Hub - Issue 13 by January Mortimer / Marie O'Regan

Author:January Mortimer / Marie O'Regan
Format: epub

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The jeep could do 0 to 60 in 8.8 seconds. On the drive south, I never did more than a speed limit-strict 59. I slept an uneasy night in North Carolina, parked on a residential back street under sulphur street lights.

I dreamed of half-remembered things and barren winter and police sirens.

The air changed from mild to warm to sultry heat. Towns grew thinner and the golf courses overgrown. The air smelled of distant filth: of contamination and swamp mud. An hour passed the last house, the road was washed out; the jeep revved as the four wheel drive tasted dirt for the first time.

The Madgellion spill had made a wasteland, a nightmare of poisonous mud and the twisted corpses of moss-draped trees. Restoration fungus sprouted in irregular lumps like so many grasping hands. Zombie hands, mottled and slimy. They'd permitted some moron to rewrite and he'd messed it up.

That evening, the jeep dipped into a hidden mire and could not escape. Terminal traction failure, the dashboard told me.

In the trunk, life stirred.

I rested my head on the steering wheel. I would not cry.

“They’ll take everything away from you.” My voice sounded odd, unused and rusty. “They’ll take the Reserve and your work, your butterflies and everything.”

But not Benny. Not Sam. And all the world apart from me would have butterflies.

My mother’s voice whispered across years and miles. “Look at them, darling, you can love them. You can love them, and they’ll never hurt you. They’re all we need.”

Truth. But truths can change.

I heaved the crates one-by-one across the desolation. Eggs had hatched and eaten and grown and wrapped themselves in silk cases. Like seeds, I thought, and sewed them.

Midnight had given way to twilight when I came for the last crate. I could hear them: the sound of autumn leaves. All the old, unwanted flesh cast off. They hatched quick, grew fast and they would spread to every corner of the earth

“Nothing short of a nuke can stop you,” I told them. “And who would want to stop you?” Mud seeped through my jeans as I knelt to split the box seam with Terry’s key.

Seven-dozen wings unfurled and fanned. Green for envy; yellow for love; red for anger; dusty silver for pain...

And blue for joy.

“I made them, Alfred!” Dawn came rushing over the horizon, bright enough to blind, to burn, to chase night into shadows and nothing. Wings and sunlight brushed my cheeks. “I made them. But not for you.” Butterflies humanity would never be without.

They took wing all at once, sweeping upward in a million flurries of gold and red and green and blue. Each one more than a butterfly.

Each a prayer.

And a benediction.

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