There are so many: yellow and silver and black, morphos whose wings are a demure moth-brown on one side and iridescent blue on the other, like princesses in disguise. The children follow them around the pavilion on their little tottering feet.
“Too hot,” we say to one another at intervals throughout the day, looking up with pursed lips at the sheer plastic dome that forms the roof of the enclosure. “Getting hotter. The generators won’t be able to keep up.”
Over our heads, beyond the plastic sheeting, hovers the relentless sun. For now, the generators keep the pavilion at a steady seventy-nine degrees Fahrenheit, and for the sake of the flowering plants that sustain the butterflies, seventy percent humidity. There is at all times a faint but intrusive smell of rotting fruit. The irony of seeking shelter in a greenhouse is not lost on us, but here we all are: in the last place we could find that still has electricity. We’ve made our way here at night, two by two and three by three, mothers carrying babies, sons towing elderly grandparents in carts, half-feral groups of teenagers with skinned knees, moth-like ourselves: all fumbling through the profound darkness toward the only thing left that glows.
For now, we have water. The butterfly pavilion is not on the city grid or connected to the utilities that went down a few weeks ago; it’s out in the empty fields, miles from anywhere specific, a roadside attraction for tourists heading west on I-90. It runs on solar power and well water. A few soft-hearted employees have stayed behind, still wearing their matching polo shirts, to care for these extraordinary insects, and in a sideways fashion for us refugees. They know where everything is, and mostly how everything works: the electrical panel and the compressors and the water filtration system, all of which are now keeping us alive along with the butterflies.
A chicken farmer down the road who refused to abandon his flock trades us eggs for water. One family has a hunting rifle, and a few people who know their way around a gun go out into the foothills to look for game. They bring back a rabbit sometimes. All the deer they have found are dead, their tongues and eyes lolling in the yellow grass. They died of thirst, probably, or smoke inhalation; we can’t know for sure. Once the hunting party found the body of a mountain lion in a shallow pool of runoff, already covered in algae and dirt and ash from the fire. He’s on his way to becoming fossilized, an omen for whoever comes next.
We don’t tell the children about the lion or the deer. Instead we teach them simple arithmetic. One little girl packed her math workbook in her suitcase when her family evacuated, and out of this, we copy problems for the other children. And of course, we are all learning about butterflies. They are so different, these weightless things, from their former caterpillar selves. In their chrysalises they are reduced to liquid, to a primordial goo, and out of this internal mess they reconstruct themselves using only the roadmap of their own DNA. This is what we ourselves must learn to do when we leave this place and go out into the wreckage. And we must go out, eventually, though we do not admit to this to each other.
When the eldest of the grandfathers has a heart attack, it is like a little joke. Pottering among the plants one day he goes white and clutches one arm, and we all cluster around him, help him lie down right there on the gravel path, or rush off for folded towels to pillow his head, for a glass of water, for a precious aspirin tablet. It seems to work, because within an hour he is alert and smiling. We all laugh half-hysterically: the tremendous, giddy laughter of relief. We have come through the first trial together. We can manage. When the grandfather feels strong enough, we carry him to one of the classrooms where we sleep at night and tuck him in. In another day he is up again, though wobbly, and able to sit in a chair. He eats his eggs and greens with a good appetite. We all keep up a brisk, happy chatter, newly confident in our little pavilion, our ability to survive here, right here. There is light, air, water. We can make it work. We have made it work.
Two days later, the grandfather’s feet begin to swell. He complains it’s hard to breathe lying down, so we gather hoodies and sweaters and tarps and bundle them behind him to prop him up. He starts to wheeze. His lips are a pale, translucent blue, like the wings of a morpho butterfly. It is difficult to be around him now, to listen to that labored breathing. The children cry, anxious. We grit our teeth.
When the rattling breaths stop, we are all asleep. We wake in the morning to find butterflies clustered on his eyelids, drinking his tears.
We bury him out in the charred earth, beneath the awful sun, as far as we can manage from the well. No one knows what to tell the children, who walk up and down the gravel paths with hollow eyes. They understand what death is, all of them: they have passed it on the road and in the fields they had to cross to reach this place. None of our meager attempts to comfort them seem to land. This death is different, and we cannot convince them otherwise. This death has slipped between the plastic tarps, into a place we told them was safe.
We emerge from our grief reconfigured. We can talk about it now, about leaving. We see that we must. Somewhere there are still doctors. Somewhere there may be schools, clinics, things to eat besides eggs. Our little pavilion, our world of plastic tarps, is only a chrysalis. It is not the place we live. It is the place we leave.
But the caretakers in their filthy polo shirts are fretful. What will become of the butterflies? Do we leave the solar generators running, to give them as much time as possible? Do we let them out to make their way in the world as best they can, knowing they will likely die?
They might not all die, someone points out. Some might survive. Some might thrive and make more of themselves. We could be the reason the world still has butterflies.
This is a fantasy, of course. There is nothing outside for the butterflies to eat: no flowers, no fruit, not within a month of walking. Yet still it is tempting to imagine.
We begin to prepare. We fill every available container with well water. We take stock of our eggs, our rabbit jerky, every edible plant in the pavilion. We tell the children we are going on an adventure and the butterflies are coming with us. We say it until we too believe it. The day will soon come when we must let them out, let them all out, butterflies and children, into the waiting air.
(Editors’ Note: “Butterfly Pavilion” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 63A.)
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© 2025 G. Willow Wilson
