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“Most people are when talking to the FBI.” “It’s not that different from talking with—” She bites her chapped lower lip, winces at the beads of blood that seep through the cracked skin. She takes another sip. “With?” he prompts gently. “Him,” she answers. “The Gardener.” “The man who held you—you talked with his gardener?” She shakes her head. “He was the Gardener.”
You have to understand, I didn’t give him that name out of fear or reverence, or some misguided sense of propriety. I didn’t give him that name at all. Like anything else in
The upper wings were golden-brown, tawny like Lyonette’s hair and eyes, flecked through with bits of black, white, and deep bronze. The lower wings were shades of rose and purple, also marked through with patterns of black and white. The detail was astonishing, slight color variations giving the impressions of individual scales. The colors were rich, almost saturated, and they filled almost my entire back, from the very tips of my shoulders to a little below the curve of my hips. The wings were tall and narrow, the outer edges just barely curving onto my sides.
Beauty loses its meaning when you’re surrounded by too much of it.
“Not entirely accurate. Let’s call me a shadow child, overlooked rather than broken. I’m the teddy bear gathering dust bunnies under the bed, not the one-legged soldier.”
Like beauty, desperation and fear were as common as breathing.
The Gardener came for her just before daylight. He was an elegant figure of a man, maybe a little above average height, well built. The type of man who always looked at least ten to fifteen years younger than he really was. Dark blond hair, always perfectly in place and well-trimmed, pale green eyes like the sea. He was handsome, that couldn’t be argued, even if my stomach still turned at the sight of him. I’d never seen him dressed all in black before. He stood in the doorway, thumbs hooked in his pockets, and just looked at us.
The Gardener only ever killed girls for three reasons. First, they were too old. The shelf date counted down to twenty-one, and after that, well, beauty is ephemeral and fleeting, and he had to capture it while he could. Second reason was connected to health. If they were too sick, or too injured, or too pregnant. Well, pregnant, I guess. Being too pregnant is a bit like being too dead; it’s not really a flexible state. He was always a little disgruntled about the pregnancies; Lorraine gave us shots four times a year that were supposed to prevent that sort of inconvenience, but no birth
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“Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them
back together with all the sharp edges showing.”
trouble with sociopaths, really, is that you never know where they draw their boundaries.
Yet if hope has flown away in a night, or in a day, or in none, is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Real butterflies could fly away, out of reach. The Gardener’s Butterflies could only ever fall, and that but rarely.
Three butterflies for a broken girl: one for personality, one for possession, and one for pettiness.
“Not making a choice is a choice. Neutrality is a concept, not a fact. No one actually gets to live their lives that way.”
And this time, instead of writing someone else’s poems and stories against the inside of my skull, I wondered about the boy on the other side of the kitchen counter, listening to it all.
But each time I saw it, I knew I was in the presence of something extraordinary, something that not everyone found or was capable of recognizing and sustaining.
We were Butterflies, and our short lives would end in glass.
