Crushed Butterfly Wings (excerpt)
by Nicola R.
…Splintered like broken glass across the milky grey cement and
made the sidewalk sparkle. The wind carried icy shards of purple-tinted
sky that caused the potted cactus to shrivel to yellow and bend like it
was sad. The orange chipped door had shrunk so that it matched the
dilapidated triangle window. Surrounding the house was a yellowstone
gravel garden where pieces of pottery protruded from the ground. The
butterfly’s spidering veins stretched to a ten-foot extension of
concrete that cut through the front yard and created a path to the
jagged front step.
...Here, on the crisp January day, lay
three amethyst-eyed, small, white kittens on the doorstep. Their meows
sounded like bells as a man wearing a clean white dress suit rode up to
the house on a silver-plated, silver-rimmed, miniature bicycle. He was
whistling a jazzy tune from forty-five years ago and sported a silver
curled moustache made from two paper clips carefully tacked to his upper
lip. Riding at a pleasant pace, he occasionally nodded his head and
tipped his silk hat at the leafless birch trees.
.....His brakes screeched as he
stopped his bike a few yards away from the house; he slid off and let it
levitate a few inches off the sidewalk. As he walked toward the house,
his patent shoes clicked with each swanky step. He only stopped to lift
his pant leg as he consciously avoided the dead insect spread
beautifully across the pavement.
.....Now on the doorstep, after
removing one lace glove, he reached down his porcelain pink hand to the
felines that encircled his ankles. Their meows harmonized with his
whistle, and one by one, the kittens jumped and stacked themselves onto
the palm of his large hand. With the other arm, he peeled one paper clip
off his skin and jiggled it into the scraggly keyhole near the middle
of the scraggly door. With five jiggles the door swung open, revealing a
black void of a room. He walked in; however, the click of his patent
shoes, the meows of the cats, and his whistle were no longer projected.
Rather, every noise that would have potentially been made was expressed
as a flickering fluorescent glow in the dark. The words “Delivery”
floated from the man’s lips in the italized old English script,
“Delivery for Ms…”
.....The words “Welcome, this way,”
floated towards him before he could finish his sentence. His giant legs
took giant steps through the nothingness.
[To read the rest of “Crushed Butterfly Wings,” please order a copy of the current issue.]