Death of the Fairies

A few weeks with the parents in Michigan seemed like a good way to spend the summer. Classes were over and Jen had saved enough money during the school year to take a two-and-a-half-month vacation until work resumed in the fall. Her students had also bestowed on her several gift cards for coffees and small purchases at retail stores, on behalf of their parents, who made more money than she did. On holidays and other special occasions—like the end of the school year—she could always count on such small tokens of appreciation for watching their children. Education was secondary a lot of the time, she had learned. Most people just wanted a trustworthy person to hang onto their kids for them while they went to work or kept house and ran errands in peace and quiet.

Mom and Dad lived in Michigan, near Lake Huron. Summers had gotten hotter for everyone due to the changes in climate, but they were at least a few degrees less sweltering in Northern Michigan than where she stayed—Chicago, where the steel and glass and concrete turned the whole city into a gigantic oven. Like a dark-eyed-junco, she chose to avoid the summer and went north where some lingering coolness remained, unlike the rest of the birds.

This year, even just below the Upper Peninsula, the heat was only incrementally lower. As she walked to the harbor to feed the ducks, she worked up enough of a sweat, on her hairline, and down her back. She regretted wearing leggings. Standing on one of the public docks over the lake helped cool her down, thanks to the wind coming off the waves, but the walk back to her parent’s house, cutting through the little village of under 500 people, was strenuous. Her clothes clung to her in a way she could only describe as “gross” and her hair felt as wet as if she’d been rained on.

She wasn’t sure what she was going to do next year. Each year seemed worse than the last. She’d read an article about a year ago claiming that one day the Midwest would be a desert. Maybe Canada could provide a safe haven in the years to come. Or maybe Chicago could adapt and become the new Dubai.

As she followed the road toward her parents’ house, she noticed the vibrant orange wings of a monarch butterfly in the grass and gravel along the roadside. She stopped to inspect it—it was dead, though outwardly no worse for wear. It might have only just died. The entire body was whole and unbroken, and the wings pristinely shaped—no tears or holes.

She gently slid her fingertips under the body, which was as light as tissue paper and picked it up. Her mother would love the perfect specimen and could place it on a wreath or in a bird’s nest, one of the few that she’d retrieved after it had been abandoned and knocked to the ground.

She almost stepped on another fallen monarch only a few feet further, recoiling at the last moment. Just as dead, a little rougher in the wings—one tip missing from its left upper wing. Maybe by whatever had killed it. Maybe it had managed to carry the damage for a while before its death.

She encountered a few more on the side of the road, including one swallowtail in front of her parent’s lawn. The rest were monarchs, except for a smaller, powdery-white species, though that one technically might be classified as a moth. She was no entomologist.

Using the back of one hand she cleaned off another layer of sweat as she reached her parents' front porch. Carefully cupping the butterfly, she opened the door and showed her mother her find, explaining how she’d seen many along the roadside on the way home.

Mass butterfly death could be the result of any number of things. It could even be a coincidence. Butterflies were naturally fragile and helpless creatures, and Jen had to suppose that just about anything a human being would shrug off—even a short, sudden burst of wind—could terrorize them in the right circumstances. Any number of combinations—the heatwaves that got worse every year, the pesticides sprayed over personal gardens to keep certain critters from eating home-grown tomatoes and cucumbers, the cars that roared down the road, oblivious to the tiny, fluttering things they might hit along the way—life must be a nightmare for a butterfly.

Her mother placed the stiff, but delicate body in the windowsill over the kitchen sink. “Poor thing,” she said, then went to the pantry to retrieve boxes of cornbread and canned beans and pork.

After dinner, Jen walked the road to count the dead butterflies. Seven in all. Not really a big number, especially in the insect world, but it struck her as ghastly when packed into such a small area and time frame. Butterflies must drop dead for one reason or another every minute, but what could do it to seven roughly all at once? It was unlikely the bodies had been allowed to languish for long.

The evening brought down the temperature a little. She took pictures of the butterflies on her phone as if she were documenting a crime scene, then tucked the device into her back pocket and went back to her folk’s.

Maybe next year she’d raise butterflies with the kids in the spring as a science project. Buy the caterpillars, explain the life cycle—let the kids watch the crystallizing, and then, when it was time and the cocoons were broken, release them into the air.

She did, and the kids enjoyed watching the butterflies grow from little worms into paper-like beauties. They released them as she’d planned, too, and the kids spent several minutes speculating about where their butterflies would be going, what they would be doing.

The next day she found three dead and tattered on the sidewalk beyond the school gate. She discovered a couple more on the playground as she walked to the front entrance. She deposited them all in one of the flowerpots near the steps, so the kids wouldn’t be discouraged.

-End-