The Butterfly Garden (The Collector, #1)

by Dot Hutchison

Some wanted the freedom to be anyone they wanted, some of us wanted the freedom to be left alone.

“Maya,” she repeated, and gave me another sound to hold on to. “Take a look at yourself now, Maya.” She held up a mirror, positioning it so I could use it to look into another mirror behind me. Large portions of my back were still pink and raw and swollen around the fresh ink, which I knew was darker than it would become once the scabs flaked off. Fingerprints were visible on my sides where the fabric gapped, but there was nothing to obscure the design. It was ugly, and terrible. And lovely. 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.

“Some people stay broken. Some pick up the pieces and put them back together with all the sharp edges showing.”

He called us Butterflies, but really we were well-trained dogs.

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.

and I thought how fucking unfair it was that he made us butterflies, of all things. Real butterflies could fly away, out of reach. The Gardener’s Butterflies could only ever fall, and that but rarely.