like that Odilon Redon print: not The Gambler; something else like that. The strange thing is the oilskin the guy was wearing looks like it’s been dipped in some sort of organic liquid steel. Forensics have seen nothing like it, and NASA have expressed an interest in doing further testing. Which brings me to the UFO sighting – alleged UFO sighting, I should say. Off the record, sources for the sighting include senior members of the AOS; however, this should be balanced by the fact that locals report similar sightings in the past around this time of the year, usually coinciding with the disappearance of the butterflies. Someone else has pointed out to me that this is just the sort of charade that Butterfly Bill was well known for. Given the existence of four bodies and one missing person, it’s highly unlikely to be a publicity stunt, but we may never know. Any questions?
My name is Wiremu Heremaia Borges. I am an entomologist. My passion is butterflies; or more specifically, chimera among butterflies. The chrysalis as a reality and a concept is fascinating to me. In its purest form a chrysalis is a rite of passage, a stargate, the room between the two worlds, moving from one state of being, the nympha, to another, the imago. The metamorphosis from human to god. The butterfly that emerges, in all its celestial and triumphant glory, has wings and a body and a finite period and purpose to live, find a mate, procreate and achieve Godhead, Nirvana. There is a meaning to its life that is apparent only to the initiated, the encloses of the mystic garden. My purpose in life is to protect the revered and the innocent. Kaitiaki. Maybe that’s why some people call me Butterfly Bill, king of the wild frontier.
With that in mind, I went into the bush with my wife in the Ureweras in a particular area beneath a cliff by Wāhirēinga, where it was reputed a colony of giant butterflies lived and bred. The locals call these creatures ‘ngā kēhua patupaiarehe’, ‘the children of the mist’. They believe these particular butterflies are manifestations of departed spirits preparing for their final journey to the afterworld. In some reported sightings the body of the butterfly closely resembled that of humans.
I specialise in time-lapse photography. After pitching up camp my wife had some visitors while I was away setting up some remote cameras. I later found out it was three young men. For some reason she decided to leave with them. I was understandably upset by this; however, when returning to the campsite with some unusual toadstools I’d found somewhere in the bush, I came across an amazing sight. Hanging from a branch close by was a dark chrysalis about the size of a human and apparently with the shape of a woman underneath. This was very exciting for me. After cleaning up from gathering the toadstools I set up a camera focused on this wonderful apparition. Every day I monitored the progress of this giant chrysalis. I noticed that every time I approached it there were high-pitched screeches and sounds like whispers coming from it; whether in alarm or warning I couldn’t tell.
Over time I began to sense that all was not right with the darkening green and gold colour of the chrysalis, and that it may have been sick. As if in confirmation, there was an increasingly offensive smell emanating from its soft jelly-like interior that seemed to attract unwelcome predators. I continued to set and clear traps for them, but again I had had no experience with chrysalises of this size, and I could not be sure that the chrysalis’ condition was not part of its normal transformation. One day, returning to camp after finding an abandoned campsite deeper in the bush with usable clothes and provisions, I saw that the long-awaited day had arrived. The chrysalis shell was lying beneath the tree. I ran over to examine the remains of the capsule and was amazed and excited to find what appeared to me to be an exoskeleton of human-like bones among the debris. I knew that the newly emergent imago of the butterfly must be nearby, waiting for the haemolymph to spread through and harden its wings. I searched everywhere, high and low, to no avail. It had mysteriously vanished.
Two days later I came across a wondrous sight in a nearby clearing: a butterfly with green wings and gold markings covering the human form of a beautiful naked young woman. She appeared to be in some distress, and the wings were crumpled like she had been in a fall. I remembered the possibility that there had been something wrong with the chrysalis: perhaps the wings had not formed properly during her incubation. She appeared to be delirious. I ran down to the creek to fill my water bottle but took a wrong turning on the way back, and heard a strange clattering mechanical sound coming from the direction of the track. I got to the side of the track just in time to see a foreign type yellow vehicle go past with a male type human and the female body of the butterfly without her wings sprawled on the seat alongside him. My first thought was that it was some sort of scientific poacher opportunist taking advantage of a money-making situation. I raised the shotgun I had found at the abandoned campsite; however, when the male tauiwi looked directly at and through me I lowered th
e weapon, and the vehicle drove on without slowing. I rushed to the place I had last seen the butterfly woman and found the useless wings where they had been amputated and discarded. Many questions went through my head. Who was in the vehicle? Where had it come from? Why had it come? How could the wings be removed? I knew that truth was often stranger than fiction. My wife would have known what to do.
I gathered the wings up and took them back to the campsite to examine them more closely. They appeared to be made of some sort of malleable metal and fabric material, such was their strength and robustness. When I scoured the area around where I had found them I heard another sound: the cry of an infant baby. Beside the nearby track I found another pupa in a blue cocoon with a human face. The cry was a mixture of human and strange little screeches like those that had emanated from the chrysalis. I put my finger in its mouth and it sucked on it hungrily. How had it got here? I took it back to the campsite and managed to feed it some powdered milk I had found at the other site. I noticed a zip-like juncture along the side of the cocoon, knowing this was common in some species. This one appeared to be a similar sort of metal to that in the wings. Unzipping it I eventually uncovered what appeared to be a female human child; but how could that be? The butterflies had come back. The baby, whatever her origin, was wet and soiled. I cleaned and dried her and she fell asleep after I had wrapped her tightly back into her cocoon. For the first time in a long time I felt content in the world and not alone. I decided to look after her until she was claimed by the mysterious tauiwi in their yellow bubble, or some other wondrous metamorphosis occurred. It was exciting to be a part of it. The next day I fed and changed her and put her down to sleep, but that afternoon something horrendous happened. She disappeared. Completely. I searched and searched, frantic with worry in case a wild animal had taken her. I was exhausted. A light rain began to fall. I decided to climb a nearby tree to see if I could see her blue cocoon lying discarded by some wild animal somewhere. I must have fallen asleep.
Huia Short Stories 9 Page 16
