Free The Night Following by Morag Joss Page B

also have said, for I had acquired a few real mounted specimens, pinned and fraying above inked Latin names in display boxes with flakes of broken wing in the corners, that I found something poignant and sacrificial in their labeled entrapment. I picked up one of the boxes from the worktable and looked at it:
Chrysiridia ripheus
—the Madagascar Moth. Not strictly speaking a butterfly at all, but looking like one, its wings open to show a gorgeous twinned miniature sunset. But now I was fascinated not by its classification nor its beauty nor the precise manner of its death. What seemed amazing was the simple cessation of its hair-thin little life, the dry and painless arrest of all the faultless microscopic connections that had joined one beat of its wings, one sweep of its antennae, to the next. I hadn’t thought of it before, but it was the single wanton instant of its final coming to stillness that was spread out on display under glass, that one pure extinguishing moment perpetuated by every pair of eyes that gazed at it in the hundred and more years after the creature would anyway be dead.
    I thought of the woman no less reduced to a specimen on a mortuary slab, her body pinned open and exposed to the rummaging of a pathologist’s latexed hands. Such an obscene curiosity, which could be satisfied by encrypting the end of her life in a series of data entered by a laboratory assistant on a clipboard. But the true, inexcusable obscenity was not the physical progress from being alive to lifelessness, nor the recording of it—it was the manner of her death. I alone was responsible for that. I swept the boxes of butterflies to the floor, where all the papery colored wings fragmented among the splinters of glass and wood. There was nothing poignant about them. They were disgusting.
    It was dark when I went out. The night was gray and vapory, rain misting the darkness. I knew I wouldn’t see the moon so I walked fast out of the ring of the cul-de-sac, flexed both hands in my coat pockets, and began to run, head down, fixing my attention on the silver reflection of my body dancing off the shining road. Weather is louder at night. The drumroll of raindrops brought cold, pungent spirals of scent up from gardens and pavements. I fisted my hands and pushed them down against the inside of my pockets, squeezed my arms against my sides, and ran on. Walking and running, sometimes stopping for breath, I continued without thinking of where I was going except that I knew I was avoiding anywhere lit.
    I turned away from the direction of the town and followed the road until it intersected with two lanes leading into the countryside. Soon I was about two miles from my house, on the edge of woodland that I had only ever driven past. I turned off the lane and crackled and stumbled my way through the bracken. I was grunting and wheezing; in the dark I felt like an animal, but one out of its proper place and unfamiliar with wet roots and ditches and low-hanging branches, and I felt both alone and surrounded, my presence both unsensed and sensed. I was raising enough racket to empty the woods; I liked the idea that from their places among the trees and bracken they might be watching, the badgers and foxes, the voles and hedgehogs. I slowed and stopped, my body aching, my face itching under the heat of the sweat I had worked up. Silence, but for my breathing and the seep and trickle of the rain, drifted through the wood. There was no movement but fronds of bracken swinging back from the trail I had broken behind me and the waft of damp air touching my hair and cooling my skin, the only smells my sweat and the rainy green sap.
    Now I could see a white cloudy smudge of moon shining through the trees and white darts of rain spitting out of the sky. From far away came an animal cry, a rising screech of distress that it was impossible to imagine might not be human. It was late and lonely enough for me to let out an answering howl if I wanted to, but I