Joyce’s Reviews > The Butterfly Garden > Status Update

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

All the air for the Garden came from a centralized system. All the Gardener had to do to take out the entire flock was put a pesticide or something into the air. After all, he had to keep all sorts of chemicals stocked for the care of the greenhouses.

The trouble with sociopaths, really, is that you never know where they draw their boundaries.

If you truly wish to become a psychologist, Desmond, you will have to respect people's privacy.

Except when that privacy forms a block to their mental well-being. In which case, I'd be professionally obligated to urge them to talk through those secrets.

I'd lived through bad things before coming here. Bliss never had, or at least, not nearly to the same extent. She had too much good to compare this to.

come on, it's a Greek tragedy, and the Greeks and Shakespeare really love killing people off. It's a great lesson, really. Everyone dies.

I tell you to ask for anything, and you ask for something that benefits all of you.

It benefits me too.

Does "justice" change any of what he did? Any of what we went through? Does it bring the girls in glass back to life?

Well, no, but it keeps him from doing it again.

So would his death, without the sensationalism and tax money.

We'd take our hair down, put our backs against the rocks, and there were no f#cking Butterflies. Just for a few moments. So perhaps there was illusion here after all, but it was our illusion, not one he'd manufactured for us.

~~~~~

My secrets are old friends; I would feel like a poor friend if I abandoned them now.

"There's no illusion in here," I said finally. "It's not lush and green and growing and waiting for death and the possibility of decay. It's just rock and water."