Hanna Henderson

Butterflies only live for a week, Bobby.

That’s what Mama told me when I boxed the bubbly, white thing in the creeper-keeper. But I was too blinded by the four corners of the moon fluttering in my stale wooden crate to care. I held her up to the sun and watched the wings reflect the light like mirrors as the dancing dust turned to starshine on the windowsill. The wire walls blocked new constellations; I named each one—Pretty-In-Pink, Dorothy’s-Missing-Tooth, My-Old-Blue-Bike, Mama’s-Wedding-Finger—but the butterfly’s dizzy whirls made me forget and the seven days came and went and so did the butterfly.

The day I met my baby sister, I wanted to embroider her outline to the night sky. She lay swathed in white against Mama’s chest. From her gumdrop skin to her squealing tongue, I thought her immaculate. When Mama fell asleep, I drew the constellations across her freckled arm and asked if she knew their names. She only babbled behind blue lips, purple gums forming a toothless smile. I think she liked the stars. And, like me, no one had told her their names—she just knew.

I didn’t like the black dress Mama made me wear. I didn’t like the white rose the stern lady placed in my hand. I didn’t like how the thorny flowers rested on the dark wood. All I could see was the butterfly’s shriveled wings, curled like folded hands, pointing heavenward within the box I had made her coffin.

Mama never told me my sister was a butterfly.

From Issue 46, Spring 2022 / First online publication June 26, 2024

Hanna Henderson is a creative writing college student from Oregon. She enjoys reading, writing, drawing, and petting cats when they so allow it. Prose is her passion and she hopes to make some a bit longer than short fiction one day.