The Names

by Florence Knapp

Instead, they treat her like a rare butterfly, accepting these moments when she is amongst them and appears, however briefly, to dazzle. Gordon once told her a butterfly’s average lifespan is twenty-nine days. She wonders, when she adds up these moments where she exists out in the world, if her lifespan will be any longer. And which would be better? To have those days boiled down into one intense burst of color, or to have the pin removed from the thorax every now and then, dusty wings fluttering back to life, a little more time eked out before being locked away again?

“Seriously, we’re back here already? Cora, you’re my dearest friend, so I mean this kindly, but you are not responsible for the goings-on of the entire world. Yes, people’s lives bump and collide and we send one another spinning off in different directions. But that’s life. It’s not unique to you. We each make our own choices.”

Maia nods. She knows this feeling. She’s been seeing a counselor for the last few years, but she, too, has been slow to lift the heaviest stones and look at the dark earth beneath, where her fears and worries flee the light like scurrying woodlice. She’s talked about her early childhood, said just enough about that awful day to acknowledge its existence. But she hides the details even from herself.

And he wondered where they’d be if there’d been no pandemic, if they hadn’t run out of money. If he’d found a way to be better, to do what was needed of him in time. If love weren’t just two ordinary people, connected by gossamer-thin strands of silk, brushed away as easily as a spider’s web.