Aimee Ogden - [BCS300 S05]

by Never a Butterfly, Nor a Moth

  They sat me down upon the benches where the children your age sat with their slates propped upon their knees and told me that a proper young lady must soon leave such childishness behind. Not a word about your accomplishments in voice and word and wit. No, only the innocent light that burned in you, whose soft glow they recoiled from. How, they lamented, would you ever come by a fine Ksmala husband if you kept at such loutish behavior—even with a good trade to your name?

  They clucked, too, over how close your heart had entwined with Enet’s; it was not proper, they insisted, for two souls to close themselves off from the love and goodness of the rest of their peers, their community. My fingers, too, had tied many a worry-knot about you and Enet and your tight-twisted hearts, though the ply of my yarn ran opposite theirs. I smiled and thanked them for their thoughts—do not be wounded, please, daughter-mine, that I did not rise to defend you, for my soul was weary and small then. And do not begrudge me my fears, then, about dear Enet. It is not too late for a woman grown to feel the breeze from the Changing God’s wings.

  When I stepped outside, I let the sun burn their peevishness away from me. I hoped that you would never have a Ksmala husband. Nor a Butterfly one either. As if that is all a person could amount to, to be anchored one to the next.

  I walked home to the apartment we had rented by then, over a glass-blower from whose rooms the hot acrid air floated up to us. It was cheap, though, and we did not suffer so badly from the cold winters in the shadows of Ulgon Lis as did our Butterfly friends and cousins who had otherwise fared better finding housing in the city. A few Butterflies, especially the eldest, still lived in the barracks. I missed them sometimes, missed the easy warmth of Chayen or Kitu as I had for years now missed the bodies of the men whose barracks lay on the far side of the city from ours. There was no creeping between houses after curfew as there had been between beds. But it was good to have our own space. To be away from the noise and the forever-smells of other women’s feet and other children’s sick.

  You had already set the pot to boil with the potatoes for our dinner. Strong enough to carry the water up the stairs and tall enough to work the stove without the little wooden stool; I knew you would soon be taller than me. Your father was tall, or at least the shadow he casts in my heart is a long one. Beside the stove you sat, tongue between teeth as you bent over your work. Already we were well-known for our spiderweb patterns, so delicate and intricate. Other Butterflies had long since begun to make their own, but they let us be the only family to sell them to the Ksmala. A way of thanks; a gift given in return for our own. So clever, how you captured it, silk for silk, the Ksmala would say, and we would smile and take their coin and let them think we were clever, in their elder-sister head-patting way. We were cleverer by far than they ever allowed for in their rules and rows.

  We had halfway finished our supper when a client came to our door, ducking her head around the houseblessing in order to knock. Another foreigner to this city, a Tirish jeweler, though never as foreign as we; not so long as Tir Ardol follows the same gods of order and rule as the Ksmala. Surely you remember this woman, who had ordered an altar cloth, made to order for her daughter’s wedding feast, with our cityfamous spiderweb patterns. She scarcely haggled when you brought out your work—only praised your steady eye and confident hand.

  You smiled the easy happycat smile you had already learned to turn on Ksmala in their kindest moods. In the web’s silver highlights you had picked out a rude shorthand missive in your bloodborn language, jagged angles spiraling outward from the center in a list of the customer’s shortcomings and two paired couplets comparing the bride to a buffalo. I had already long cautioned you against what might happen if, one day, the Ksmala realized our game. But I think you would rather play it than live without it. Risky enough without sewing daggers into every pattern, but you might have lost interest had it not been for the dangerdance you could work into it.

  Maybe I worry for nothing. They have never yet figured it out; perhaps they never will. Our writing is so different from the Ksmala script, the hardfast lines instead of soft easy curves, the spiral outward instead of back and forth oxplowing. The Ksmala look into the world as if it is their mirror, and they only smile when they recognize themselves in the reflection.

  The woman gave you her coin, which helped us make rent, may tomorrow’s wings blow kindly on me for how much I leaned on you in those days. And before she left, she made charmed murmurs over the work laid out and the finished fineries on display. “This is your best yet,” she said, lingering over the great tablecloth that you had folded over, unfinished. “The complexity of the pattern reflects the divine plan. Is it already spoken for?”

  “It isn’t for sale.” You smiled again, as bland as ever. You put a Butterfly flutter into your accent, though I know you wield Ksmala like a handborn blade. “It is for my someday-chest.”

  The woman clucked her disappointment. “So much time spent on something that will only sit idle for so many years!”

  “My future household will be worth the wait.” You bowed a student’s proper bow. “And it is said that busy hands do the gods’ work.”

  “It’s true, it’s true.” The client winked at me on her way past. “Such a virtuous daughter you’ve raised!” Her gaze rolled over me and my home: the faded-dye green of my jacket, the scarlet flowers growing out of a broken teapot on the sill. The idol on its own high shelf. “And at such a disadvantage,” she said, with knifetongue kindness, and slipped out.

  You watched her go. A familiar disdain curdled your face when her shadow faded from our doorstep. Supper had gone cold, but I made you sit back down, finish eating; no day will come where I will let food go to waste. You dragged the potato through the redspice sauce and gulped it down in huge angry bites. That way, I think, you could pretend it was the redspice sauce dragging the tears from your eyes.

  I volunteered to mind the dishes after, and you silently went back to your sewing-work. The bubble-burp of the soapy water; the slip-slip-hiss of the thread. We both worked separate and in silence, and it was only to my back that you said, between the kiss of needle to fabric, “I don’t want to be Ksmala.”

  Oh, my heart. “It is not safe to be a Butterfly,” I told you, “in a place like this. A moth, perhaps, with moon-faded wings. But still a thing of beauty, something gentle and precious.”

  I did not look at you, so that I would not shatter this moment and send the broken pieces of you skitter-scatter across our home. After a moment, your fabric rustled again, and I went back to my dishes.

  That night after we had gone to bed, I opened my eyes on the darkness to see a shadowghost shape slide over the floor to the shelf where the idol slept. Your lips did not brush it in reverence, but you did whisper to it, and what things you said I do not know, will never know, will never ask you. The way you never ask what it is I bend my neck to, every night, the manytreasured embroiderings that never see their day in the marketplace. It had been years, many years, since I’d seen you let the Changing God carry your worries away. That night I cried myself to sleep with silent tears.

  I should have asked you then whether a Butterfly was even what you wanted to be, but I didn’t think of that until it was already too late. Daughter-mine, I am sorry.

  My daughter, a woman all but grown, you have hands as strong as steel from long hours of sewing. At night, when I come back from the fields, you still have the strength to massage my aching shoulders and back. Are you not exhausted from the long days you spend as midwife-assistant in the Halls of Confinement? Would your hand not be rather be occupied with Enet’s? While you work my knots, I try to count up all the hours of needlework you’ve put in; to convert them to weeks, months. Years? How much of you has been tied up in spools of silversilk thread?

  I dream of the day when I can give you these silken letters, so that you can understand some fraction of the whys I never gave you. But I dream in shame, for understanding me should not be your duty. Your mother is a selfish
woman.

  My other letters are yours, now. This one is for me, to remember, to pretend that you will press it, too, between your palms someday. There are some paths a mother cannot follow except in the dark secret hallways of her heart.

  Let me set you down in silk this way: sitting on the floor of our little apartment with your head in Enet’s lap. Enet, braiding your hair with strands of gaily-colored thread, hiding rainbows in between the thick dark curls. Enet has been your companion through such a long string of years now—a strange thing, in my eyes, to spend so much time bound to one heart. But you love her, and Enet loves you. It is not good to eat from only one tree, I would have scolded once, for what will you do then if the fruit sours? But you, daughter-mine, are not a Butterfly like me, nor Ksmala either; something in between and far away. I tried never to nag you for what you are, for what your life and I have made you. But I weep sometimes for the bright colors you might have unfurled to a different world, a different time. Then I dry my tears, and I count the ways that I am learning to love this strange enduring union too.

  You were humming softly to yourself. You used no words, but I recognized the shape of the sounds you made: the song-poem your father wrote for me nearly twenty years ago. You wore the same oversized blouse every day now, and your fingers were laced over the generous folds of fabric. Together you and Enet had both lain with a Ksmala man, though only your belly grew hard and moon-round. How my daughter eats, I joked with the Ksmala matrons, the city mothers, our clients. Like a horse! I am going to have to marry her off before she eats me out of house and home. And then we would all laugh together, but I did not mean it and neither did they. Behind those kindly smiling faces they were always sniffing for deception and sin. And ready to sew some from whole cloth where none could be found.

  Your eyes were closed, but as if you felt my worrywatch gaze, you turned your face toward me. “Don’t worry about me, mama,” you said. Your eyes opened, two golden suns to warm my face. “It’s you I’m worried about.”

  A backward thing, for a daughter to bear up under concern for the mother that bore her. But our whole world is upside down, ground flipped with sky, and what was strange has become what is ordinary.

  I shook my head. “I’m too old.” True, though not to the heart of the thing. Someone had to be here to flutter her wings, to churn up the winds of distraction and deceit. “I’ll be fine,” I promised you, and that was true and it was not, which is a thing that can be so in such a wrong-side-up world. I have your aunt still, ghost of my sister-gone that she is, and my mother’s songs are sewn too deep into my heart for any scourging stone to reach. That is more than many are granted, in this sorrowstrange world.

  “Almost curfew,” said Enet, her voice apology soft.

  You stood, your hair all bound up. That outsized shirt of yours fell past your hips, so that your father’s loving words could be seen spiderwebbed all about the hem. I wonder if Enet ever wrote a poem for you, to be shared with your child. But that is none of my concern.

  Enet put on her warmest cloak, the one you had sewn with rosethorn endearments on the inner lining. She reached for the packs without embracing me, as was ever her way, and I could see my best kitchen knife where it winked inside the cloak’s folds.

  You folded me up in your arms so tightly I could feel the child leap and twist within you. I held my granddaughter too, then, in the only way I ever will. “Stay here,” you said, daughter-mine, against my ear. “If you’re seen with us tonight, they might—”

  “No,” I said, gentlehard, and your shoulders shook against me. Even in an upside-down world, a mother’s word is final. You will understand this, soon enough.

  The last time I saw you, daughter-mine, it was as a darkcloak shape sliding into the shadows of the mountain pass. Your outline and Enet’s crossed one over the other up the switchback path, so that I could no longer tell you one from the other. Up you went until you disappeared, swallowed up by the forest where the evergreens grow stout and close together like fat wise old women, where the beasts which the Ksmala do not dare to name roam. The forest is full of shatterdream darkness, but the forest is not forever, and you have the strength of doublelife to carry you over to what world waits beyond.

  I stayed until I lost sight of you and after, until sun had rolled nearly out of the sky, and then I went home hurryhard before curfew. Your bed was heaped up with blankets in a woman’s sturdy shape, and I made excuses for your exhaustion to the under-mother who came to our door. An extra night, for you to hurry away into the forest. To slip further out of reach.

  I lay down on my bed with the Changing God idol against my cheek—you refused to deprive me of it when you left, though in leaving it you deprived me of something much greater. I will never begrudge you that. And it was some comfort yet to have my idol with me, when I had little else. I didn’t have the breath to whisper my worries, so I wept instead, and the old clay drank away my tears until at last I slept. There would be punishment, on the morrow, but I will not bind it into my memory with silk. Our choices bear their consequences, and so must we. I would not change mine.

  Because I dreamed then as I still do: of my daughter welcomed with open arms into a rainbow-clad Butterfly village on the far side of your mountains, with your father there to welcome you; of you and Enet all alone, building a cabin and holding off the forest with song and blade; of a world of strangers who share with you no common tongue but who make room for you in a cozy corner of their homes, their cities, their stories. I dream that you and Enet steal aboard a boat and put to sea and cross the globe searching for an island that drowned long before you were born.

  I dream of you, my spider-daughter, who, unlike a butterfly buffeted by trouble and change, will creep into what crevices you may, who will make a home wherever one can be found.

  You, my spider-daughter, will spin yourself a new world out of silken steel, and into that world will your own child be born. Another spider-daughter, perhaps. Or maybe something just as new and strange and wonderful.

  © Copyright 2020 Aimee Ogden