jack lived in the basement of our house on laird avenue, where i arrived in a pink cocoon in september 1984. jack had long black hair -- long because it was longer than dad's and he combed it forward, slicked vertically across his forehead and all around his head like black seaweed.
jack collected butterflies. he pinned them into shadow boxes that he never hung on his wall, he just stacked them like clay soldiers against the baseboards of his living room. four, five, six deep. my sister and i discovered this one day when we turned the knob of his front door and pushed. he was gone, mom was watching soap operas and eating grapefruit with sugar and a green serrated spoon. we were supposed to be on our yellow plastic swing behind the garage, next to the cherry tree. we saw the butterflies, some the size of quarters, others the size of our 4-year-old hands, and then the saucer-sized, iridescent blue ones -- too bright to be real, or dead. i saw them suspended inside the box -- sewing pins pierced through their candystriped bodies. their eyes were wide open, i thought perhaps they could still fly if only the pins were taken out. we pried one of the boxes open. i felt a kind of stewardship over butterflies ever since my mom told me that my name meant butterfly (shorthand explanation for genus of butterfly). i took that as a sacred calling to free the butterflies, to never stomp on a crisp fall leaf (what if a butterfly was hiding on the underside?) and to always help a butterfly in distress without touching their wings (special butterfly dust that human hands can destroy).
we pulled the pins out of the first butterfly. it didn't move. it didn't slip and fall, didn't flutter awake and escape jack's butterfly prison. jack was evil. jack made dinner at the same time every night, and it smelled terrible. what was he cooking? one morning my mom decided to cut my hair. she combed my dark wet hair down to my chin, over my ears, down the back of my head. i saw my reflection through the vines of my dark brown curls, and realized that my hair looked exactly like the evil butterfly murdering crappy cook neighbor himself...jack. i was horrified, my mom was trying to fashion me after my mortal enemy: the man in the basement. i protested wildly. she explained that it was only a part of the hair-cutting process, that my unruly mass of curls would return once she finished. i took her word for it. she turned out to be right, and i took to combing my hair down the front of my face after my bath as a matter of routine comedy -- something that made my sister laugh and gave me a sense of vengeance taken, on the man who killed butterflies.
i later studied butterflies in more detail as a kindergartener in ms. hansen's class in half moon bay, california. we collected fat green caterpillars with sticky yellow feet and placed them in clear plastic, aerated lunchboxes with red handles on the lid. We colored, labeled, cut and pasted depictions of metamorphosis, cocoons, larva, milkweed, the voracious eating habits of a caterpillar approaching its time for chrysalis. i remembered the butterflies jack had killed. thought about how long it took to transform into a butterfly-- how much work was involved in being a caterpillar-- the effort to complete such an astonishing task. how did they know when it was time? would they sometimes forget and remain fat green slugs devouring milkweed in a sunny field at the base of a copper mine? either way, my contempt for jack was elevated as my caterpillar progressed from one day to the next.
when the day came to watch the butterflies break out of their cocoons, i saw an entirely new creature emerge from its papery shell. new legs, long black and slender tucked into crumpled orange peel wings with black webbing. they were dripping with butterfly blood, so we let them dry out on the classroom ledge -- the sun pouring through their wings like silky stained glass windows. i was immensely proud of my butterfly. i watched it intently, made sure that no one crowded it or threatened to jostle it while it rested and got acquainted with its new life as winged creature.
our butterflies became spry and curious about the corners of their plastic lunchboxes, baffled by the illusive limits of a clear plastic box. parents were invited to the school for release day -- the day that we would all set our butterflies free to tell other butterflies, other caterpillars, about their most unusual experience as subjects in a montessori classroom.
we stepped outside the playground fence to an open space where parents were flashing pleased smiles and complimenting us on our butterflies, like we had just painted them ourselves, adorned them with the perfection we could not comprehend let alone draw with a crayon.
butterflies clambored out of their boxes and escaped hastily without so much as a fond farewell to us, their noble captors. one girl panicked as her butterfly stepped onto the edge of the box with three spindle legs. noooooooooooo! she slammed the lid back into place and severed the butterfly in half. wails ensued. horrified parents hid their shock behind looks of concern. the dismantled insect was collected, in pieces, and buried next to buttercup -- the late guinea pig. i thought about jack. pushing pins through thoraxes in the dark tomb where a girl named butterfly lived upstairs. i thought about the fragility of the butterflies when they're alive, their brilliant colors in life and death -- was that what made people want to keep them in one place, to pin them down in collections?
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