Balance of Fragile Things

by Olivia Chadha

  It bit me! Kill it, bháí! Kamal tossed him a knife. His nine-year-old hands clenched his foot as if pressure would make the serpent withdraw its poison. Snakes hid everywhere on their property, under beds, beneath bales of wheat—loathed demons of the earth.

  Paul lifted the knife and dug his heel into the soil for balance, but he froze when the snake hissed. It buckled back into itself, threatening to uncoil in his direction. Fear consumed Paul, and he dropped the knife and ran to get his father.

  Papaji wiped his forehead with the back of his rough and calloused hand, tucked the edge of his turban back into its form, and slung his shotgun over his shoulder. Kamal was sweating when they found him amidst the forest of wheat. His foot, bloodied by the fangs that had entered his skin, was now twice its normal size and purple.

  Where is it? Papaji aimed his shotgun at the ground around them, but Kamal said it had gone back into the thicket. Papaji smacked Paul across his cheek and told him he should have killed the snake so it would not bite again. Or do you want it come out of the earth and bite you too, na? What good are you, puttar? He addressed Paul in the same tone he used to speak with the washer boy.

  Papaji pushed up the sleeves of his kurta, leaned over Kamal, and took his injured foot in his hand. Hold your brother steady, he said. Like a skilled surgeon, he flicked open his knife and cut a sizeable hole around the two deep bite marks. Kamal screamed. Papaji put his mouth to the wound, now rushing with blood, sucked the venom, and then spat.

  Hurry, puttar. Follow me.

  Papaji carried Kamal back to the haveli and asked his wife to fetch the nearest doctor. Paul’s little sister, Prithi, cried amidst the commotion. It was five hours before anyone came to look at Kamal, five hours of writhing pain and prayer. Wahe guru, wahe guru—his mother’s prayers steadied everyone. But when he came, the doctor was pleased by Papaji’s method of venom extraction and thought Kamal had a good chance of healing on his own after his body dealt with the fever and poison. The doctor cleaned the wound with iodine and hot water, then tied it up while instructing Kamal to remain upright to keep the venom away from his heart. The doctor gave Papaji a small flask of whiskey to administer to Kamal for the pain and told him to clean the dressing on the wound each day. He said he would return in a week.

  Kamal beat the poison; the snake wouldn’t be his murderer. Yet Papaji still blamed Paul for Kamal’s tragic life; Paul felt guilty just by touching the letter. Though he was now a man with children of his own, the whisper of memory drew Paul back into a world of childhood regret and guilt. Paul grew frightened of the day when he would trip over that snake and have his turn with the fangs because he’d failed to kill it in the wheat fields of his youth. Paul had always hoped to find likeness with his family in his own appearance, but instead it set him apart. His face was round; Kamal’s was thin. His nose was large; Kamal’s was a perfect symmetrical slope. His hair was soft; Kamal’s was thick, like a horse’s tail. They were foils. Not to mention the terrible scar that ran up Paul’s body from mid-thigh to his upper arm. He’d been told that when he was two, in a fit of curiosity he’d pulled a pot of boiling oil down onto himself. His torso today still looked as though it had gone through a meat grinder, as the scar stretched across his broadening adult form.

  “Darling?” Maija’s voice jarred Paul into the present.

  “This—what is this, broiled beef?—lacks flavor and spice.” Paul spoke angrily through his full mouth.

  “Did you hear me? Have you read—?” Maija asked.

  Vic shoved food into his mouth at an alarming speed.

  “Mundá, slow down or you’ll choke.” Paul placed his large hand on Vic’s hand.

  “My head hurts,” Vic said. “May I please be excused?”

  “Yes, darling, of course.” Maija turned to Vic when she spoke.

  “No, puttar, stay.” Paul dropped his fork on his plate.

  Paul noticed Isabella’s face change from white to green. She put her hands over her mouth and seemed to win the battle with a beast in her stomach, but then lost the war. She ran to the bathroom, and Paul heard the purge

  Maija looked at Vic. “Tell me, Vic, darling, does she have boyfriend?”

  Vic shrugged his shoulders, made a gross-out face, and mouthed, “I don’t know.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Paul said. “It’s probably nerves, the play.”

  “Darling, the letters.” Maija sighed.

  Paul growled, stood, pushed the chair behind him to the floor, and walked out of the room. He returned with the tall stack of letters, which he threw on the table, tipping the salt and pepper shakers. He tore open the envelopes one by one, occasionally tearing the letter inside. He read, took large draughts of his beer, grunted, and stabbed his wife with kirpan-sharp glares.

  Then Paul lifted his chair from the ground, sat back down, and asked for the good scotch. Vic brought the bottle to the table with a glass. He asked for two more glasses, poured an inch into each glass, and passed one to his wife and one to his son.

  “Sardar Harbans Singh is coming. We will need to prepare.”

  No one pressed him for details, and for that Paul was thankful.

  On the Wing

  Metamorphosis

  Posted on October 7

  Some people hate the winters here because they expand across six of the twelve months of the year. Others find only the early summer exciting, with the end of school and ignition of fireflies, like fairies, floating through a transformed and magical night. I don’t have a favorite season, but the in-between days when nature prepares for change have a special place in my heart. When seasons change, nature shows us who she really is. She’s vulnerable at the end of summer when the grasses have grown too high and face decay and drought. Things go in reverse—leaves experience vertigo as they fall from their royal seats at the tops of willows, oaks, and other deciduous relatives. Flowers retract their blooms; petals turn mushroom-brown. Nature begins to shut her doors as bears prepare for hibernation, and many late-season butterflies reach their Spartan-esque pupa, which will remain frozen in stasis until the springtime thaw. Autumn is a time of en masse preparation.

  Now, here in Cobalt, New York, the clouds have begun to darken and wrap fog around us like a wool scarf. There’s little left for us to do other than self-soothe with long walks trampling through the fallen leaves. After the sun escapes the day, on a fairly clear night, I climb out my window and lie on the roof under the stars. The return of my friend Orion with his canine companions makes me happy. Every fall I wait for him to appear; throughout the year my eyes search an empty night sky for his figure, even though I know he is not there. Signs of consistency bring my mind peace.

  The metamorphosis must bring the caterpillar comfort. After she consumes more than 2,700 times her weight, her tired jaws must celebrate when she hears her internal scale telling her she’s fattened enough. Then, she casts a silken thread from her mouth, lassos a branch, flips around like a tiny acrobat, and holds the thread with her toes. Then she unzips her exoskeleton coat of caterpillar skin and exposes her hard chrysalis self underneath. Inside, during her longest rest, cells rearrange and move into different order. I wonder what it feels like to change, to truly morph like that. I wish I could rearrange into something like a grizzly bear or wolf—not a werewolf with its full moon limits but to shape-shift into something wild and strong forever, something that belongs only to nature.

  I wonder if the unnamed butterfly I found earlier is endemic to Cobalt; it looks quite similar to the one I found a week ago except for the difference in color and shape on each side. It must be a part of the blue family because of the color, though it’s possible it is a copper because I’ve been wrong about identifying them before.

  It reminds me of the Spring Azure I saw months ago. I was sitting atop a clump of mud near a puddle of rainwater on the path I was taking beside the Chautauqua River; I thought my eyes were tricking me. I thought a piece of bright blue sky had fallen to the ground. The sun lit its wings in
a way that reflected its slightly powder-blue iridescence. It must have been a male because they tend to be flashier to the human eye than the females. I kneeled down and lay flat on the damp ground about one foot away. It couldn’t have been larger than my thumbnail, wings open. As it was so consumed with its meal of salt and nutrients from the wet earth, it didn’t even seem to notice my presence. We spent nearly two minutes next to each other. I could also make out its drinking straw, the proboscis. Its wings were still warming to the world as they weren’t fully uncurled and were still moist from its chrysalis. I read that Spring Azures only live for a few days before they lay eggs and die. Most of us think of the life of a butterfly as only the time when they are in the adult stage, in flight. The time it lives as an egg, caterpillar, in chrysalis to pupa, should be considered its infancy. If its life was three days long, and I spent two minutes with it, then we were more than passersby, perhaps acquaintances.

  It would be a shame if the nameless blue remains so. I will take it on as my special duty to find out what it was like when it was alive, so that in death, it can find peace. I’ve spent a great deal of time searching through the Internet and the limited books I have here at my fingertips, and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. If anyone is reading this, if you have any idea what this butterfly is called, please post a comment below. Here is a brief description: one inch across the full body, maybe less, outer margins of the forewings and hind wings have a whitish fringe, the left side of the body is mostly an iridescent blue and the right side is an earthy brown, and there are white circles filled with black scattered along the post-median area of the wings. The left side has slightly sharper edges than the right. I have found butterflies that match parts of this description. Perhaps it’s a new breed I’ve found, or perhaps nature has created a freak, like me.

  Please post a comment below if you know what I’ve found.

  0 COMMENTS

  Maija

  Maija saw tiles. From behind her counter in Jones Drugs, she looked at Mrs. Eleanora Finch and saw marble, glass, porcelain, and travertine. There were so many shapes and sizes, from the smallest and most variegated used to craft classical Italian mosaics to the sapphire squares that allowed Eleanora’s kitchen and bathroom floors to match. How far had the little blue gems traveled to arrive in such a place? Were they made in China or Taiwan, or had some skillful Mexican or Italian man flattened a lump of clay into perfect thickness, sliced it into squares, and then fired it in a kiln? Maija wondered if he would hand paint each one or simply cover the squares with blue glaze and place them into the kiln’s inferno once more. She could see him bending slightly and sliding the tray into the fire, a movement not unlike a child from a fairy tale his grandmother had told him about, a curious boy who was pushed into the oven and baked in the dough. Would he even have guessed that his tiles, from far across the Pacific or Atlantic and then a series of smaller seas, would arrive in a small town and play such a central role in a life so unaware of the importance of tile density and resistance? Maija couldn’t just come out and ask her. She couldn’t control the images and thoughts that poured into her mind as she stared across the counter at Eleanora Finch.

  Maija took one look at Eleanora and knew she would die soon. She would have a heart attack.

  Eleanora was the head of Cobalt High’s PTA. And here, this Sunday, Eleanora’s clogged arteries wouldn’t be death’s agent provocateur—no, it would be the blue-gray tiles that covered her shower that would crack her skull as her chest tightened and her feet slipped on the water.

  As Eleanora handed her the small piece of paper from Dr. Green’s office, her hand grazed Maija’s wrist, and through this teensy touch, Maija saw something worrisome. What she saw without her eyes was not a complete and total picture but a series of images and flashes of sounds: Eleanora’s floral Sunday dress hanging on a towel rack to loosen the wrinkles with steam; a shower running; a thud; blood mixing with water. It felt like a presage whispered to her from an inaudible voice. Maija took Eleanora’s prescription and told her it would be ready in ten to fifteen minutes if she wanted to wait. Hoping Eleanora would wait, Maija attempted to sound as pleasant as she could and even added a sappy smile at the end of her sentence. Eleanora smiled at Maija, asked her how she was, then turned her back to her before Maija could reply.

  Maija could never bring herself to truly rely on her visions. Sometimes the presage was dead on, and she felt it in every scruple of her being. She’d see something, and it would happen. Like the time she got up in the middle of the night with the feeling she should lock the door and in the morning heard that the neighbor’s house had been robbed. Other times, particularly when dealing with death, these phantasms of her mind were more imprecise and symbolic, as the recent one with Papaji seemed to be. They could also be a manifestation of her anxieties and fears. She’d never understood why she couldn’t see her family’s futures. That was a cruel joke. Or perhaps the sight had to have limitations. Without vulnerability, her ability would be too powerful. This gift was a curse. But perhaps the disturbing image of Eleanora lying like a dead fish on the floor of her shower, breathing in the water that had puddled around her body, meant only that she would have an awful fall. Maija’s mind may have altered the vision to include her latent feelings about Eleanora, who, since she had moved from the house next door five years ago, hadn’t called her once.

  No, she realized, this forecast was true. She had felt Eleanora’s heart stop and her throat close.

  Maija both believed and didn’t believe her visions. If she doubted them too much, she would doubt herself, and it would be maddening to think that she was lying to herself. Still, Maija’s confidence regarding her sight was waning because of her recent divination malfunction, the case of Mr. Bozeman. He came in last month as a new patient to fill a Viagra prescription. She had a terrible vision of a dark room in his house on Monroe Avenue, where he kept a girl no more than five years old tied to a chair and dressed in provocative clothes. She’d assumed from her vision that he was molesting a little girl and called the police with an anonymous tip that led nowhere. She even stole his address from his medical records and sat in her car one night across the street from his house, just in case she saw a child in need. It nearly drove her mad for a whole week, until she convinced the police anonymously that she was a neighbor and heard a fight and glass breaking. It turned out, the police said, that Mr. Bozeman was just babysitting his granddaughter. Why Maija saw what she had seen was beyond her. Regardless, a moment of misleading clairvoyance had been a blow to her self-esteem, not to mention her conscience, because she rarely acted upon the visions. If the images in her mind were becoming questionable, Maija feared the worst: that her sanity was finally giving way to the imagined future.

  Perhaps Eleanora’s demise would not come to pass, but still Maija felt the urgency to try to save her former friend from a potentially painful end. Maybe the Plavix would thin her blood enough to give her another season, but medicine was about as accurate as soothsaying. Everything is theory, she thought, and most medicine had a success rate similar to the placebo in trials. The pills considered actual medicine were guesses that made large corporations piles of cash. If you popped a pill, your world of troubles nearly vanished, along with your liver. Nothing was ever truly certain; this was the only fact that Maija truly believed.

  Maija watched Eleanora spin the display of plastic reading glasses. She was, as her surname suggested, avian in shape, with a face that drew to a slight point in the center and long fingers that mocked feathers. She seemed so young and didn’t appear sick.

  Maija typed Eleanora’s information into the computer and put the slip of paper in a plastic basket behind her. She glanced at a postcard that a chain pharmacy recently mailed to her offering relocation to their newest store and top salary for experienced technicians. She propped up the card next to her screen so she could read more about it while she worked. The store was in Orlando, Florida, and she’d always wanted to see a white-s
and beach. Beside the postcard was her favorite photo of Paul, taken during Christmas a few years ago at the Jones Drugs company party. He’d had a few eggnogs and looked like he was having a great time, smiling, laughing. Someone had dared him to put the plush antlers atop of his turban, and he never was one to pass up a dare. It was the small things Maija kept in her station that distracted her from the reality of her day-to-day. Palm trees and plush antlers were powerful numbing agents, as powerful as cocaine eye drops.

  “Hey, lady. I’m next.”

  A lumpy-looking man stood at the counter. He came in from time to time to fill his antipsychotic drug, and today he looked worse than usual. His prescription was lost among his banana-length fingers as he held it out to where Maija had been standing earlier. The line had grown during the mere moments her back had been turned. Of course, the phone began to ring as well—line one, line two, and then line five were all on hold while she accepted a glare from the man with the big hands. This pharmacy had only one pharmacist, Tom Tingle, a man who on some days resembled Santa Claus and on others a truck driver. A girl named Shandy, whom Tom called their intern though it had been more than ten years since she’d walked through the doors of any school, managed the register. The pharmacy also had a drive-through window, but, thankfully, few of their customers had discovered this additional convenience.

  Maija left the phone lines blinking and gave her physically present customer her attention. Tom Tingle was sitting on his stool as usual, not filling prescriptions but ready to check Maija’s work after she was through. He smiled impatiently at her and moved the toothpick from corner to corner in his mouth. Today he looked like he drove a big rig.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  The man responded by shoving his scrip forward once more and grunting with his mouth closed. His breath reeked even through his pursed lips. Maija looked at the scrip; it was the anti-seizure medicine Dilantin. She didn’t need her power of insight to know that the dosage was extremely high, even for a man of his size.