Young Writers Society

A bridge collapses like a dying snake, body slumping over the ground like a rope and spine breaking into tiny pieces, and slick, scaly skin splitting at the seams. Most of the bridge was submerged in the muddy waters of the canal, rippling with cracks and silver iron rails bent like drinking straws. There was a heavy pile of stones on the bridge, fitted with loose bricks and squares of sidewalk, chunks of cement buildings, large stones and small stones, with pebbles and broken pieces to fill in the cracks. The hubris of the mountain had brought it to its knees, crunching the bridge under its weight and plunging it below the murky waters, leaving only a flat, crumbling top of concrete slabs and ceramic tiles.

Their footsteps pattered across the asphalt, to the collapsed bridge, and the top of the sunken mountain. Daffodil’s face was a little thin, but her eyes glowed with a determined hope. She carried a bucket of her formula and a ladle, and more of burning grass and candles swung from their elbows. They set them down in the notches of the knobbled edges. Daffodil set the red plastic sand bucket of formula in the middle. It was heavy with a thick, waxy mixture.

According to plan, she was hardly there at all, it being almost a day since she’d ate. She was able to move the rubber gloves coating her fingers only dimly. Her bones were weak and faded, and you could only see her from a certain angle, a thinly dispersed cloud of matter, steeped with air and only held together by will.

She could almost feel the shadows oozing across the floors and sidewalks. They were catching wind of what was going on. She could see them beginning to seep out of the windows and cracks in the bricks from across the water. She shut her eyes, and turned away. She had to be fast.

She slopped up a ladleful of liquid, splattering a few drops onto the stones. She moved the bucket aside and drizzled oozing ropes of it on the broken pavement, in a circle that splashed across the concrete. She got down on her knees, and the liquid soaked into her jeans. But it didn’t matter. The liquid was a thinner. A transporter. A circuit. She’d calculated it down to the very last detail.

Ciana sat on the other side of the circle, and dipped her finger in the drizzle of mixture. The shadows had surrounded them now. It was pitch black blanket draped over them, held at bay by the bubble of breathing room emanating from the smoldering tin buckets. It was enough. They couldn’t come any closer, not like they were. They were still recovering from the firework show.

Ciana looked at Daffodil.

Ready?

Ready.

Ciana swiveled her head on its neck and lifted her eyes to the heavens, and saw the moon, pale as milk and round in the evening sky, a starry cookie with a small bite missing, through a gap in the clouds of shadows, glowing bright in the noonday sky. She didn’t need to turn her eyes away this time, or squeeze them shut. She could see the every silver crater and lunar white streak, and soak in the light without fear.

It was beautiful.

Pale light spilled into her eyes, sizzling with a weird milky magma. A sensation like electricity shook through her, making her bones buzz and sparks flutter from her eyelids, dripping and flying like flecks of falling stars and lightning fizzed over her skin.

CRACKLE

The liquid lit up like a string of christmas lights, with a thin thread of dull, honey glow that flooded and exploded into the edges. Sparks flew from the glistening surface and tongues of flame bubbled up like geysers through layers of stone.

It’d been almost a whole day since she’d had anything to eat, and she was hardly there at all. Her bones were weak and faded, and you could only see her from a certain angle, a thinly dispersed cloud of matter steeped with air and only held together by will.

Empty.

HUGH

Energy surged into her like a spark of static. Feeling and touch and matter surged into her limbs and her fingers became solid. The numbness was burned up from her skin. Air rushed into her lungs and she could feel the asphalt on her knees and the air pressing on her hands.

Full.

Her ears were ringing, and it was hard to think. But it died down, and she realized it was maybe even calm. Aaron was watching as he warmed his hands on the smoke rippling from one of the buckets. The shadows were swirling at the edges of the light. The drizzly circle of mixture was flickering with unearthly fire. Light was glowing and dripping from Ciana’s eyes. And from her own, from her eyes and small cracks in her skin from under her fingernails.

She rose to her feet. Her limbs felt heavy, like they would burst open, and she moved them slowly. Through the light in her eyes she could see Ciana.

After a while, you stopped seeing the butterfly wings, that sprouted from scalps and soft parts of skin, that tangled in hair and popped from sleeves. It was like hair. Everyone had them. Ciana had some poking up through her head, between swaths of blonde hair, and from the bones beneath layers of tissue on her arms, and clusters creeping down her shoulders.

Daffodil stepped into the center of the circle and placed a finger on one of the wings, the butterfly wings that grew from Ciana’s forehead. It seemed to sear her fingertip, burning into it with an intense, sizzling energy like a magnet. She could feel light whizzing between them in a loop, spinning and spinning faster and faster and faster and faster.

BOOM

A harpoon of lightning speared into the sky and cracked the shadows into broken pieces. It was blinding, and she thought it had knocked her back but it hadn’t, she was frozen in place.

The sound came after, like thunder after lightning. If she thought she’d been thrown back from the light, she certainly thought the sound would blast her to smithereens. Her ears bled and her bones shook with the rippling aftershock and her hair blew back like in winds.

It took a long number of seconds, before the ringing in her ears ebbed, and the spots swimming in her vision faded, and the breath in her lungs returned.

She didn’t know if it was oddly quiet, or if she’d just gone deaf from the sound, but the silence made everything seem a weird kind of calm, like she was watching it through a veil, and yet a feeling of everything but calm thrilled through her, something strong, something, the coupling to the energy sizzling around them. Her finger was still on the butterfly wing growing from Ciana’s forehead, and light still filled her eye sockets. She could feel the butterfly wings coating her organs, sprouting from her skin and the notches in her spine, rustling in her throat, she could feel them as they hummed.

The darkness was null. Whatever the shadows that bubbled out from their feverish minds said the butterfly wings were, whatever they really were, fungus, disease-all any of them saw them as, thought of them as-

was what they looked like. Butterfly wings. Wings, pale, dusty wings from a miscellaneous lepidopteran insect, linked with skeletal muscles and rooted with blood-filled veins, used to beat the air and flex and flap and-

fly.

Reality was crackling all around them. The line between mind and matter was blurry, if it’d ever been there at all, during such a time as this.

So, the butterfly wings flew. They squirmed out of their skin and bodies and flew.

Daffodil had never thought of them as having roots before, but they did, and she could feel them as uprooted themselves, shifting, lifting away. They formed pairs, then quarters. All they really were is what they thought of them as, some way or another-butterflies. They were flying, pouring from her mouth and nose and squeezing from between her eyeball and eye sockets.

She could breathe a little. She could see a little, through her tears, as they floated skyward like sparkling fireflies. The butterfly wings were taking flight. They were flowing out from her, from Ciana, from the colonies stuck to buildings like clams, in columns and torrents that pierced into the burning white sky. Gravity was in shambles, and loose objects were quaking as they vibrated away from the earth’s core, like water in the throttle of a plane. Pebbles skittered and shook against the ground as if it was tilting, popping like flecks of grease in a frying pan.

Next came the explosions. Ropes of butterflies spiraled together into rippling white orbs, and burst in hot clouds of flame and smoke. It was the final firework show, the final hour. Starling’s had merely been a preamble. A prophecy.

sssss-ssssss sssss-sssss

BOOM

sssss-ssssss ssssss-sssss

BOOM-BOOM

BOOM-BOOM

Peals of sound like thunder rippled through the air, shaking her bones. The rippling orbs ballooned into hot stars of magma and ash, glowing red from the middle as they popped in the sky. Burning wings flew from the core, in arcs of burning honey, and burning sparks fell like needles of rain, mingling with flecks of soot and ash. They tangled in her hair like fireflies and cooled as they caught on her clothes.

sssss-ssssss sssss-sssss

BOOM

sssss-ssssss ssssss-sssss

BOOM-BOOM

BOOM-BOOM

The butterflies were gone from her, and burnt up in the resounding explosions. Her hair was tossed around her head in the wind. More butterflies continued to stream up, bubbling up in rippling geysers, as they peeled themselves off walls, out of corners, lifting away from their hosts and forging themselves into insects. All they really were is what they thought of them as, some way or another-butterflies. Butterflies, that uprooted themselves and assembled themselves and filled the air with the beating of wings floured with scales, swirling in rivers of white that trickled up, dripped up from the hollow parts of the city, like streams of watercolor running down a canvas, up to the sky, trailing together like twisting streamers rippling with tissue paper and bursting in flowers of smoke and glowing red.

sssss-ssssss sssss-sssss

BOOM

sssss-ssssss ssssss-sssss

BOOM-BOOM

BOOM-BOOM

Daffodil looked at Ciana. Pale light spilled into her eyes no longer, no longer sizzling with a weird milky magma, no longer a sensation like electricity shaking through her, no longer making her bones buzz and sparks flutter from her eyelids. No longer. Her eyes were gleaming with all of the pupil and iris in them, reflecting with the balls of fire bursting into the air. Her skin was quiet, and the wind whipped around it like her own. The storm was out of her hands now. They both were only watchers, members of the audience.

Then she noticed. The words left her mouth before she even thought.

“Where’s Aaron?”

Her world was bright, but suddenly a dark tint of doubt fell over it. She suddenly felt the fear sizzling in each explosion, how the fire was terrible, how the ash burned into her, how the smoke smothered the sky.

Where was he?

As if her feet were guided by something beyond herself, she ran, her footsteps splashing clumsily in the water as it surged past her knees. She managed to ground her feet on a solid surface, and heard Ciana splashing behind her. Her footsteps pounded on the broken asphalt of the bridge. There was a yawning gap where the bridge curled away from the earth, muddy and soaked with water. Her shoes slid on the slick grass and skidded across the muck.

He was sitting, folded over like a paper bag, back to the cracked pieces of bridge. His neck was thrown back like it was broken, as his arms splayed limply over his knees like dead snakes dangling off the edge of a table. The butterfly wings growing from him didn’t fly. They burned. They burned, into him like stars, making his skin red, making him smoke like a smothered log, like the The eye that wasn’t choked with the burning wings was burnt black.

She felt hot tears suddenly sliding down her face. Her face seemed shaped for tears, and they ran around her nose like rainwater through dry riverbeds. But not tears like this. The riverbeds overflowed.

“Why?” Her words came out in a sob. “Why didn’t it work? Why is this happening? Why didn’t it work?”

Aaron sat up, weakly, like his bones would split. His hair smoldered and acrid smoke wafted and blew away in the wind.

“Don’t you understand?” His voice was quiet.

“What?” She choked. “What is there to understand?”

“Let me tell you a story.” he breathed. “Near a forest, a forest of deer sprouting wings, there was a town. it doesn’t really matter what it was like.”

“But-”

“No. Listen.

“One of the deer, the infected, sick deer, had wandered into a yard there, and died without a breath in the soft grass. Nothing happened to it, really, it just died and rotted. Flies laid their eggs in the skin and maggots ate at the flesh, crawling out of the eyes like wriggling grains of rice. Crows plucked a few sinews from the flanks. Beetles ate the flesh off the bones, leaves fell and petals rotted and the months and years patted a thin layer of ground over it. It was only a thin one.”

Daffodil listened, her vision blurred.

“But it would’ve been fine, you know. the spores had nothing to feed on. Nothing left at all. Until someone fell out the window.”

“You.”

His voice was barely a whisper. “Yes. I was just a baby. I fell and died and rotted just like the deer.

And woke up fifteen years later.”

“That’s this year.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s you now.”

“Yes. The boy awoke, under the leaves, roots of mycelium trailing from his back, sprouted with butterfly wings. He didn’t know it, but they were his fault.”

“What?”

“It would’ve been fine, you know. The spores had nothing left to feed on. Nothing left at all. Until someone fell out the window, and nourished them with his flesh, as he became their host. They kept him a twisted sort of alive, as he grew into what maybe was a boy, and spread on the insides of the nearby house, waiting, until it broke loose upon the world. And after some time, they did. They didn’t need their host anymore.”

“No.”

“That’s all I ever was. A host. A husk. The wings were the only thing keeping me alive. They burn, and so do I.”

“No.”

“Hey. It’s fine. Everything’s fine now, even if it hurts. The wings are gone...”

Daffodil looked through the tears, at the wings in him, burning, smoking like pieces of fallen star, while here she stood whole and free. It wasn’t fine. Not like this.

With a desperation that seemed to guide her hands, she began pulling the wings, the burning, smoking wings out.

snap snap snap snap

They broke in her hands, and their roots left burn marks. But it didn’t matter.

snap snap snap snap

She saw Ciana’s hands as they moved with hers, a little smaller, a little paler, picking out the cooler ones. They moved with the same energy of hers and Aaron’s as they built Starling’s memorial shrine, but one far more powerful, far more important, for it was in honor of someone alive.

snap snap snap snap

It seemed like forever, and yet no time at all, until the pulled wings sat in a crumbling pile. Aaron lay on the muddy grass, among the bursting orbs and streams of butterflies, smoking a little, burns blooming on him like roses. For just this once. For the final moments of his life. For the first time that he could remember, the butterfly wings were gone. His limbs felt oddly light, and painless.

His body went limp, as his last breath shuddered out of him, and was lost to the ash-filled air.

* * *

Memories were returning, slowly. All of them would eventually come back. Lots of things would. The bridge would be repaired. The ash would be swept up from the sidewalk. Lots of things were gone, too. The butterfly wings were gone. The shadows were gone. Aaron was gone. Maybe he’d never fully been there at all.

Not everything was fine. But everything would be. And that was a new feeling, one that was enough.