Harlequin Butterfly by Toh EnJoe

Author:Toh, EnJoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2024-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

This happens in the air, between Tokyo and Seattle.

Mid-story, I find myself on a plane. Out of the corner of my eye, I’m watching two women across the aisle, their four hands moving this way and that as they speak. The tatting shuttle I have in my left hand passes under a span of silk pulled taut between my right thumb and middle finger then loops back over, again and again. You can’t bring knitting needles or sewing needles on a plane, but the tatting shuttle, which holds the thread ahead in time instead of behind, is one of my favourite tools.

One of the women pulls a silver handkerchief from her chest pocket. No—what I thought was a handkerchief turns out to be a tiny bag wrapped around a small stick. And what seemed like silk is actually fine, incredibly fine silver thread. The egg in my mind hatches into a sterling-silver caterpillar, which spins itself into a silken cocoon. From that sheath emerges a brightly coloured butterfly that flutters around the cabin. The woman opens the bag.

A miniature butterfly net. Silver filigree.

“This net captures good luck,” I hear her say. “I fell in love with it the second I saw it at the antique shop. They told me it wasn’t for sale, but I kept going back until they changed their tune. It’s got a billion spells woven into it, so tiny you can’t even see them.”

Yes, there are words woven into the net. But they aren’t written out in letters you can read. The threads cross and tangle, the words flitting forward then turning back on themselves, capturing connections that wouldn’t otherwise exist. That’s their magic. I have no memory of the net the woman is holding, but its function is immediately apparent to me.

It doesn’t catch luck. It catches opportunity.

It captures things that can only exist mid-journey, things that set the next leg of the journey in motion. It scoops up ideas left behind by the moving body—ideas that would otherwise vanish.

I’ve already forgotten all about it, but I’m sure that I created a net just like that one at some point. No, that isn’t quite right, I realize. I’m going to create that net. In the future.

In that moment, there’s no doubt in my mind.

Someone in the past collects that net from a room I abandon in the future. That’s how it finds its way to the antique shop. The woman with the net operates an assortment of businesses, and, as part of her charity work, she offers low-cost housing to people without the necessary papers or permission to work. One of these rooms is mine. When I fail to pay my rent, one of her employees enters my room, finds the precious net and, considering it fair game, pockets it, then sells it to the antique shop for a song. There, Abrams finds the net, none the wiser to its provenance. Once she gets her hands on it, she lives out the rest of her days in the air—on one plane or another.

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