Butterflies keep landing on my ass.
It’s hot for them, too.
Do I look like a beach to you?
Maybe you are, to them.
Maybe I am.
Maybe this is exactly why so many people got butterfly tattoos on their asses in the early 2000s.
Oh, absolutely.
You know, that was my email address when I was a kid.
“Oh absolutely?”
I love the Gold Coast on you.
Me too.
There’s a flurry of butterflies in the air by the river. We’ve taken the mid-tier towels from the linen cupboard to the one gentrified patch of grass by the dock. Recently, we bought an apartment in an area of Melbourne that people are still mostly scared to visit, but that we insist is “on it’s way up”. The street smells like cabbage and tobacco and you can hear the sounds of people living – yelling, television, church and birthdays. Quiet houses are terrifying. We love it here.
On the opposite bank of the river to us is a functional shipping yard. When I stretch out an arm to apply sunscreen or check the time, the arms of great grunting machines echo my movements like my dystopian shadows.
If they weren’t so beautiful, they’d be a swarm. The butterflies, that is. Moths would be a swarm. But butterflies are a flurry.
Mine was just my name.
What was?
My email, when I was in school.
Oh my god remember Yahoo?!
Is that still a thing?
Probably not.
There should have been a funeral.
That’s –
Not how it works. I know.
It’s only 2pm, how good is that?
Hmm.
I left work at lunchtime today. It’s not the type of environment that just lets you go early on a Friday afternoon because you deserve it, nor would they ever introduce butterflies to the workplace to boost flaccid employee morale. So, the butterflies were odd. But I wasn’t dwelling on it, striding bullishly to board the 1:45pm Werribee train home. I’d earned my early mark, staying long after dark last week to float fake plastic flowers with LED candles jammed in their mouths in a body of water and film it for our social channels. We tried, and honestly, failed, to make it look like the celebration it was intended to be, and not a memorial for someone, or something, lost at sea. A country. A name.
There is a funereal quality to everything at the moment. The city drips with it. Grief is an oil that sets into your clothes and muffles the clinking of glasses at Friday drinks to a soft thudding that sounds like bombs in the distance.
And now we’re at the park, chatting intently over the urge to ask the earth is on our side, or will soon abandon us.
Why are there so many butterflies?
I don’t know, Aurelia replies, wincing a little at the strange urgency in my voice. Is it breeding season?
But don’t they die after, like, a day?
Detecting this wasn’t a moment for wild guesses, she pulls out her phone to Google.
She sounds out each word as she types.
HOW - LONG - DO - BUTTERFLIES - LIVE.
(pause)
Huh.
What?
Apparently, Monarchs can live up to 8 months.
Fucking royals.
Amen.
But the average?
A week. Sometimes a day.
I had started crying a little while ago, but the facts were more important.
How often is sometimes?
1 in 30.
I cried, with more gusto now.
Some hard-beaked birds starting giggling in a pack to our left. I couldn’t see them but I knew they were hard-beaked from the way they cackled. Cunts. What could they be laughing at, in this moment? The spectacle of an entire doomed population trying to live their last day, when it’s also their first? How do you know what’s good when you’ve been alive for an hour, six? When everyone else has also only been alive for a minute, so can’t give recommendations on where to fly or what to eat?
Or were they mocking us, two lesbians clenched in the grass by the shipping yard, desperate to witness the first strains of summer after yet another predictably unprecedented winter.
Surely this butterfly event is unprecedented, I said, borrowing the language of my thoughts.
Unprecedented is nothing.
Wow. That’s a lot.
Well, we knew this was coming.
What?
Everything.
Everything always comes.
That’s what I mean.
There’s a morbid pause while we both try and see the future, to be able to offer it to the other. Nothing.
People are posting watermelons for Palestine, I say.
Now, that’s unprecedented.
The fucking birds haven’t stopped talking this whole time. The butterflies are starting to look like ghosts.
Whose ghosts are you? I want to ask. Are you who I think you are?
Don’t you think it’s weird that we just assume all animals we see here are Australian?
Like, “these are Australian butterflies?”
Yeah, but what if they’re actually French?
The French would never land on my ass.
Hah. True.
Have we had too much sun?
Oh, definitely.
Let’s go home.
We should, while we can.
You’re sad, I can tell.
What if these butterflies are –
Maybe they are.
It’s getting hotter and less beautiful here by the minute.
Deep.
Can we just stay until they get tired?
They’ll move on.
But we don’t have to.
You’re right.
Let’s stay.
We’ll stay until dark.
Is that the end?
I think it is.
They’ll have us.
Until the end.
Yes, until then.
-TN