When I was a girl, I was enthralled with butterflies. Their stately names—monarch, viceroy, painted lady—each sounded to me more like royalty than biology.
I wished sometimes I could become one, unfurl kaleidoscope wings and float off into some other world, light as breath. And so I spent afternoons planting butterfly bushes and milkweed in the sunniest corner of the yard, imagining the precise steps to transformation. Bloom, attract, emerge.
One summer, I gathered every chrysalis I could find, peeling them carefully from fenceposts and branches. I arranged them along the shelves in our shed, affixing them to the wood with Scotch tape like milky-green specimens in a museum. Then I forgot about them.
For weeks, I was busy being ten years old. I read The Baby-Sitters Club books over the phone to my best friend, Amanda. I ate ramen dry from the packet, lips powdered with chicken-flavored salt.
Until one afternoon, I swung open the shed door, looking for my old rollerblades, and stepped into a hush of wings. They were everywhere: trembling on rakes, lifting off from corners, flickering like stained glass in motion.
Some had died, unable to free themselves from my careful tape. Others were still emerging, abdomens contracting, wings unfurling slow as the creeping dawn.
They drifted past me into the waiting world, having done the impossible work of unmaking themselves, to become something else entirely.
Rachel Parker
Rachel Parker lives in Delaware with her husband Dustin and two children, Avery and Ford. Her work has appeared in Riverteeth, Penstricken, Anomaly Poetry, The Maine Review, and Beyond Words Magazine. She writes regularly on Substack at Fragments of Humanity, exploring literature's intersection with psychology. She is a member of the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild and an alumna of Lauren Grodstein's “After the Novel” workshop in Paris.
