BUTTERFLY DREAMING

What's the value of a life, be it insect or human?

The day, of course, was balmy.

Pretty, the senior butterfly from the brilliant orange Monarch Clan, his wings beginning to show the ravages of life - he’d been around for the best part of a month and everyone knows how time can batter away at the fabric of pure gossamer wings. Anyway, he was old. He felt old. The rest of the clan accounted him as old and even revered him in the kind of unemotional way butterflies have about them when they do anything.

Pretty could detect something on the air. A month might not be very long in which to gain a deep insight into the ways of the world, but Pretty had quite a few ideas about what was what, and he didn’t like the something on the air.

It had to do with burning, and he didn’t trust burning.

It had to do with smoke, and that was horrid stuff. It got into the eyes, it blocked the passages of the body and could even lay a butterfly to waste.

Then the man came staggering into sight.

Pretty didn’t know much about men. He’d spent most of his time fluttering here and there looking for nectar, the stuff of life, and not been acquainted with too many men. But this man was coming his way, and a kind of mixture of curiosity and fear drove him to hide under a large and crinkled leaf and find out what he may about the gigantic life-form and the smoke that was issuing from him.

ooOoo

Jed Burgman lived in the old cottage at the end of Brandywine Lane on the outskirts of Swanspottle. He’d lived there all his life from when he’d issued from the womb of his mother during that bad old days and right up to now, when he knew with a certainty that was scary that he was dying.

Jed had been afraid of death ever since he’d lost any vestige of religious faith back in his youth when he’d discovered one or two bad things about Father Tom, the local catholic priest who mouthed off about the evils of drink every Sunday and got mindlessly drunk when he hoped nobody was looking at his corner of the village pub every Friday night.

Now he knew that he was dying. The doctor hadn’t given him much hope when he’d gone to see him about a mysterious lump that stuck out of his head like an extra cranium. And then the headaches had begun, great throbbing orchestras of pain that washed through his whole being like a war. For weeks they’d plagued him and laid him low in a darkened room.

Then, just a few minutes ago, he’d known he was approaching his end. The world was more crazed with dizziness than ever, and everything about it became suddenly and he knew irrevocably vague as a mushy kind of blurring diffused his vision.

“This is it,” he whispered to himself, “this is death and suddenly I know that it’s welcome. I think I’ll take my packet of cigarettes and go outside for one last smoke before eternity grabs me and I peg it.”

And that’s what he did.

How he managed to walk was beyond him, and when he reached the cabbage patch next to his well-mowed lawn he became perfectly aware that actually standing still was something he wouldn’t manage for much longer.

He drew a small amount of cigarette smoke into his lungs and closed his eyes in order to present the world with some kind of order. It did help, but not much. Everything about his life was confusing, and he knew that his brain was giving up on him. He knew, with a huge certainty, that he was standing by his cabbage patch and smoking his last moments of life away.

And, you know, he was happy. There was, he knew with a monumental certainty, no heaven anywhere, no fluffy cloudy place with lyres and lutes or even harps, no angels singing Hallelujah choruses, no bearded judge ready to pile praise or blame on him according to some odd interpretation of what life had obliged him to do as he lived it. And, here was the bonus and the corollary, no hell with devils and sulphurous fumes and eternal torture and the howling of souls in agony. So he was happy.

One last drag of his tipped cigarette and he let it slip from his fingers, down to the ground by the crinkled leaf of a lush looking cabbage as he slowly crumpled to join it…

ooOoo

Pretty saw that white and smoking cylinder fall.

Like a gigantic nuclear-tipped rocket it hurtled towards where he was hiding from the dreadful smoke that had all but blocked everything in his tiny body that was blockable.

“Help...” he breathed with what might so easily have been his last butterfly breath, but thank goodness it wasn’t.

“Half a tick,” boomed God from on high, “I’ll save you...”

And at the precise moment when a good man died a tiny and aged butterfly was saved.

And at that moment that was one of the strange contradictions on a world so filled with a motley selection of contradictions that all of life might well be no more than a Pokemon game of the gods and all of death their exasperated resignation from everything.