Free Scent of Butterflies by Dora Levy Mossanen

prerequisite to casting off her skin, a necessary stage before she metamorphosed into the seducer she became, banishing me to a foreign continent.
    â€œThose foreigners!” Mamabozorg had spat out one day. “Here they go again. Meddling in our affairs.”
    Mamabozorg’s declaration had embedded itself in my two-year-old brain, continuing to change form over the next thirty-three years, igniting a spark of suspicion now and then—sometimes justified, often not—making me wonder, even today, whether “those foreign elements” did meddle too much in our internal politics. Years later, older and able to better understand how her past bled into her present, I asked Mamabozorg what had upset her that day in 1966.
    â€œSoraya, I still cannot get over the insult. My ears still turn red with shame when I remember that our own Queen Farah commissioned Van Cleef & Arpels to make her coronation crown. Not only that, but Reza Shah’s sisters and daughters had the audacity to follow suit. Such insult! An upward spit that landed on our own faces. The Imperial family ignored our own wonderful jewelers and handed the honor to foreigners. Traitors! Reza Shah’s bones must have rattled in his grave. Yes, his own flesh and blood acted like traitors! As if a plague had wiped out all of our own jewelers, Reza Shah’s son opened the doors to our National Treasury to a French maison .”
    Pierre Arpels spent days in the basement of the Central Bank of Iran, where the national jewels were housed during Mohammad Reza Shah’s reign. Since the precious jewels were not allowed to leave Iran, a workshop was set up for the jeweler, his designer, and foreman in the National Treasury room, where they worked under heavy security for six months. The result was a crown of unprecedented beauty that boasted a stunning emerald weighing 4.3 pounds.
    I check the Emerald Swallowtail in my net. She must be female. Her abdomen is visibly larger than any male’s, in order to store the great amount of fluids she suckles during her lifetime. And down under, shadowed by the gray-bordered, emerald velvet of her wings, her sex protrudes from the end of her abdomen like a clasp. To better imprison the male in her grip. The males of the species have their own wiles, too. A certain type collects nectar with which it blends a perfume it hides in the pockets of its legs to attract females. Another type, a breed of male Clearwings, passes bitter alkaloids to females during mating to render the female repugnant to other males.
    Aziz carries his smell of sandalwood, smoke, and power in full view and with no apologies. I fell in love with his base notes first, the initial scents that tickled my nose and warmed my lungs. Later, I got drunk on his top notes of passion, sweat, and sperm.
    â€” Jounam , you are better at detecting smells than any reputable “nose”—
    That I certainly am. Unlike experts, I don’t have to go through a series of complicated rituals to detect the characteristics of a scent, the base notes and top notes, lock myself in dark rooms, or blow my nose clean, pinch my nostrils, sprinkle a handkerchief with perfume, and wave it in the air to bring out its gaseous state. No! I don’t need any of these rituals to detect that live butterflies smell different from dead ones. Still alive and active, like the one trembling in my net, they give off the odor of predators, acidic and pungent, similar to the stench of Butterfly’s Chanel No. 5.
    Reaching into the net, I tenderly rub the butterfly’s fuzzy warmth, caress the throbbing underbelly, stroke the quivering antennae. My forefinger crawls up to tease the erogenous spot on top of her head, the spot the aroused male fondles with his antennae.
    And then gently. With the slightest of pressure. I squeeze the thorax.
    Scarcely dead and still supple to my touch, she begins to give off the smell of public baths, humid and cloying and a bit