Butterfly

[fiction]

How do I explain the butterfly if I don’t explain the heat?

My sister and I were walking to the corner store to buy snacks with money from my grandma, who was dying. She had been dying for as long as I could remember though, so it didn’t really bother me. What did bother me was getting dragged to India for my entire summer vacation, just so my mom could feel guilty about abandoning my grandma and vaguely threaten to move us all to India forever.

Chennai was so hot that most days my sister and I stayed inside, picking fights and eating too much until it was finally nighttime. We spent our days waiting for the chance to lay down, blasting the frigid AC, and watching the streetlights through the ornate prison bars on every window. It was the type of heat that turned stray dogs into rabid beasts, and parents into monsters.

At the store, we stared at the aisles, the currency weird and the snacks weirder. In turn, the cashier stared at our shorts and bright tank tops, our ungreased hair and broken Tamil. We were brown in a country of brown people, and she still stared. She thanked me in English and waved goodbye.

We were walking back home when on the side of the road, I saw a flash of something black and electric blue. Perfectly preserved and perfectly dead, the butterfly stuck out amongst the piles of garbage, glinting enticingly. Crouching, my sister pinched the butterfly and shoved it into her pocket. Her knees brushed against layers of garbage, and she got up, sickeningly unaware.

When we got home, my grandma was watching the news and my mom was asleep. My sister pulled the lovely black/blue butterfly out of her pocket, now crumpled and mangled. It was unholy, like she had brought it to life just to kill it a second time. I scooped it out of the trash, and waited until nighttime. Cradling the butterfly’s broken body, I carefully pushed it through those prison bars and watched it fall back to the concrete ground. The air smelled like manure, sweet and pungent and velvety. In her sleep, my grandma groaned.

Sanjana Raghavan is a student at George Mason University and lives in Fairfax, Virginia. When she isn’t writing or camping out at the library, she enjoys chasing down random dogs on the street, and going to yoga to nap on the mat (and so she can tell people she went to yoga today).