Nebraskan Butterflies

Aza clenches the steering wheel tighter, the flapping of monochromatic butterfly wings only decibels greater than the rain. She glances back at the creatures pressing their legs against their transparent habitat, and numbly presses a finger to her mouth. The glumness inside her threatens to burst, but the butterflies mend her, bit by bit, unknowingly.

She relishes the wind-whipped water hurling itself against the car, thickening into choked car-oxygen. There are no other cars on the road, no other drivers to hurl fists at her clumsy driving. If her mother was in the car, her mother would drunkenly giggle a bit and throw her hands in the air with the music, ignoring the storm. (Aza has a faint memory of one car trip with her mother, which is where Aza pulls this image of her mother.) But there is no more music now, only the sounds of butterflies dipping their wings into the meshed panels -- forging an escape plan without knowing that escape is their only option.

Her mother’s dying wish was to release the butterflies in the air -- like the majority of terminally ill people Aza had met in the hospital where she spent most of these past days, her mother had a guilty pleasure in sustaining life other than her own. This made sense to Aza; as a child, her mother remarked about Aza being a mini version of her, yet never took the time to care.

Everything about Aza branches into other little things, like most people, but in her case, the blood that courses through her 5’4 height is so fragile, she would mist into the heat if anyone took the time to care. Her father beat her, then he died, her mother never talked to her (she stopped after Aza started being able to make her own sandwiches at age five), and now her mother is about to die.

Before today, Aza had seen her mother everyday only since her mother got sick; Aza stared at her mother: a shriveled capsule of so many years shrouded in tobacco smoke and paltry canned food items. A few months ago, when Aza’s mother muttered over the phone I have cancer, it was the first time Aza had spoken to her mother in a decade. Aza simply did not care, but she went anyway, because she had read in a New York Times article that her mother’s cancer was a genetically inclined type of illness -- and Aza wanted to avoid incurring the wrath of some God. It was only when, a few months ago, she pulled up outside her mother’s weathered door, that she realized it didn’t matter if she did end up getting the same illness her mother had.

As Aza parks her car, a crack of lightning rips through the sky, like church bells for the sky. She steps outside the car and balances the butterflies’ cage in her arms. She hears a peaceful malaise in all the fluidity of rain and thunder.

Another loud crack pierces the air and now she knows with the utmost certainty that her mother is dead. Mostly, she knows this because there is no other way to not know, but also because a strange fluttering sensation overtakes her -- restlessness.

It is not a long time before the butterflies take off even in the storm. Aza can see why, because the raindrops are intricately compelling; droplets of water but also so much more. So she stands there until she too becomes flighted like a butterfly and can close her eyes.