Wings

It was September, still hot and so humid that she immediately felt as if she’d been wrapped in cellophane whenever she stepped outside. But she’d found a bit of ivy clinging to her brick apartment building, and that vine had a single red leaf on it. No harbinger of autumn like that could be ignored. Fall, the season of death, was her favorite. She wanted to be watching when hit.

She drove three hours to a national park. She hiked several trails that day, leaning down and closely examining every fallen leaf, every nut and mushroom, every wooly caterpillar that trundled across the packed earth. She smoked cigarettes every few hundred yards and put them out in a water bottle in her backpack, to be disposed of later. She nodded and smiled at other hikers headed the opposite way. She stopped to read snatches of Edgar Allen Poe poems. She imagined she had wings. She sweated completely through her tank top and wiped her brow with a rainbow-colored bandana.

In the end, she was so hot and tired she hiked the road back to her car, rather than take the long way around. She was looking at the ground, testing her balance by walking heel-to-toe along the white line painted at the edge of the road, when something small and light brushed her cheek. She looked up to see a brilliant orange butterfly struggling to open its wings and failing. It looked miserable. She picked it up and held it in her hand. She felt like a god.

She placed it gently on a tree branch and turned back to her path.