Free The Butterfly Plague by Timothy Findley Page A

excursion, it rested longer than was normal. Now the butterfly was in the area of a town called Pacific Grove, and in midmorning of the 14th, one Edwina Shackleton, a zealous amateur biologist and professional spinster, discovered it on the leaf of a milkweed plant in her garden.
    Miss Shackleton ran up to the screen door of her house.
    Inside, lying on a day bed and listening to the radio, Edwina’s mother, Mrs. C. Clarke Shackleton, heard her daughter’s urgent footsteps and turned down the volume of “Pepper Young’s Family.”
    “Mother! Mother!” Edwina called. “You’ll never believe what’s happened!!”
    “What is it, dear? What is it?” cried Mrs. Shackleton, torn between the adventures of Pepper Young and those of her daughter.
    “They’re here! They’re here!” Edwina cried.
    “Who’s here?” said Mrs. Shackleton. “Calm down, Edwina. Is it the Japanese?”
    “No, no, Mother,” said Edwina, huffing and puffing and already lifting her mother from her pillows. “The monarchs! The monarchs!”
    “Oh,” said Mrs. Shackleton.
    She went through this every year.
    “Come and look,” said Edwina. “He really is lovely. He’s large. He must have come a long, long way, Mama. There’s a hole in his wing. But he’s beautiful.”
    Mrs. Shackleton, a self-proclaimed invalid (asthma and diabetes, a heart condition and stones), wobbled to her feet and shook her head.
    “Are you going to kill it?” she said.
    “Oh, no, Mama. No. You know they’re always being killed around here. I hate it.”
    “Kill ‘em all,” said Mrs. Shackleton. “They give me hay fever.”
    “Now, Mother. You know that’s a lie. Come and see him, please. It’s the very first one. An occasion.”
    Mrs. Shackleton grumbled and swayed. “Then I don’t have to look at any more?” she said.
    “No, Mama. No. Just this one. The first.”
    “All right, then. Very well.”
    They got down into the garden. They approached Edwina’s cultivated milkweed plot. (She grew these plants especially for the arrival of the butterflies every year.)
    “He’s so big, Mama. You won’t believe him.”
    “Where is he?” said Mrs. Shackleton.
    “Oh, dear,” said Edwina. “He’s gone.”
    “Maybe someone else will kill him,” said her mother, wheezing dramatically and shedding nose tears. “He’s left wing dust everywhere.”
    “Oh, Mama. Butterflies don’t have wing dust. That’s scales.”
    “And I’ve missed the end of ‘Pepper Young’s Family,’” said Mrs. Shackleton, making her way alone toward the house. She banged the door and turned up the volume of the radio until it was deafening.
    Edwina stared off into the sky.
    “Good-bye,” she said. “ Vaya con Dios .”
    She stood quite still for a long time, with her hand up to her forehead. Then she went back to the cultivation of the milkweed.
    On the afternoon of the 15th of September the butterfly was flying southward twenty-three miles northeast of Los Angeles. In the distance there rose a mighty pillar of smoke.
    The butterfly broke to the west, seaward, driven away by the smell of fire.
    At dusk it made for land.
    On the 16th of September, noon, it reached its destination—a grove of pine trees south of Santa Monica, where the other butterflies would soon begin to join it by ones, twos, and finally by hundreds in the following days and weeks.
    For the time being it rested alone.
    Et in Arcadia ego .
    With everyone.

The Chronicle of
the Nightmare
    It is always night.
    I am always alone.
    And so are they.

    They.
    They live in their own world.
    It is not like any other world. No other world is real. They knew once another world but that has been forgotten. They think they remember. But it’s forgotten. They remember that it was joyful and it wasn’t. They remember that there were feast days and there weren’t. They remember babies and there were no babies; children and there were none; mothers and fathers and there were only men and women. They remember