Butterflies Inside

For old brown eyes who knows this was my attempt at a love story.

Painting by Fragonard. Included for reasons I know.

- “I have something to give because I want to and not because it’s needed,” said the mouth ­-lying in curvature below the eyes masking the mind of B. - to E. whose own mouth was in curvature too but not nearly as much as B. hoped it to be as she sat where she was, propped against the wide bottom of a tree, a little notebook of words on her lap and all the colours of the world coating her body like a collage attempting to slather itself into a representation of the hope she was to others in speculative forms; E. looking up just as B. took a simple hand out of a simple pocket and cut their simple chest open to pull out their simple heart, which pulsed happily as it was proffered like an egg that’s chick was just about ready to hatch from all the love it felt.

- “Oh!” E. took the heart and weighed it in her palm, rubbing the side with her thumb before popping it in her fleece pocket, her eyes glimmering, her mouth curving a bit more, seeming happy with it but not quite happy enough, B. being of the opinion that her happiness deserved to be represented by nothing less than a permanent smile so powerful it could only be compared to a torrent of water able to flood a town, a city, a country, AND a continent before being even slightly spent; knowing that their opinion was half a selfish one that would greatly increase their own happiness to see not lessening the urge in the slightest.

- “Thanks, it’s… it’s so… so red!” was what E. really said in response to the present, bemused but pleased, but, “Thanks but I’m still not as happy as I could be and I don’t know what to do to be BUT I have heard that a soul makes someone happier than a herd of shaved sheep in the summer. I heard it on the wind, surfing through tangled grapevine. So seal that hole in your chest and please go on, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please do it for me and get and then give your soul to me too. DON’T roll your eyes if you say yes,” was what the insecurity in B. imagined her wanting to actually say.

- “I want to,” B. whispered not to the person they loved but to what they imagined her wanting to say as the memory of the time they’d dreamt that E., sitting on some sunny grass with her feet in the air, had looked at them and plunged a pinkie in a nose and drew out her own soul in twisting strands of gleaming and smoky beauty- the colour of a sunset turned silver with the knowledge it wasn’t setting just for an unanimous YOU making it all the more lovely- to let the strands play freely about. “So I will, I’ll get it, it’s already yours.”

- ZIIIIIP resounded as B. grasped the sides of the hole they’d pulled their heart from, pulling it closed with a thumbs up and absolutely NO eyeroll, attempting through this to convey how much they just wanted her to smile in a way that let them know that E. too felt all the sheer happiness and pride they themselves did at just being with her; standing to go because their soul lay not in their nasal passage but somewhere else, buried beneath a bench on a hill looking down on a burnt to ash boardwalk that’d once led the way above a marsh that had dried out anyway.

- “What the hell are you talking about? Where are you GOING?” E., who worked hard and still did enough to make a normal person know she felt the same as they did, called as the moron B. turned and set off at a run down a nearby dark narrow path leading to a dark narrow gate that led to a dark narrow trail that led through the woodland the hill their soul was buried on lay behind; their hands shaking slightly as they pressed them against the gate, its metal as cold as a penguin tongue, pushing it open so erratically it slammed into an oak tree with many dents already in the wood, golden sap oozing from each one with the slowness of slug slime in its prime trying to make like a clock and chime as B. walked through.

- SHHWOOOOOOORSHHURFHGHHH went the woods like B. had entered the gullet of a ferocious beast sleeping the eve away, the gust accompanying the noise drawing their coat aside, revealing a dark brown shirt covered in patches and badges, and making their forward run become a step back so strong and gusty was it, only the thought of E. potentially smiling at them in a way that let them see what was already clear giving B. the power to step onward again, pressing against the gale like it was a potato someone had shoved in their exhaust pipe.

- SHHWOOOOOOORS- the snoring stopped mid snore once B. had gone a certain distance, and once it did the woods- priorly as dark as the gullet of a ferocious beast so ferocious light was too afraid to enter it actually would be - became alighted with a luminous green, eyes appearing between the surrounding tree branches, as wide and round as the ones of a herd of intoxicated owls, letting out the glow, the irises of them all different two dimensional shapes.

- “Good ol’ eyes, you’re peaches in cream for this!” B. called, assuming with a good nature borne from a lack of thinking about bad nature that the eyes were watching for the singular reason of keeping the way lit, keeping up their quick pace until a snake tongue fork in the trail appeared that they simply couldn’t remember being there before, the pathway of each being equally dark and unlit and unfamiliar and forcing them to ask. “Oh peaches, can you do more than just light this no-decision-needed section? Can you point? Can you gesture? Can you light the way I’m supposed to go? E. is waiting! I can’t get lost.”

- “The way to go you ask for?” said a disembodied but otherwise normal nose, appearing like a leader in the middle of the fork and flaring itself wide enough for the teeth lining each nostril, for the tongue lying within each one too, to be revealed, its words sliding out and writing themselves in the air. “Easy to find if you wish. Go right to go left, go left to go right. Peasy of the easy.”

- “But is going left to go right the right way to go?” B. gazed into the nostrils, at the tongues which swayed even when not being used like the heads of mesmerised snakes just waiting to be unfurled from their baskets, mesmerised almost too by how pink and flat they were. “You see I have to get to the hill with the bench on that looks upon the remnants of a burnt boardwalk and an unburnt but dry marsh and I have to get there quick, and. I can’t do quick things quickly if I make the wrong choice and end up on the wrong path.”

- “Easy to find if you wish, the right path”, the nose spoke again, grinning savagely with both its little nostril mouths. “Go left to go right and go right to go left. Simple decision to make, simple. You can return to any path, can backwards come you can, that isn’t forbidden. All this simple can be made simpler though, for the rusher, the want it quick and nower. It can, yes, if a mistake made to be made with no consequences had isn’t what you want. Give something to the woods you must. Freely and happily drop to the ground, a possession. Then the path of right will light.”

- “A COAT A COAT A COAT!” The eyes spoke, not aloud but in the head of B. who fingered their threadbare coat, pushing the tips of their fingers through the overused and thus stretched button holes lining it, cradling too the little brown buttons that perched above the fraying hem that had been fraying since its birth without ever fraying more, thinking back to the day - Coat Day - when they’d been draped in the fabric, fondled in the womb of the thing.

- “My coat? But it was made by my grandfather! And he sewed the last stitch with his magic sewing hands! And he only made garments for the family! To keep them warm and safe from the most mortal types of danger! And not one of us has ever given one up before, not one! And he’s dead! You really want the coat?”

- “THE COAT THE COAT THE COAT THE COAT”, was repeated with the type of finality only comparable to a hammer hammering home a truth nail into the two-by-four plank of wood that is the mind of man, the nose, grinning so wide with its nostrils it looked demonic, whispering along, the words slithering through the air like the written backbones of snakes.

- “Okay,” B. nodded, further hesitation given no heed once it was confirmed with all extra space for doubt being sucked into a vacuum what they had to do to continue on, shrugging off the coat, dropping it like a bead of sweat to a ground which swallowed it whole with no pause; the right sleeve of the coat being the last thing to vanish, the empty thing moving as it went down in a distinctly waving type way, B. waving right back at the right sleeve as the right pathway to take was revealed, the left one remaining while the right ceased to be.

- “Waillllllllllll”, went the pathway as B. stepped out onto it, carefully because of the lack of light, the eyes having stopped their wanting to be around and watch, and, “Wailllllllll”, it continued as B. walked through the enveloping darkness with no clue whether their head was still on or if their hands had become fishes until the wail became a, “Whoooooooo!”, as the pathway ended and B. found themself stood at the charred crumbling start, and end, of what had been the boardwalk across the dry marsh, which, surprise surprise, was longer dry but moist, thick, and hungry to suck at the ankles and knees of any unfortunate who thought they could wade onwards and upwards.

- Rustle went the dry and happy to stay that way fabric of the trousers of B.; not a cherished family heirloom like their coat had been but a simple pair of emerald green cotton ones that fitted loosely and comfortably, ones that E. often said she liked them in and no lie and, once, had touched their face after she said it in a way that made them feel like they were a person that was, and even could be, loved by a face like hers which was as close to a high-on-a-hill sun setting on a city renowned for its romance as a face could be.

- “I know, I know, I know you want to stay dry”, B. semi-crouched and spoke directly to the trousers, touching the green balls of lint that’d collected and rubbing the fabric lines that ran up and down them with no up nor down to go to. “But dry you cannot be, dry-not is a state you will have to get used to being”.

- Rustle went the trousers again, and it was a slightly more sad rustle than the previous one, a burdened rustle that wrenched B.’s heart from right to left and back and made them decide on another hard thing considering they knew that such a great pair of trousers wouldn’t be left alone for long without an owner; stepping out of them to reveal to a nearby shadow- lying leisurely as shrouded as a widow’s eyes-  their bare legs, their bare everything below the waist, only their long brown shirt remaining to cover, slightly, what was exposed as they hung thegarment with care gently over the extended branch of a nearby tree, the up-down lines of them creasing as they did so that some resembled featureless smiles and others featureless frowns.

- “Hallo water, hallo cold,” B. murmured as cold wet mud of marsh climbed to their chest, and higher, to their neck!; a chill making their exposed flesh a puckered featherless goose wing as from behind the sound of their former trousers rustling to no one was heard by no one; a splash of the non-existent sort, following the existent splashing they had made as they entered the marsh, coming from a suddenly imagined E. who appeared to get them through the loss, swimming up from behind, her eyes - brown and flecked and warming B. right down the centre of their chest, to their cockles and giblets, their absconded heart beating faster wherever the owner was keeping it - gazing up at the sky as she swam backward on her back in the thick mud, paddling like a holidayer compared to B.’s laboured marching advance.

- “Why are you not swimming my love?” imagined E. asked in a voice very unlike her real one - B.’s imagination fabricating her to a thing only feeding into their fears - the splashing her arms and legs made in the mud making like a child in the 19^th century to be seen but not heard, rendering her a phantom swaying through intangible reeds. “If only you were swimming, you’d be making so much more progress compared to now when you’re being so slow and slothly in the face of the fact that I’m waiting! Waiting for so long and with a long unsmiling face.”; one of her paddling arms stretching out and imaginarily prodding B. as she said that, smiling the smile she always smiled when she was making fun and having fun, the smile that B. wanted to always be around because MY GOD it was beautiful.

- “I’m going, look, I’m moving along and I’m making progress so don’t appear and make me think less,” B. laughed in response to imagined E.’s imagined words but still tried to make their steps bigger, their strides strideier, not swimming still for the simple reason that their up-to-the-ankles-in-mud feet were too heavy and ladened for the jump up and start.

- Squelchy squelch was the sound of their steps - serenading a hovering above crescent moon as it carved into a portion of the night - increasing their length as much as they could until the length of them was actually shortening, fractionally at least, the distance between where the marsh had started and where the marsh ended which once had appeared long and great but once the motivation for longer steps came suddenly shot up to be just about short and average enough for B. to easily flop onto their belly and grab at the long reeds of grass on the sodden mud of the bank and draw themself up and out of the mess, lying just a metre away from the rising hill of their abandoned youth.

- “Climb if you dare, a soul lies upon me up there. Yours could it be? I guess we will see. If not you’ll never go freeeeeee”, the voice of the rising hill, made of grass as green as the teeth of a moss addict, came out and would have been alarming if B. hadn’t known like a fact making a pact that the soul was theirs and that they certainly would go free; climbing the hill with no time to waste, the sound of their breath like a balloon being pumped up and released and pumped up and released, scaling the steepness with just the occasional use of their hands and feet, clambering like a goat whose hooves had seen better days until the steepness was gone and it levelled out and the wooden bench B. had once sat on daily rose up, looking just the same as it once had.

- “SOUL!” B. shouted loud, the wooden bench immediately rearing slightly on its squat curved legs like a horse come sixty- the mandatory horse age for it- being prostately checked, bucking up and down and coming up close to B., rubbing its front on the knees and thighs of the near nude figure, testing the quality of their metal, some of the planks of wood of it slightly changing form to form the beginnings of a cage ready to capture the possible liar, sniffing up and down before getting the right scent and relaxing, all the tension of its wood draining away as the speaker was revealed as being the one, the owner.

- “Yes, soul, I’ve come back you and for good reason too. I want her to have you and she wants you to be able to smile! Forever! I’ve come for E. you see,” said silly B. – as unaware as an unanswered phone that they were getting all confused by imagined words and desires as to what she wanted and what they should actually do  –  as, with a well swallowing something much larger than its opening and struggling gurgle, the hole they’d once dug to put the soul down into because they were afraid of having it as it had been at the time, (at the time it being a strange scaly thing that seemed to want more than anything only to make B.’s own skin as hard as the armouresqe substance of it and also wanted them to give it to every person they met though they didn’t want to), began to finally be dug up; B. shoving their hands deep into the mound of earth, as moist as a river bed when the river it bedded was as moist as a river was, the black soil oozing up and around their wrists, dirtying the hanging sleeves of their shirt which just got moister all over as sweat perforated the fabric and they dug far past the point they thought they had buried the soul up to, until they reached a wall of solid wet that seemed clustered, atoms of liquid forming a barrier they couldn’t bypass.

- “It’s really you I see, returner of the soul is thee, but where is the sacrifice, the roll of personal dice? Give it up, give it all up, petulant pup, and then and only then will the item be sent up,” the hill B. was up to the waist in spoke, the voice actually raising them back up and out of the hole they’d dug and making them finger the only thing remaining on them to sacrifice, the patched and badged brown shirt oh so fancied by B. for its caressing collar, its looking good even when not tucked in.

- “I guess it’s time,” B. spoke without a question of if it was right to the shirt, undoing the buttons but holding it to their chest tenderly; “Time for what?” the shirt responded, sheer confusion in its voice because of course it couldn’t see and of course it could only hear the voice of B; “Time to…” B. paused, not wanting to distress the shirt, not wanting it to panic and writhe and for the very last moments they had together to be bad moments. “To… to iron you, I know how you like to be ironed. It’s a warm feeling isn’t it.”; “Oh yes! It’s such a warm feeling and I get so smooth! I like it a lot,” the shirt shouted happily, wriggling itself around B.’s shoulders with glee until it began to be removed from them and had to simply wriggle limply in the air. “Does the iron still need to be warmed up, or are we starting straight away? I’m so excited and happy so I hope straight away”; “It’s straight away love. Right now in fact,” B. laid the shirt gently on the hill, so its arms were spread wide and, with a bang that echoed around the hill rolling around them like impressionistic paintings, and a flash of flame, the shirt vanished.

- “Num num. Good bud,” said the hill as a grinding whir came from the hole that’d been so far dug and, with the jerky movements of a bolt of lightning caught in low frame rate, a battered box with scratches to the side - as if the denizens of dirt had tried their best to break in - emerged, the lid popping open like a finger frozen mid-waving the then nude B. closer; B. going closer, stepping softly to the box and then falling flat on their back as what was in the box sprung out in a blur and wacked into their stomach, winding them as a small wooden door with already faded paint appeared just above their belly button.

- “Hallo soul, hallo and welcome back,” B. rubbed a finger over the small brass knob of the door, which creaked softly in response, before springing up and running in any direction because it didn’t matter what way they went because they would always find their way back to E.; no obstacles or harsh lights and sacrifices blocking their way home, the soul seeming to have made them lighter, lifting them slightly above the ground so they practically flew into the waiting presence of her who wasn’t really waiting at all but chewing a pencil and writing, not looking up until B. coughed, knelt, and smiled.

- “You’re naked,” she said. “What happened to your clothes?”

- “Naked I am. I gave up my clothes, who needs clothes, besides, I brought you something.”

- “Something? For me? Why?”

- “No reason, I wanted to.”

- “Where did you run off to?”

- “To get the something I’ve bought for you. I think it will make you smile.”

- “You’re insane, always trying to get me to smile.”

- “How else will I know you’re happy?”

- “By asking, “ E. blinked at B., reached out, and brushed a strand of hair from their face before shaking her head. “So what is this thing that will make me smile?”

- “Well, I hope it will make you smile anyway.”

- “Only hope! Well, do you want a quick smile or a long smile?”

- “A really long smile, a forever one preferably. But it can be a quick one, that would be good too.”

- “That will be hard to achieve you know. A forever smile doesn’t come to lips easily, I’ve heard.”

- “Let’s hope it’s good enough then.”

- “I’d hate to let you down. If you went down, I wouldn’t smile, not even briefly. Where is this something for me?”

- “It’s here, behind this door on my stomach.”

- “Oh thank God, you mentioned it, I was wondering about the door. I was afraid to ask, afraid I was mad.”

- “Nothing scary, your mind isn’t bent. It’s just blocking the place where your something is.”

- That’s unusual. This is unusual. You are acting unusual. Jesus.”

- “I know I am, but I’m worried and insecure but not so much that I can’t admit that, and I just need this to happen. I just need you to open this door and for the something behind it to do what I hope it’ll do for you. I need that and I’m sorry it’s about me.”

- “… I’ve never opened a human door before,” E. said after a pause in which she put down her pencil and notebook.

- “There’s a first time for everything. I’ve never had a door be opened on me before. Never had a door before neither.”

- “I guess I’d better break the mould for both of us then.”

- “Break it.”

- “Here I go.”

- E. reached out, touched B.’s stomach gently, and tugged on the brass door knob of their stomach door; it swung open as easily as anything to let her in; a pitch black nothing filling the doorframe so pitch and black and nothing light looked unable to survive beyond it as it would be starved of all necessities; the opening to the doorframe not even appearing as one, appearing instead as a rectangle vacuum, a 2D equivalent rather than a fully-fledged able-to-go-right-on-in opening; that is until a high pitched fluttering fluttered from all that dark with all the confidence the only sound capable of coming from such a thing would have, sauntering out nonchalantly and making the pitch dark nothing appear other than as it had appeared, making it clear that it was a fully-fledged opening that things could emerge from; a torrent of butterflies, following the fluttering’s suit, all with colours of green and brown and blue and gold and red and purple and orange and yellow and white and pink, doing just that, approaching the entrance of the little door with no caution or consideration for what the others with them wanted, rushing en masse so the entire mass of them blocked each other from leaving until, with the tiny satisfying pop of a cork going flying into the hemisphere, they went, cascading into the air.