Tinfoil Butterfly

by Rachel Eve Moulton

“Something happened to you and so you got scarred. Ghosts are like that too. Like scars. They travel with you.”

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.

Rage grows in me, a welcome déjà vu of a tamped-down feeling. Warm and thick and burning at the edges.

“This cannot be run away from or fixed. You have to start again. You have to forgive yourself and make this right.”

I know the sound of that apology. He’s apologizing for his father, for the shitty way in which he’s been living, for the cold night, for his seizure, for his scars, for his girl body, for his entire life.

I know what we will do next to prove to ourselves what we are and what we are not, and even in the moments when I know I want to stop it, I don’t. I let it roll. The beasts of us both crawling out into the light.

The heat’s too intense, but I want it. I want it to feel good. I want to know how it feels to be pushed up against something so hot that your skin gains muscle and willpower and curls away from the source, but I’m too weak. I have to back away a little.

The fire I walk into hurts so much and in every spot that it doesn’t hurt at all. I give up on being able to see and shut my eyes. The flames wrap around me, big black bird wings that lead me to Earl. In the darkness, I find him and my body stops hurting. I pull him in, our bodies against each other, and I feel that peacefulness I felt in the ocean. All of it roaring around me as my body confuses its own strength with that of nature’s. Out of the flames.

I’ll tell anyone who will listen that the little boy with me needs help. That I set him on fire, and if they want to save him, they need to get him far, far away from me.

“Family.” The word is thumping around in my belly, pushing against absent organs, begging to burst open my ugly scar. “Love.” That’s another good one I’ll never understand. The word begins and ends with a sound so soft, so gentle yet it congeals on my tongue. It doesn’t hiss or howl or swoosh. It only sits there, mouth rotting.