I enclose my contribution to your literary sips page. The prompt: During the week before the writing class met, we all looked for objet trouve, which could be anything--overhead words, an object retrieved from the sidewalk, an interesting sentence or phrase from the newspaper, a scene viewed in passing. We were to bring these "objects" to class and share them with each other, then write from ours or someone else's. I wrote from my own. During the week, I had been browsing in a 100-yen store, and found a watering can I thought I could use. Peering inside it, I found a swallowtail butterfly; a real one, not a toy, but quite dead, though perfectly preserved.
MEDITATION ON THE REMAINS OF A SWALLOWTAIL BUTTERFLY
It was a summer day, hot, not the way summers are hot today, blistering and blinding without let-up, but hot the way summers used to be. The rays of the sun in those days fell upon the skin like gifts of gold from the sky, and the clouds really were white and puffy the way you see them now only in children's picture books. And even in the perfect stillness of high noon, a zephyr was sure to come wafting in from somewhere west of the woods, laden with seeds of change.
It was that sort of summer day, and noon, with the sun blazing overhead. The keening of a single locust pierced the thick still air over the pond and left it shimmering gently. Small goldwing dragonflies flitted around the milkweed leaves as if pondering them. Frogs held their breath in secret hiding places under broad leaves the same color as their skin.
No one noticed the swallowtail butterfly when it entered the scene and skimmed over the surface of the pond. No one wondered where it had come from or how it had gotten in. No one remarked on its remarkable rarity since back then butterflies were still abundant, and a swallowtail, though prized by any novice collector, was sure to make an entrance, just like this, just when you least expected it to, just when you were ready to give up and go home.
But no one saw this swallowtail, not even the lazy frogs or the goldwings or the locust. Because this swallowtail was invisible to almost everyone. This swallowtail flew through the world and flew through the experiences of others without being known about by others. This does not mean that no one was affected by the swallowtail, only that they were unaware of being affected. The frogs did not know that because the swallowtail flew over the pond, flapping its wings, a slight change in the air currents above them cooled the top side of the leaves they were hiding under, and this in turn led a pair of goldwings who were resting on one such leaf to shiver slightly and then to clutch at each other and float off together on the passing breeze to the other side of the pond where the sun shone warmly on gray rocks, and where they were instantly caught in the sinister white net of the collector. The locust in the oak tree shrieked in protest, but the frogs slept on, ignorant and undisturbed.
As the shriek of the locust died away, the goldwings were already suffocating in the small glass jar with the bed of plaster of Paris at the bottom, breathing in the invisible fumes of the cleaning fluid that had disappeared into the plaster before it had grown hard.
The swallowtail landed on the tip of a long cattail leaf, making it dip and then bounce gradually back to stillness in a slightly lowered position. The collector, eyes alert, noticed the change but attributed it mistakenly to drops of moisture falling from a passing rain cloud. The collector, holding very still, glanced up at the sky, and so did not see the long brown cross-banded snake with a triangular copper-colored head come slithering out of the woods down to the pond for a drink.
This snake was one of the few creatures to whom the swallowtail was not invisible, and so when the swallowtail left the tip of the cattail leaf and flew off into the sunlight, its wings cast a shadow which was reflected in the iridescent eyes of the snake in the water, and when the snake raised its head to see what had caused this reflection, it saw instead the bare white ankle of the collector just inches from its nose.
The glass jar smashed on the gray rocks when the collector fell over face first into the shallow muddy water. At first the groggy dragonflies did not move, but after a few seconds their wings began to twitch. The snake moved in for a snack but the escaping fumes of the cleaning fluid repelled it, and it slipped instead back into the woods, losing itself in the darkness of underbrush and old leaves.
Later in the evening, just before the sun went down behind the oak trees of the wood, its last rays glittered for a moment on the shards of glass scattered on the gray rocks. The white net could still be seen floating just beneath the surface of the water. A pair of goldwing dragonflies flitted, but not too strenuously, among the cattails. No one noticed when the tip of one long leaf dipped slightly. It could have been the dew.
