• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 658 0

broke clear and cold, she found she could choose her dreams. She could call a memory and patiently follow it backward into flesh, sound, and sense. It would become her life once again, and she was held and safe, everything undecided, everything still new. His arms were real, carrying her over the threshold as he joked that she weighed more than one bag of groceries but less than two. Cicadas buzzed and the air was hot and sticky—June, just after the wedding. She still had on her blue rayon skirt but had taken off her stockings and shoes in the car on the drive down from Lexington. The light-blue skirt flowed like cool water over her thighs and his forearms as he carried her up the stairs. He stopped on the landing, kissed her there, and slid his hands under her so her whole weight was nothing held in his hands. She was weightless, floating in air with her back to the window and his strong arms beneath her thighs. The air around his head seemed to shiver with the combined molecules of their separate selves as he entered her and she gave in to the delirium of flight, this perfect love made on the wing.

Sometimes the dream changed itself then, and his comforting presence had the silky, pale-green wings of the stranger who had first come to her after the funeral, on the night Jewel gave her the sleeping pill. He always said the same thing to her: “I know you.” He opened his wings and the coremata rose from his abdomen, fragrant and intricately branched like honeysuckle boughs, and once again she felt the acute pleasure of being chosen.

“You knew me well enough to find me here,” she said.

And his scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, and his voice reached across the distance without words: “I’ve always known you that well.”

He wrapped her in his softness, touched her face with the movement of trees and the odor of wild water over stones, dissolving her need in the confidence of his embrace.

“Aunt Mary Edna says they’re praying when they do that,” Crys reported doubtfully.

“I guess you could say that. Butterfly church.”

Lusa and Crys had stopped in the dirt road to admire another dense crowd of swallowtail butterflies congregated on the ground surrounding a muddy spot. Every fifty feet or so they came upon another of these quivering pools of black and yellow wings that rose and scattered as they approached, then settled again on the same spot after they’d passed by. It had rained again yesterday, so there was no shortage of puddles.

“I’ll tell you something, though,” Lusa said. “It’s a no-girls-allowed church. All those butterflies you see there are probably boys.”

“Why?”

“What why? Because they have little peckers!”

Crys yelped out her sharp bark of a laugh. Lusa lived for this, to crack her up. It had become her pet secret challenge, to try for these moments when you could see all the lights come on, ever so briefly, in this child’s dark house.

“I know what you meant,” Lusa said. “Why do just the males do that. It’s called puddling, believe it or not. That’s what real-live bug scientists call it.”

“Yeah? Why do just the boy ones do it?”

“They’re sucking up a certain mineral or protein from the mud, some special thing butterflies need to be healthy. And then they actually give it to the girl butterflies, like a valentine.”

“How do they give it to them?”

Lusa paused, then asked, “Do you know how babies get made?”

Crys rolled her eyes. “He sticks his pecker in her pee hole and squirts in stuff and the baby grows in there.”

“O-kay, you know the story, all right. So that’s how he gives her the minerals. When he gives her the baby-making stuff, he actually puts it together with this whole package of other goodies she likes. It’s called the spermatophore.”

“Boy. That’s weird.”

“Isn’t it? You know what? Nobody else in Zebulon County knows that, except you and me. Even your teachers don’t.”

She glanced up. “Really?”

“Really. If you want to know about bugs, I can tell you things you will not believe.”

“Are you mad at me for saying ‘pecker’ and ‘shit’ and stuff?”

“Nah, not at all. Hell, no,” she swore,