The Day the Sky Turned Orange

A swarm of migrating butterflies overtakes a small town.

Content warning: This piece includes a mention of suicide.

Photo by Shiebi AL on Unsplash

I was home for the weekend on the day the sky turned orange. Sunlight filtered and flashed through flittering wings, and the wings filled the trees, taking the place of fallen October leaves.

I had never seen a swarm like this one before. Thousands upon thousands of butterflies on their great southern migration, filling the air until they carpeted our entire town, from the last, hardy flowers in the gardens to the skeleton trees still clinging to their leaves. Brilliant sunset orange veined with inky black.

Monarchs.

I drank my coffee outside that morning. Splashing some Baileys into my mug when my mom’s back was turned, I took myself, my spiked coffee, and a thick grey sweater out to the front steps. Our porch was too small for even a deck chair, so I sat on the step, shiny with cold morning dew, and sipped hot coffee as I watched the flurry of orange flutter and settle, flutter and settle. They’d be gone in a day or two. I wanted to drink them in while they stayed.

Sarah had loved butterflies. But not with the idle appreciation of Oh look, it’s so pretty! She was a Biology major. She wanted to go to grad school and get her PhD and spend the rest of her life staring at their forewings and their delicate, kaleidoscopic patches of color. Sarah didn’t think they were pretty. She thought they were fascinating and mysterious and integral to the very life of the planet.

I swallowed a scalding mouthful of coffee, letting the too-hot liquid burn its way down my esophagus, dragging with it the sharp, messy tangle that lodged itself in my chest whenever Sarah crept her way into my thoughts. Someday, maybe, I would go for a full twenty-four hours without that sick drop in my stomach and the stabbing pain in my sternum. But that pain that ached and stabbed and stopped my coffee on its way down my throat was the only thread that kept her from being wiped away, covered over like white-out on paper, by time, the world’s relentless correction fluid. It would be as though she had never been here at all.

A jittery frenzy of movement drew my eyes to the step, right next to my foot. One little monarch butterfly fluttered its wings just inches away from my slippers.

The flutter of its wings wasn’t graceful. They jerked and flapped as it hopped, trying to take flight. Its wings were tattered like a leaf blown through a lawn mower.

I put down my coffee next to me on the step and pulled out my phone.

How to fix a broken butterfly wing?

The first Google result was a step-by-step guide on how to use toothpicks and glue to fix a broken butterfly wing. The second was an article that said DO NOT attempt to fix a butterfly’s wing unless you are a professional entomologist with a full laboratory at your disposal. The third was a kid’s website about building a butterfly habitat in a jar.

Her wings weren’t too mangled. I wasn’t an entomologist, but I had steady hands. Maybe just a little superglue..

The door creaked behind me.

“Did you know,” came a too-loud, too-animated voice over my shoulder, “that the monarch butterfly subspecies Danaus plexippus plexippus migrates each summer and autumn to Central Mexico?”

I turned to see Zachary standing on the porch, holding up his hand like a puppet.

I sighed. “I don’t want to talk to Puppet. I want to talk to Zachary.” Mom sounded so gentle whenever she said those words; I hated how flippant my own voice sounded.

His expression blank, Zachary very deliberately lowered his hand to his side. “Okay.” Puppet spoke with the exaggerated inflections of the little kid cartoons that Zachary watched, but when Zachary spoke as himself, his voice was hardly more than a whisper.

He cocked his head. “That butterfly is dying.” His eyes fixed on the little struggling insect at my feet. “In captivity, butterflies consume nectar or sugar water.”

“Go ask mom for a jar and some cloth. We could make a house for it.”

There was a pause, and then Puppet’s loud voice came out again. “The subspecies Danaus plexippus plexippus roosts for the winter in oyamel fir trees.”

Since six o’clock this morning, when he’d woken up flapping his arms and shrieking in fear and excitement about the army of orange-winged creatures outside, Mom had stayed with him for hours while he sat at her laptop, scrolling through facts about monarch butterfly migration. It had calmed him down, but I could sense an impending months-long obsession with butterflies.

“Go ask mom for a jar and some cloth,” I said again. Go inside. Please. Go away.

With Puppet still spouting trivia about butterflies, Zachary turned and went back into the house, and the door creaked shut behind him.

I rested my chin on my knees, leaning down closer to the butterfly, still jerking and writhing on the step as it tried to fly. At least we could make it comfortable for a little while.

Sarah would have told me to let nature take its course. She could be brutal like that; it was the biologist in her. But I had let nature take its course before, hadn’t I? I was her roommate, not her babysitter. I had let her ride out the funk she was in. It hadn’t seemed like anything more than a funk, had it? She’d never said anything.

She’d spent lots of time in bed, but then so do I sometimes, especially after a frat party. If she’d said something – but she didn’t. She’d never said anything.

She’d never said anything.

She had just gone home one Friday afternoon. Lots of people do. Maybe she wanted her mom to do her laundry, or she wanted some homemade food. It wasn’t my job to interrogate her about when she’d be back.

Two days later, on Sunday morning, I had gotten a call from her phone. Only it wasn’t her. It was her dad. And, just like that, she was gone.

I used to like the smell of gasoline. I knew it was bad for me, but I liked the occasional little whiff. Now I couldn’t refill my gas tank without gagging. That’s the last thing she had smelled on this earth – gasoline. Exhaust fumes filling up a closed garage.

If she had said anything, if I had just known – but I had been busy, hadn’t I? Classes, parties, homework, and it was almost finals week for the spring semester. I had a new boyfriend, and I was busy. It wasn’t my job to watch her.

She’d never said anything.

So I let her be in a funk. Because I wanted to go to fun parties and do fun things with fun people who didn’t suddenly decide to spend all day sitting on their beds.

A sharp pain rippled through my jaw, and I realized I’d been grinding my teeth. My palms stung from my fingernails squeezing into them.

I scooted down one more step to be closer to the butterfly.

The school gave me free housing for my senior year – this year. That fixes things, right? Free housing equals compensation for dead roommate. I’m sure that math equals out somehow. I got free housing for ignoring my friend into her grave.

With a creak and a slam of the door, Zachary came back onto the porch, clutching a piece of cheesecloth and a rinsed-clean spaghetti sauce jar. Without a word, he set them on the step.

“I need a rubber band too,” I said. He dashed back inside with his stiff-legged run.

I grabbed a few leaves and twigs from the garden and dropped them into the jar. Then I set my finger down on the step beside the struggling butterfly. Even I knew better than to try to grab it by its wings. Fluttering her ragged wings, she stumbled as if by accident onto my fingertip. I lifted her up and held her close to the mouth of the jar.

Zachary banged through the door, clutching a rubber band. He held up his free hand, and Puppet spoke in his exuberant mimicry. “PAW Patrol is on a roll!”

I kept my attention on the butterfly. Twelve was too old to be watching PAW Patrol, but Zachary loved it. And he quoted it. All. Day. Long. Maybe we’d get a respite from it now that he was spouting facts about monarch butterflies.

In its new habitat, the little insect with the ravaged wings shimmied onto the twig. I spread the cheesecloth over the mouth of the spaghetti sauce jar. “Here, put the rubber band around the top.”

Zachary’s hands were much more dexterous and graceful than his body. His gait was clumsy and awkward, his movements bigger than necessary, but his fingers could put together the tiniest Lego sets without looking at the instructions and build intricate animals out of toothpicks and glue.

Sliding the rubber band around the top of the jar, Zachary leaned his head down to peek at the little butterfly inside. He held up Puppet again. “Whenever you’re in trouble, just yelp for help!”

“I think the butterfly wants to talk to Zachary, not Puppet.”

He lowered his hand and stared with solemn eyes at the little creature, its filmy wings still beautiful as the morning sun glinted on them through the glass jar.

A gust of wind came, and with it lifted a shimmering swarm of butterflies – so many that they blocked the sun streaming through the trees, turning it into an oscillating orange glow.

Zachary gasped and squealed, flapping his arms up and down and bouncing on his feet.

The wind came alive as a sea of orange and black as thousands, millions of butterflies flew south, toward warmth and sunshine and survival.

“Did you know –”

“Puppet, I want to talk to Zachary.”

After a reluctant pause, Zachary’s voice came in a robotic whisper. “Did you know it is hypothesized that butterflies use a combination of sunlight and the Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves?”

“No, I didn’t know that.” I set the jar on my knees and watched the butterfly hop from the twig onto a leaf. Its wings still flapped with jerky movements, like an animal caught in a trap. “They’re all leaving. They’re just going on without her,” I said. I meant to say it to Zachary, but it came out as the barest whisper, just to myself.

“Did you know that there are four to five generations between these butterflies and the ones who will migrate next year?”

I didn’t say anything, just watched as the air swayed with flittering orange.

“Let’s go inside,” Zachary said in his singsong voice. He stood and ran back inside, the door slamming behind him with a screech of old hinges.

Five generations. These butterflies didn’t know how they knew where to go; they just knew. And they kept moving, knowing that plenty of them would get smashed by windshield wipers or gnawed by the teeth of lawn mowers. If they didn’t keep going, then all of them would die.

Holding up the jar, I peeked in at the little migrant, which batted its shredded wings against the glass.

Sarah would have said to let nature take its course.

Why did nature’s course have to be brutal? Sometimes nature’s course swarmed a small town with millions of butterflies on an autumn morning. Sometimes nature’s course brought someone with a spaghetti jar and cheesecloth and a rubber band.

I would let nature take its course. Nature could take its course in a comfortable little jar with food and the watchful eyes of a twelve-year-old boy who loved PAW Patrol and Wikipedia.

I wouldn’t mangle the butterfly’s delicate wings with superglue. But this butterfly would not die alone and ignored on my front step.

Shivering against the chilly October wind, I hugged the jar to my chest and went back inside to make some sugar water.