The wind catches the tails of her pink scarf and puffs them out translucent and weightless
around her head, and she looks like a dragonfly floating over the asphalt edges of an overfished
pond. She’s standing below the rainbow rampart and the flapping flags marking the roof of our
grocery store. Her name is Ashley, and it breaks my heart to see her there, but I can’t look away.
I haven’t looked away, for almost six months.
around her head, and she looks like a dragonfly floating over the asphalt edges of an overfished
pond. She’s standing below the rainbow rampart and the flapping flags marking the roof of our
grocery store. Her name is Ashley, and it breaks my heart to see her there, but I can’t look away.
I haven’t looked away, for almost six months.
Mr. Watters, our biology teacher from high school, told us how one summer when he was
a kid, the monarch butterfly population had a spike, and there were so many monarchs that you’d
drive past a field or some huge patch of weeds and it’d be like looking at a giant cake covered
with candy sprinkles.
When I see her, I’m looking out into those fields and seeing what’s left. I can’t look
away. So I’ve learned how there’s a wire that runs through Ashley’s burnt arm and that when she
thinks no one’s looking, she’ll let it wind tight so her arm curls and her face goes still. Then
when someone talks to her, she pulls that arm straight. That wire — it’s connected to her face
somehow. It hurts like hell to pull on it, but that’s how she makes herself smile.
She sometimes talks to the kids at the school or meets with church groups, gives her
spiel. I heard it once, not long after her crash. She’s scarred from the fire, and she almost lost a
leg, can’t drive, walks with a cane. Her best friend died in the accident and her college boyfriend,
the one she’d left her sweet high school boyfriend for, took one look at her in the hospital and
never came back. Each day is a gift, she says to the kids. You just have to open the box.
She doesn’t believe that. Not at all. No one else knows that but me, which is why I keep
an eye on her.
Her pulls up to the grocery in their blue Dodge van. I start my car – Grandma’s hand-me-
down Buick – and I ease it along, nursing my trannie. I have to get home. There’s a memorial
tonight out by the river on land my roommate’s family owns. We’re having a bonfire in honor of
our friend Josh. He’s been gone almost two years now, died about a month after Mr. Watters quit
teaching early in our senior year, two years after the accident that burned Ashley and killed her
friend, because that’s the kind of town we live in.
our friend Josh. He’s been gone almost two years now, died about a month after Mr. Watters quit
teaching early in our senior year, two years after the accident that burned Ashley and killed her
friend, because that’s the kind of town we live in.
I swing the car around and out of the parking lot. There’s a dip at the edge of the road and
it jolts my back, sore from hanging sheetrock ten hours a day. I forget about the pain when I’m
looking at Ashley. I feel it now, but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.
# # #
The route I take from the grocery store goes past our neglected park and mismanaged
sewage plant. Because of the foul air, the park is mostly empty. Weeds spring up unchallenged
along the creek like patches of wild ear hair. In a few of those rough little spots, I’ve gotten some
milkweed to grow. It’s taller than the crab grass and the stray bits of alfalfa that migrate in from
the farms, and it’s about to seed out. I put it there for the monarchs the fall I graduated from high
school, and over the course of the last two summers, I caught and tagged two. Only two.
The monarch thing started for me in high school, my freshman year, when my buddy
Josh—who’s dead now—talked me into joining Mr. Watters’ Nature Club. Nature Club only did
one thing: tag monarchs and report them for the national count. Mr. Watters had used the
computer to sign us up with some program. About a dozen of us showed up for the first fall
meeting, mostly girls of course. Ashley was a senior, and she dragged along her jock-boyfriend,
who sat through the meeting staring at her with his tongue hanging out, pausing once in a while
to grin at us. I felt like a tiny, furry creature in a tank, and he was the guy tapping at the glass and
looking in.
Mr. Watters had been a teacher for less than three years, and during the summers he was
a river guide with a rafting company way up north. He liked to celebrity-list all the animals he’d
seen while working up there, and by the end of the semester, we’d heard about them all:
swallows, dragonflies (eight types), five species of butterflies, and four of frogs. Blue herons.
Fox snakes, if you knew how to look for them. Otters and eagles and salamanders and little
white-footed mice. A fisher lived out there along their run, he said, and he saw it pretty
regularly—and he had us all gather around his computer to look at a picture because none of us
knew what one of those was. Like a bear? Like coyote? More like a weird looking weasel the
size of a big cat, or a small dog. Who even knew we had those in Wisconsin. Apparently we did.
And that first day in Nature Club, while we were waiting to see if anyone else was going
to show up, he told us that the best animal he’d ever see—any time in his whole life, and he
didn’t think he’d ever top it in the wild—was a puma.
a river guide with a rafting company way up north. He liked to celebrity-list all the animals he’d
seen while working up there, and by the end of the semester, we’d heard about them all:
swallows, dragonflies (eight types), five species of butterflies, and four of frogs. Blue herons.
Fox snakes, if you knew how to look for them. Otters and eagles and salamanders and little
white-footed mice. A fisher lived out there along their run, he said, and he saw it pretty
regularly—and he had us all gather around his computer to look at a picture because none of us
knew what one of those was. Like a bear? Like coyote? More like a weird looking weasel the
size of a big cat, or a small dog. Who even knew we had those in Wisconsin. Apparently we did.
And that first day in Nature Club, while we were waiting to see if anyone else was going
to show up, he told us that the best animal he’d ever see—any time in his whole life, and he
didn’t think he’d ever top it in the wild—was a puma.
“What’s that?” the boyfriend asked.
“Cougar,” Mr. Watters said. “Mountain lion. Catamount—but that’s only if you’re in the
south. Panther. Ghost cat, if you like.”
“You get a picture of it?” he asked.
“There wasn’t time. It was gone hardly before I had time to realize I’d seen it. I didn’t
dare to move,” he said. “Too amazed. Wasn’t even sure I was seeing it.” Mr. Watters was a
slight man with a trimmed red beard. He wore baggy khaki pants and wrinkled, cotton shirts. He
was dressed like he was ready to head back out, like one day he might put down his dry-erase
marker and leave in the middle of a lesson.
“Bet you wished you had a gun,” the boyfriend said. Ashley elbowed him, but he ignored
her. “Weren’t you scared shitless? Those things will eat you.”
Mr. Watters paused and turned his eyes on the boyfriend, and then put them on Josh.
“Yeah,” he said nodding slowly for effect. “They will.”
“Yeah,” he said nodding slowly for effect. “They will.”
Five rafts total were out on that run, Mr. Watters told us, and in his boat he had a family –
parents, a daughter, and a college-aged son. Their raft got ahead of the rest. They were drifting
along in an eddy, and Mr. Watters looked twenty yards downriver to a spot where a low boulder
jutted out from the shore, and there, crouched over the water taking a drink, they saw the puma.
“My mouth fell open and all I could do was look, and the boy was sitting next to me, and
he saw too. Still gives me chills to think about it.”
He’d lowered his voice, and he was gentle and fierce, a madman with blue eyes, and I
heard Josh breathing.
“He looked right at us. It was like staring at life and death and all of it together at once,
looking into those eyes, knowing he could kill us without hardly giving it a thought. Then he
slipped back into the forest like you might slide into water, and he was gone, leaving us there.
I’ll never have another moment like. Not for as long as I live.”
Ashley leaned over to rest her shoulder against her boyfriend’s side. Josh shrunk back,
studying a spot on his shirtsleeve.
The boyfriend shifted, and the size of his body made the desk creek. “So, now we hunt
butterflies,” he said.
Tap, tap, tapping he went, on that glass separating us, staring at Josh and Mr. Watters and
me. But it didn’t take much sense to realize that he was looking out and if we looked at all, we
were looking in.
# # #
It’s evening, and I’ve managed not only to get my piece-of-a-wreck car home, but I’ve
eased it back and forth between town and the river about eight times hauling firewood and beer.
Once the she sky has gone black and the weed has come out, it’s a real party. Never as good as
when Josh was supplying is what we say, like it’s some kind of eternal truth, even though
probably half the people there never even knew him. But even just saying it is making me
morose. Then the fire starts to stink like rubber, and I’m pissed because some asshole threw a tire
on it, probably pulled from the river. I tell people this, but they only laugh. Someone hands me a
bottle of Jack, and I remember that I was the one who bought it.
eased it back and forth between town and the river about eight times hauling firewood and beer.
Once the she sky has gone black and the weed has come out, it’s a real party. Never as good as
when Josh was supplying is what we say, like it’s some kind of eternal truth, even though
probably half the people there never even knew him. But even just saying it is making me
morose. Then the fire starts to stink like rubber, and I’m pissed because some asshole threw a tire
on it, probably pulled from the river. I tell people this, but they only laugh. Someone hands me a
bottle of Jack, and I remember that I was the one who bought it.
If there’s been a fun part of this party, I seem miss it, and the next thing I know I’m lying
on the wet grass a ways off with a half-empty bottle hard against my leg and a girl on top of me,
named Bridget. We must have been there awhile, because I think I’m sobering up. When her hips
hit my middle in just the right spot, my spine cracks in about eight places, and I get such relief
from the pain that I think maybe I should ask her to marry me, or at least ask if it’d be okay to
take her home.
I make a sound, and she stops kissing and slides off. “Did I hurt you?” she asks. I grab
her by the hips and pull her back. She comes willingly, as if that’s what she’d wanted all along.
I’m more glad than I thought I’d be. “Tough day today?” Her hair is a blanket over us, brushing
against my face. I like the tickly feeling of it there, and then I don’t, and the don’t-like is even
better.
She says, “Are you thinking about Josh?”
“No,” I say. I squeeze my eyes so tight I see brown and golden spots. “I’m thinking about
monarchs.”
She hesitates for only a second before she says, “There weren’t any that year I signed up
to help with the count. The year that Josh died.”
to help with the count. The year that Josh died.”
I want to weep. “And Mr. Watters left. In the middle of the week. Called in and said he
wasn’t coming back. Went to do guiding full time. Said he’d be working year-round, now,
planning winter hikes.”
“But you kept us together,” she said. “You took over for him. Ran the count all by
yourself.”
“There wasn’t anything to count that year.”
“Yeah,” she says softly. “But I had a big crush on you. I think I still do.”
She breaths into my ear, making me shiver, and I have my hand under her shirt, spread
flat across the valley in the small of her back, and between that and the thing she’s done to my
spine, I’m so damn grateful to her I want to die.
# # #
I remember every year of Nature Club. I remember each year as a distinct thing.
Sometimes I think I remember every butterfly. This one, though, from that first year, is the one I
remember best.
One bad storm, Mr. Watters warned us. Warm October weather was confusing the
wildlife. A cold rain that turned into snow, which could happen at any moment, would be a
disaster for the butterflies still hanging around, waiting for some signal that told them it was time
to head south.
The school year’s first quarter was over, and we were having a quick meeting before
morning bell, counting up how many butterfly tags we had left in our stash. Ashley thought we
should have goals, and our goal should be to use up all our tags. And since there were still some
monarchs around, we should count them, she said. She volunteered her and boyfriend to check
out the preserve one more time, climb the big hill and hike to the bluff. Then she turned that
open face of hers right to me and Josh and asked if we wanted to come along. Next thing I knew
we were riding in the backseat of her boyfriend’s car and hoofing it up past the tops of the trees
to the flat prairie, to the place where a broken-off pine marks a lightning strike and the sun heats
up the brown grasses and little flowers that grow all around.
out the preserve one more time, climb the big hill and hike to the bluff. Then she turned that
open face of hers right to me and Josh and asked if we wanted to come along. Next thing I knew
we were riding in the backseat of her boyfriend’s car and hoofing it up past the tops of the trees
to the flat prairie, to the place where a broken-off pine marks a lightning strike and the sun heats
up the brown grasses and little flowers that grow all around.
We went to the overlook, where you can see the whole city, and the wetlands and the
river. You can see the factories and the houses and the forest and the farmland. You can see the
whole country, almost. But we were there to see monarchs. And I didn’t know any better then
but I know now, so I know that the miracle of it was we did see a monarch. One single
magnificent monarch, right there at the cliff’s south-facing edge, about to take flight from it.
Ashley had the net, and she floated it down over, capturing the creature inside. Just like
Mr. Watters taught us, she took the butterfly carefully from the net, talking to it, laughing a little
when it fluttered against her hand. Then she held her fingers flat and pressed the wings between
them, keeping its muscles snug so it wouldn’t hurt itself. The boyfriend caught me staring and
grinned, so I hurried to bring the little sticker-tag. She put her hand on my wrist to steady me,
and I set the tag on the wing, in the center of hand-shaped cell. Ashley pinched the tag into place.
Then she spread her fingers apart.
The monarch took hold of her with its legs. It rested, feeling around with its antennae,
dipping into the little crevices her skin made over the knuckles of her hand, sipping some sweet
or salty thing.
Even the boyfriend smiled when the wind kicked up, cold and sudden, blowing Ashley’s
hair around her head. The monarch lifted off and flew straight out from the edge of that cliff into
the wide-open sky.
the wide-open sky.
Josh grabbed my elbow with his hand. I didn’t mind. I understood perfectly.
Only now do I wonder why we didn’t put a tag on him, too. Or on us.
# # #
“Hey, I gotta talk to you.” My roommate, Brandon, kicks the whiskey bottle, so that it
jabs into my back. I’m lying on my side, my head propped on my elbow, half-curled around
Bridget in the grass. She’s like a fire and I’m trying to keep warm.
jabs into my back. I’m lying on my side, my head propped on my elbow, half-curled around
Bridget in the grass. She’s like a fire and I’m trying to keep warm.
I turn to give Brandon a look, but I can’t see his face in the dark. He says, “I know this
ain’t a good time, but I think I gotta do it now.”
I sit up. Bandon’s got his Walmart vest wrapped awkwardly over his back. His arm hangs
around a girl. I stumble to my feet, all wet and cold. I give a hand to Bridget, helping her to
stand.
I say, “It’s all good, Bro. Nothin to worry about.”
He cusses and takes a swing at me. A serious one. But he misses and sways. His girl gets
behind him and puts her arms around his middle, holding him in place. I think how it’d be good
if he kept with her this time.
“You’re all fucked up,” he says to me. “You gotta listen to me.” I put a hand on his
shoulder to steady him. “Now, I wasn gonna tell you this, but you gotta hear it.” He pauses again
and slurs at Bridget, “You just wait a minute here. I gotta talk to my bro.” She shrugs. I take her
hand.
He grabs his Walmart vest, like that’s what’s steadying him and not the girl with her arms
wrapped tightly from behind. He says, “Everybody knows, man, what you been doin. And you
gotta stop it. Right now. Knock that shit off because someone is gonna call the cops. Slap your
sorry ass with a ‘straining order. And I been thinkin bout this. You’re smart, man. You gotta get
your ass back in school. Stop followin that girl around –”
I put my hand on his shoulder, friendly, but I dig in with my fingers into the spot above
his collarbone, squeezing until he yelps. “Shut up, Brandon,” I say. “Shut up.” He does and I let
go. His head hangs, and I feel like the dick I’m sure I am, so I pat his shoulder and pull on the
blue vest. I say it again, kindly. “Shut up.” I’m using both hands now, getting the vest to sit
straight.
He struggles. “Don’t dress me, Josh. I’m fine.”
He sways, and his girl, who’d sort of let go, grabs him again and holds him standing. He
shakes his head hard, twice, like he’s just taken a blow. Then he takes a long drink from the
bottle in his hand and when he’s done, he raises it high above his head. Over a stereo blaring
early 90s metal, he calls out clear like a trumpet, “Okay all you assholes listen up. We’re all here
to have one in honor of the memory of our good friend Josh!”
He says it loud, and the sound carries past the circle of light the stinking fire makes, out
past the crowd and into the shadowy areas where the lonely people have gone. Soon everyone’s
holding up drinks saying Josh’s name, and someone calls out, “To Josh! Who sold the best weed
ever!” They whoop and cheer. It goes on and on. I feel like I’m at the speedway and just saw
someone bust.
I pick up the whiskey bottle, wet and slippery from the dew. I clank it against Brandon’s.
“To Josh.” I take a long slug and like how the whiskey punches me, right in the guts. I hand to
bottle to Bridget who makes a face but puts it to her lips anyway.
Just then the music switches off, and everything is quiet and for the first time that night I
can hear the deep sound of the slow-moving river and up above, the beating of the wind against
the side of that bluff.
Josh and me, couple of juniors, a few weeks after Mr. Watters left, middle of the school
week, just up and left. We were up there again, on the bluff. I made him come, thinking that
maybe if we found a butterfly I could make things like they were before. We’d just learned about
Ashley’s crash, about her friend dying, that she was lying in the hospital with fourth degree
burns all over one side of her body, over her face.
I kept saying to him, “Maybe. Maybe we’ll find one. I mean, we have to look.”
Josh followed along. The sun was yellow, and in the prairie, beneath the tree cut off by
lightning, it was hot. Out on the bluff, looking out over a landscape coloring itself orange and
yellow and red, the cold wind let us know that if there were any monarchs, they were on their
way to dead.
“Nothing,” He took a step closer to the edge. “There’s nothing out there. Everything is
dead.”
“Hey, buddy.” I caught hold of the tail of his coat and pulled him back a step.
“I was in love with him.”
“It’s okay, buddy.”
Josh took a deep, shuttering breath. “Fuck it,” he said, stepping back from the edge. “Fuck it.”
I did my best. We drove around everywhere. There wasn’t a monarch to be found.
# # #
It’s Saturday morning and I wake up stoned. I remember another toast and Bridget
handing me a joint. At some point Brandon lit his Walmart vest on fire and threw it into the river
where it floated a ways, all aflame, before going under. I was thinking, You hardly even knew
him. You hardly know me. Thinking, If you’d have just fucked him, you’d both have been
happier.
handing me a joint. At some point Brandon lit his Walmart vest on fire and threw it into the river
where it floated a ways, all aflame, before going under. I was thinking, You hardly even knew
him. You hardly know me. Thinking, If you’d have just fucked him, you’d both have been
happier.
Then, the sun was up, and I was in Bridget’s car. I begged her to come in, but she said
she needed to get home to her baby. I admire her for that, for turning my sad, stupid, dropped-
out-of-college, stalker-ass down.
No one knows this except Ashley, so when I wake up, I’m blaming her for my hangover,
for Bridget turning me down, for my shitty bed in the shitty trailer I’m renting with Brandon, my
shitty roommate, who misses Josh, but only for the pot. Josh did go on to sell the best fucking
pot this shitty town had ever smoked. Hell if I know where he got it. The only time I saw him
after last fall was when we were hunting butterflies, or if he was selling me pot.
It’s late, and if I don’t hurry, I’m going miss her. On Saturdays, she makes her slow way
from her mother’s van to the steps of the Methodist church, not to pray but for some aerobics
class that meets there.
It’s not reasonable or even fair, but I do kind of blame Ashley for everything that’s wrong
in my life. I blame her for being so friendly that we stayed in Nature Club, a couple of dumb
freshmen. Mostly, I blame her for being in produce that day, just about a year ago now, when I
was still taking classes at the community college, commuting forty minutes each way to get
there. I registered her there looking up, but I didn’t really give her much thought until she said,
“Hey. You were one of the butterfly kids. Weird about him leaving like that. Mr. Watters, I
mean.” And then, “I was really sorry to hear about your friend Josh. He was a nice kid.”
Ashley held a bag of grapes awkwardly, the burned hand ho lding the bag, the unburned
one steadying it. They were like a before and after shot.
mean.” And then, “I was really sorry to hear about your friend Josh. He was a nice kid.”
Ashley held a bag of grapes awkwardly, the burned hand ho lding the bag, the unburned
one steadying it. They were like a before and after shot.
It was like her saying it made it real. Like, if something was gone and you didn’t talk
about it, the thing never existed at all.
“It was an accident,” I said. “He wasn’t wearing a lifejacket and the current took him.”
Then I said, “They were in love, him and Mr. Watters. But nothing happened. Mr. Watters left. I
wish he would have taken Josh with him. I don’t care if he was a kid. I always think that if Mr.
Watters had stayed. If anyone had stayed.”
I heard her, a quiet sound. “Oh.” Then she said, “Small towns are hard places to be
single. Let alone gay. Small towns are hard places to be.”
Ashley’s eyes are brown and deep, but around the edges are jagged lines, places where
the wires run through her. She touched me, just her fingers on my wrist, to comfort me, and I felt
that pain – little shocks of it through the antennae touch of her fingers on my skin. Despite the
pain, I held very still as she touched me.
“The monarchs,” I said. “They’re mostly gone now.” My throat was dry. I was glad for
the pain. It told me we were on the same side of the glass, that I hadn’t made a mistake in telling
her about Josh. “I think we’ll see the end of them.”
She was quiet for a long time. Then she lowered her eyes and whispered, “I know.”
One of us said something about getting together sometime, but we both knew it wouldn’t
happen. I skipped class that night to figure out where she lived, parked my car outside her house
all night, followed her mother’s van the next morning to the clinic, waited in the parking lot.
When they came back out, I followed them home.
When they came back out, I followed them home.
She sees me sometimes. Well, she probably sees me lots of time, but once in a while,
she’ll let me know she sees me, or I’ll let her know I see her, seeing me. Whenever that happens,
so long as no one is looking, we take a few minutes just to stare at each other, me from my car
and her crossing a parking lot or standing outside the grocery store waiting for her mom. We
both go real still, barely breathing. On her good days, leaning hard on her cane, she’ll just barely
smile, and very slowly, with a lot of pain, she’ll hold out for me that burnt, curled hand.
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