She sat on the dock with a fishing pole
in her hands, her bare feet dangling down
to the water, but not quite reaching,
dressed in cutoff shorts and a red tank top
that set off the pale white of her skinny arms
and shoulders, her head topped off with
a yellow hat, almost like the kind you’d see
on old paintings of fisherman from Nantucket,
and at her side a blue tackle box and a coffee can
for worms. He passed her twice a day – morning,
walking to the camp just over a mile from his
Great-Uncle’s house, and heading back to
his temporary summer home after a day
of things too boring to even mention – and
each time she’d be there, still and focused
on her fishing, barely moving a muscle.
He guessed her age to be close to his ten
though he’d never seen her face full on –
just in distant angles. One day after being
let out early, as he came upon her at the bend
in the road, he decided that would be the day
he’d finally see what she looked like. So he
left the road and started walking on the short
dirt trail leading to the planks of the docks,
calling out to her, “Hey! Hey, you there!”
But she did not respond. He repeated himelf
louder and louder, until he got the notion from
somewhere that she might be deaf. He decided
he’d just gently tap her on the shoulder when he
was close enough. Yet as he approached her,
he saw that her arms seemingly pale from a distance,
were up close preternaturally white after all those days
in the sun, almost alabaster, and then noticed
over her shoulder that her fishing rod had
no string on it, no line running from its tip
into the water. He knew he should turn back,
but now he had to touch her just to make sure
she were real. With a slight tremble is his hand
He gave the gentlest of touches to her right shoulder,
barely a touch at all, more a tap, but for that
quarter-second and he’d never forget that feeling
of the coldest stone, a freezing piece of porcelain
almost burning, then watching as the cracks appeared,
migrating from her shoulder out across her entire being
with a crackling sound and then the cracked surface
dissolving into tremors that soon turned to the beating
wings of a swarm of hundreds and hundreds of
black and red butterflies that for several horrifying
seconds hung in the air, beating and keeping her shape,
but then as if acting from a single mind, turning on him
as one, stuffing his mouth, now opened into a scream,
attacking the openings of his nose and ears, flying up
through the bottom of his shorts, all as if trying to
invade him. And all he could do at that point was collapse.

So when that busy-body Mary Prickett rhetorically asked
the question “Now, who don’t like butterflies?” when
suggesting that the repainting of the walls of the Main Lounge
of the Smittyville Retirement Community should – no,
MUST – also include a butterfly motif, perhaps that is
what caused the out-of-character tone of menace to
Hank Sanders’ very forceful “I don’t like butterflies!”
before using his prerogative as President of the
Residents’ Association to quickly slam down
the gavel and curtly declare, “Meeting adjourned.”