Tinfoil Butterfly

by Rachel Eve Moulton

  The birds are gone.

  Blood trickles down from his hairline, and I dig through his hair to find deep cuts.

  “You like those things, huh?”

  “She doesn’t recognize me without my mask.”

  “Who doesn’t recognize you?”

  “Mom. She’d never hurt me on purpose.”

  I hold my T-shirt to his forehead.

  “She never saw me with these—these—umm,” he stammers, “these bad spots.” He is referring to his scars. “She only knows me now with the mask on.”

  “Be real with me for a second, Earl. Animals do what they need to do to survive and the snow came early. They are just scared and hungry.”

  “I’ll put my mask back on so she can tell it’s me.”

  The blood seeps up to the surface of his face, volcanic. Stitches would be good, but they aren’t going to happen.

  “You are not to wear that mask or any mask ever again. This is you. You do not hide,” I say, and press the cloth to his scalp. We stare at each other. His green eyes are on mine. “Your mother would say the same thing if she were alive.”

  He breaks my gaze. Looks away from me into the snow.

  “Your mother is gone, Earl. There’s nothing we can do about that.”

  I wait for him to speak, to look back up at my face, but he won’t, and it’s too cold to wait for an epiphany. Earl’s ears are already harsh with pink and my hands burn.

  “Good morning.” A sound to eclipse the birdcalls. “How did everyone sleep?”

  George stands at the tree line, not fifty yards away, with red gas cans in his hands.

  Earl begins to breathe too fast, wheezing within seconds.

  “Get back inside,” I say. Earl does not move. “Now! Climb!” My shout wakes him into movement, and I stand between George and the climbing trees.

  “What’s the deal with being so fucking psycho, George? Can’t you just do your thing and we’ll do ours?”

  George moves slowly forward. His hurt arm can barely hold up the gas can. It drags the left side of his body closer to the snow.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’m determined, but I’m a slow mover. Go on. Go back inside with my offspring. It’ll take me a minute to get the flames going.”

  Earl’s boots are disappearing into the hayloft as I begin my tree climb. George makes it to the barn and is unscrewing the lid of one of the red gas cans at the same time that I’m stepping off the climbing trees and into the hayloft.

  “Settle in. Eat breakfast. I’ll take my time.” He splashes some gas up onto the barn. “Oh, wait,” he says, and sets down the can. “I should show you this too. From inside his jacket, he displays a rifle. He’s got it somehow attached to his waist so it moves with him as he walks, a third limb. “I’m good with it. I can shoot real straight.”

  “Fantastic,” I say. Earl is just behind me, his breath still coming quickly.

  “Just want you to know what you’re up against. Of course, if you want to walk out of here, I’m good with that too. Just leave me my kid.”

  “Emma,” Earl whines from below.

  “Shhhh,” I hiss into the dark of the barn.

  “Don’t leave me, Emma. He’ll kill me,” he says. Earl’s voice echoing up from the depths of the barn.

  “Jesus, I’m not going to fucking leave you,” I say. “We’re going to make it out of here. You and me. Just get back.” I step out of George’s sight and climb down the ladder to join Earl. “Get in the Jeep.”

  “But we don’t have keys.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I just need a knife.”

  In the driver’s seat, I pry back the panel under the steering column. The mess of green and red and black wires spill out as I knew they would.

  “My father taught me how to hot-wire cars. It’s stupid easy. I just need this switchblade.”

  The dim light makes it difficult, but the red and the black wires are there. I strip the ends of both, then hand the blade to Earl.

  “Keep that with you,” I say, and then ask, “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  Copper to copper and the engine purrs to life.

  “Cool,” Earl says, and I do feel cool. I am something George isn’t expecting.

  I twist the wires together and put Willy in reverse. I back up twenty feet before I hit Earl’s art table and then I go back farther, mumbling sorry to Earl as I hear the table scrape against the bumper.

  “We’re going through?” he asks. “For real?”

  “For real,” I say. “Seat belt on?”

  “On.”

  “Lock your door.”

  “Locked.”

  “Here we go.”

  I push the accelerator to the floor and we shoot forward, wood splinters around us. I lose my nerve for just a second and let up on the gas. We stall out. The front bumper raised high on a combination of splintered barn wood and South Dakota snow.

  I put the Jeep in reverse again. We move backward smoothly. Next I slide us into first, second, and then we shoot through the rubble of the barn and out onto the snow. The gas pedal to the floor as we climb into the daylight.

  I’m shifting into third when Earl screams.

  The Jeep hits something solid. My head bangs the steering wheel and then swings back to hit the headrest, and my neck makes a funny snap of a noise. Blood oozes from a cut on my forehead and slides into my right eye. I feel fuzzy. I move my head cautiously to look at Earl, but his sweet face slides away from me, telescoping back, back, back.

  “I’m okay,” I mumble, but then it is completely dark.

  The world turns to velvet, and in the dark, I hear only Earl.

  “You can start an avalanche by stepping in the wrong place,” Earl says. And I see snow all around me where there is supposed to be a Jeep. I am standing on the train tracks. The rails frozen. If I move my body at all I will slip and bang my head. The scene changes.

  I am outside the diner. The lights inside are flickering. Veronica is parked where we left her, buried to the doors in snow. Birds are piled up on the ground beside her—four birds, no, six—huddled on top of something. One of them tilts its head toward me, and even though they are far away and I am silent, I know the bird is looking me over with one eye and then the next.

  Suddenly Earl is next to me, holding my hand, and the crow raises her beak to the sky and caws, loud as a scream. She calls up and out, alerting the world to something fierce and carnal and angry.

  The bird that began the chorus stops abruptly, ruffles its body as if cold, and launches itself into the sky. In its wake, I see what it was hiding with its dark feathers. A pale ankle, a delicate foot. The woman from the cellar. She is naked, skin welted with red. Her black hair hangs as dark as the crows’ feathers over her bare breasts.

  “It’s my mother,” Earl says in a far-off voice that makes me feel very sad.

  Then he is in her lap, or what would be a lap if she were sitting up. He is wrapping his arms around her, squishing himself to her bare chest.

  “Earl, honey, get away from the bird,” I say.

  She sits up. Her eyelids close and then open again to take me in.

  “Hello,” she says. She looks at me, black eyes that seem to be nothing but pupil, and I lunge for Earl.

  I jolt back into my body, breathing hard. I cannot see out of my left eye. It’s swelling shut.

  “Emma, Emma!”

  We are in the Jeep. My head is bleeding. I’ve hit it on the steering wheel. A crow sits on the hood of the Jeep. Earl’s mother. She peers at us. Pecks at the glass.

  A noise, loud and fierce as a thunderclap and the window next to Earl’s head explodes.

  “Fuck!”

  I restart the Jeep, press too hard on the gas, and we lurch forward. Almost stalling again.

  “Go right!” Earl is yelling, and for a moment, I can’t recall what right is but then we’re curving around the barn, finding a path free of trees that is wide enough for the Jeep. We drive fifteen miles per hour,
twenty. I hear another gunshot and another. The bullets do not reach us.

  “You can go slow, Emma. He’s hurt. He won’t be able to keep up.”

  “Where’s your mother?”

  “What?”

  My thoughts are confused. My head aches.

  I am in the diner kitchen. The swinging door between the eating area and the prep room is frantically swinging.

  “Emma!”

  I am driving the Jeep. Up the hill, through the trees to the ghost town.

  “Are you okay?” Earl puts his hand on the steering wheel.

  In the diner kitchen, the bird woman faces the stove. There are two wounds between her shoulder blades, slashes so deep and thick that I see muscle. In spite of their depth, their plant-pulled-up-by-the-roots severity, they are not bleeding. They expose the red and pink of her insides. Two spaces awaiting the perfect planting.

  The bird woman straightens her back, rolls her shoulders, and the holes gape and yawn. She does not turn to face me.

  “Who’s in the cellar?” I ask.

  “We all come back,” the bird woman says, and then the snow is before me, the broken farmhouse straight ahead.

  “You’re scaring me,” Earl says, and my body goes limp. The Jeep lurches forward and stalls out. I’m going to be sick. I open the door and vomit into the snow. I shut my eyes and behind the lids I see the crow woman.

  “He’s been calling your name for days,” the crow woman says.

  “If he’s still alive, we need to get him out of the cellar.”

  “I know. I’ll go get him.”

  “No!” I yell, but Earl is already outside the car, making his way through the snow. I need to wake up. My brain is bruised. If I don’t shut my eyes, I will regain focus. I’ll ground myself in the here and now. I step out of the Jeep. The ghost town stares at me; the farmhouse gapes.

  I move more quickly than I think possible. I turn the corner of the house and there is Earl, already removing a long metal pipe that George has jammed through the door handles. Not so far off in the woods there is a gunshot, a whoop of victory.

  “Wait!” I yell at Earl, and he stops and turns back to me.

  I make the mistake of pausing. Just for a second. My eyes shut and the bird woman is there, pointing down the cellar steps. She holds her arm steady in the air. She is still naked. Her body is covered with little bumps of skin that are mounding up.

  “You’ve left a lot unfinished,” she says to me. “These things do not like to be unresolved.”

  “Stop it. Just stop it,” I say. I shake myself awake even though it hurts.

  A sound comes now from a long way off. A baby crying. An infant ragged with cold and fear. The sound comes through the woods, closer and closer. I cover my ears, but then it’s inside of me. Rising up from my middle to scream inside my head.

  FOURTEEN

  “Emma,” Earl is saying. “Emma!” I press my hands tight to my head and tighter still. I want to press so hard that my skull collapses, but I am weak and my eyes leak water. The baby’s cries get louder until I open my eyes, and there is Earl. The shape of him is blurry through tears and his mouth is changing, widening into a gaping hole, too big to be real, but the sound is real. That loud baby cry is crinkling his face, exploding out of him. He will swallow me.

  “Stop!” I yell. “Stop! Stop! Stop!” I push at my ears. The sound does stop, and the absence of it is so peaceful and complete that I begin to weep. I speak again between gulps for air. “I’m sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.” I say it so much that it doesn’t sound like a word anymore. Earl’s hands are on my arms, pulling my palms from my ears. I open my eyes and there he is. His sweet melty face looking at me.

  “It’s okay,” he says.

  “I just wanted to go to sleep, Earl.”

  “Huh?” Earl asks.

  I’ve said wanted. Past tense. I’m thinking of Emma and Ray. Ray and Emma. Of how hard those two tried to go to sleep. To cease to be awake.

  “I’m so tired,” I say.

  “You can’t go to sleep.”

  “I wanted him to love me,” I say. My words slur. “A baby would have made us into something.”

  “Stay here with me,” he says. “Don’t go away again.”

  The crow woman is here.

  I ask her: “How does this end?”

  “Who told you it had an end?” she asks.

  “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.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I say. My brain is tired and sad and so, so foggy. I’m slogging through snow, dragging my feet from one deep hole into the next.

  She does not answer but tilts her head the other way. I look at her tiny cuts, hundreds of them, all over her naked body suddenly budding with black, feathers peeking out from inside and coming to the surface like shoots of grass.

  “I want to begin,” I say, swallowing bile.

  “Emma,” Earl says, and wraps his arms around me.

  He tilts his sweet face to mine. He is a thousand years old. Indefinite suffering sits in his ragged scars, his crooked teeth, but he is also a little boy. I want to keep him. Save him.

  “What do I do?”

  “He’s coming,” Earl says.

  A bullet smashes into the Jeep.

  Earl and I are at the cellar door. I pull the metal bar the rest of the way out and we swing the doors open together. In the dark, on the bottom stair there is a body. Curled into a ball. Only the hard shell of its back is showing.

  “Lowell,” I call down into the abyss.

  My mind is suddenly sober. I wipe blood from my eyebrow before it drips into my eye.

  “We need a flashlight,” I say to Earl.

  “It’s in the Jeep. You want me to get it?”

  “Hell no. You stay as close to me as you can.”

  “Lowell Smith! It’s Emma Powers. I need to hear you’re alive.”

  Lowell uncurls slowly. The ridge of his back straightening out. Once he’s unrolled, he puts his back to the cellar dirt and covers his eyes to guard against the bright daylight we’ve shone down his hovel hole.

  “Fuck you,” he says, his voice soft with hurt.

  “Can you walk?” I ask.

  “It’s so dark. I’ve been making my dying plans with the old lady and the others.”

  “Jesus Christ. I have to go down and get him,” I say, and start down. First foot on the first step, but Earl grabs my arm. “Is he worth saving, Emma?”

  “No,” I say without pause and then think but do not say, But maybe I am.

  The climb down into the cellar seems short this time. Earl follows closely behind me. I can smell Lowell. That specific smell of him mixed with blood and piss and decay. At the base of the steps, there is darkness. I do not look around for the others. I already know they are there.

  “I have a Jeep. It’ll get us out of here and off the mountain, but we have to move now.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he whispers.

  “Don’t be stupid, Lowell. Why would I come down here just to hurt you?”

  “Again. Hurt me again.”

  “Whatever. As if you weren’t going to hurt me. As if you hadn’t already.”

  “I was fucking nice to you. But you’re right. I do want to hurt you,” he says savagely, swinging for my ankle.

  I step easily away.

  “Too slow,” I say.

  “There’s a body down here,” he says. “I can’t get close to it but I think it’s been down here awhile.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “Fantastic. I was just planning what position I’d like to be found in. Replaying Mother’s Milk song by song in my head. I can’t remember track three, but I got all the rest just about perfect.”


  “Can you move?”

  “I’m not as whole as I used to be. You shot me. That’s what started it off. You evil fucking cunt.”

  “Don’t call her that!” Earl says, starting to move between me and Lowell.

  “Ladies,” George says from the top of the cellar steps, blocking most of the light. “It’s nice of y’all to consolidate yourselves. I’ll ask you to sit tight and let me take care of what I need to. Should be over in no time.”

  I rise to my full height and make a move for the stairs. He holds the barrel to my face. I have Lowell’s gun in my jacket pocket. No bullets, but it’s there. The threat of it could be helpful, but it’s zipped into my inside pocket and will take too long to reach.

  “I can shoot you now if you want,” George says, thrilled with himself.

  “Go for it,” I say. “I die down here now or you die later when I get out.”

  My willingness to be shot in the face catches him off guard. Rattles him a little, and his trigger finger twitches.

  Fuck it, I think, but not fast enough. He steps back and slams one cellar door shut and then the other. There is the noise of the pipe sliding into place right before the sound of my hand banging on the metal door.

  “George!” I shout.

  The fear is instant and full and real. The dark of the cellar so complete that it seems it’s all I have. The dark and the fear. Ghosts rise up from behind me, and they mean me harm. Ray. My dad. Earl’s mother.

  A hand closes around my ankle. I scream and bang my head on the metal doors above me, hard. My already bruised brain softens a little more. The ringing in my head brings the baby cry back. So loud and close that I touch my belly to make sure the baby isn’t right here with me.

  “Don’t worry. He’s locked me down here plenty,” Earl says.

  The baby quiets to a whimper.

  “That’s fucking nuts,” Lowell says, and releases my ankle. “I’ll kill you once we’re out of this mess.”