Tinfoil Butterfly

by Rachel Eve Moulton

I longed to be that horror, the thing he obsessed over for so long that he understood and loved all of its truths and ugly spots and yet still wanted to know more. I wanted to be his muse.

“I shot a man. He’s in the hills. Bleeding out on the side of the highway. Someone should find him before he is all the way dead.”

My dad’s point, I think, was that evil doesn’t take people by surprise. In order for it to really get you, a tiny piece of you has to want it.

life happens at arm’s length now—close enough to destroy the joy and distanced enough to fog the pain.

We are all of us made up of crazy,” Ray liked to say. “And madness in its simplest form is narcissism—a self stared at so long and so hard that any potential beauty in it becomes horrifying.”

Of course, it is always safer to be a boy. Everyone knows that. Fucking men always waiting to take something that isn’t theirs, to reach up into your insides and tear you up.

I know what it feels like to want to hide. Such scars are evidence of a very private emptying of the soul.

“These hills are always shifting. Swallowing things up and then growing them anew. Life is cyclical.

“Everything has an end. A beginning, middle, and end. That’s basic shit,” I say. “You’re born. You live. You die.” “It isn’t like that. It’s cyclical.” She cocks her head to the right. “You begin, you begin, you begin. Or you end, you end, you end. Either way there is no stop. No go.”