She shows him a photo she took of a butterfly and he asks if she knows its name. Red Admiral she thinks, but as soon as she opens her mouth she wonders if it is a tortoise shell, or a peacock. She feels uneducated in front of him. Despite the years of university, she does not know his world. He takes out his camera as if he is about to capture her, but she knows he cannot, though she wishes he would, and he knows he cannot either, though he has thought about this for days. The same black-and-white-tipped butterfly is on his screen and she smiles at the unspoken words they share. She wants to freeze time, capture this moment, like the glorious insect that inhabits their screens, but to do so would be to pin each other’s wings. And so they snatch time in the spaces where they are free. In those moments, he tells her about meadow browns, how these butterflies are common but camouflaged, how only by looking closer can you really see their beauty. She sees them often now, wondering how she missed them before. To her they are more glorious than their colourful counterparts.
She tells him about the time she found one on the tarmac, how she knelt next to it on the hard ground, slid her phone case beneath its open wings and gently eased it onto the verge. He imagines her movements, does not tell her how much he wishes she could save him too. Instead, he tells her butterflies open their wings when they need the sun and she imagines herself resting in the light of him. He explains about owls, the sounds that separate the tawny from the barn, the way there are many different kinds of bats, with more names than he can know, and sounds neither of them can hear. He mentions the plums to be picked in between the two fields, yellow and dark purple, in a place he calls the shelter belt, and she tries to convince him to take her there although he says she would find them easily. She needs shelter, doesn’t want to tell him this. She wants to know the name for everything, but over time she realises it doesn’t matter, that the names he gives them, those he shares with her, do not need to belong to the fancy books she’s used to reading. He teaches her the difference in crops, the times of year to harvest the ripest fruits and nuts, tells her temperatures above which bees forage for honey, shows her photos of sunrises and sunsets, marvels at the moments she has caught.
He marvels too at the clothes she wears, how each day seems to bring a new outfit and she does not care when he wears the same, because the world he welcomes her to is wardrobe enough for her. At the start, she longs to touch the spaces where the fabric has come adrift, but soon realises this is her trying to fix him. He does not need fixing. It is her. She sees the softness of his smile, the way his face lights up when she is near. She wants to feel his fingers on her skin, no matter the oil beneath his nails, wonders if it will rub off on her. She knows she never will feel them. She knows she cannot feel this way. She flits closer, but like a bird, a bat, butterfly or bee, he flies away, hovers like a beautiful fragile thing, and she thinks of the meadow brown, so often there, understated, misunderstood, out of reach. He turns away. She does not want to hurt him, but craves that feeling, that fleeting moment of knowing how the world is meant to be.
Hannah Storm writes narratives of fiction and non-fiction and the spaces in between. Her stories are inspired by her years of travelling the world as a journalist, the people she has met and the places she has been. Her debut collection, ‘The Thin Line Between Everything and Nothing’, is published by Reflex Press. Her writing has been named in Best Microfictions, the BIFFY 50 and placed second in the Bath Flash Fiction Collection. Her memoir was recently shortlisted in the Mslexia annual award. Hannah lives in Yorkshire, England, with her family, from where she works as a media consultant and mental health advocate, as well as writing and offering writing workshops. Find Hannah at @hannahstorm6 and hannahstormmedia.com.
Photo by Erik Karits on Unsplash.
