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Butterfly

November 23, 2018/in Flash Prose, Flash Prose, Winter-Spring 2019 / by Sanjana Raghavan

[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).

https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png 0 0 Amanda Lopez https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Amanda Lopez2018-11-23 11:31:102018-11-24 11:36:17Butterfly

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Genre Archive

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Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

May 9, 2025/in Blog / Gale Naylor
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Products of Our Environment

March 14, 2025/in Blog / Mitko Grigorov
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Mother-to-Mother: An Open Letter about White Privilege and Fragility

November 22, 2024/in Blog / Dr. Valerie Nyberg
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Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Dig Into Genre

May 23, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Lauren Howard
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The dreams in which I’m (not) dying

April 25, 2025/in Midnight Snack / paparouna
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On The Map

March 28, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Ariadne Will
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Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every third Friday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

Tale of the resistant apple tree

June 6, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/TaharBekri.jpg 512 340 Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson2025-06-06 11:00:072025-06-02 19:06:30Tale of the resistant apple tree

Talyshi Wall Graffiti and other poems

May 30, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Ghazal
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we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

May 16, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes
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https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/headshot-translator-Gabriella-Bedetti.jpg 400 400 translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes https://lunchticket.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/lunch-ticket-logo-white-text-only.png translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes2025-05-16 11:00:362025-05-14 17:05:21we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

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School Lunch

An occasional Wednesday series dishing up today’s best youth writers.

Today’s slice:

I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Brendan Nurczyk
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A Communal Announcement

April 28, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Isabella Dail
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Seventeen

April 14, 2021/in School Lunch, School Lunch 2021 / Abigail E. Calimaran
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Word From the Editor

The managers of Lunch Ticket all agreed that issue 26 needed to have a theme, and that theme had a responsibility to call for work relating to what we are seeing in society. We wanted a theme that resonated with Antioch University MFA’s mission of advancing “racial, social, economic, disability, gender, and environmental justice,” and we felt it was time to take a stand…

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