Dead Butterflies

For the getwriting friday flash challenge.

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Dead butterflies crumble in her hands, spiky and fine. They rest, paper-thin in her chubby child palms before she crushes, watches them fade into dusty nothingness until she can't see anything of them anymore. They become a part of the room's carpet and a part of the air, an almost random distribution of minute organic particles. Dead beauty: lost the way it was always intended to be lost. It's not lost as long as she knows it's there, though, and spinning and twirling and watching pretty skirts flare out about you takes on special meaning when she knows she has butterfly parts swirling with chaos and magic about her.

She gets in trouble when she crumbles dead butterflies, leaving empty spaces in lazily unpolished cabinets. Their hinges are rusty and the glass is only just translucent from the accumulated neglect, but still she gets in trouble.

Live butterflies don't crumble at all, they flutter before they squish, and dead butterfly parts aren't nearly as special when they're in pieces rather than powder. They twitch a little as they end to lay limp and murky, and they have no beauty when they're broken this way. It's lost, and she can never work out exactly where it goes as she prods and pushes. The remains refuse to move, they stick a little stubbornly, and when she goes inside afterwards she has to wash her hands with the flowery liquid soap in the downstairs bathroom.

She stirs the muddy water, pondwater furtively acquired from beneath the netting put up to protect the goldfish from nextdoor's pussy cat. She doesn't think she got any pond- skaters this time, but she did add twenty-two blades of grass and the special stone that shines from behind the shed. She plucked three underripe gooseberries and in they went, each wrapped in a geranium leaf. She stirs, and scrapes in dead butterfly, lost beauty for potions.