—IT’S JUST SOMETHING FOR THE LEGAL BOYS, BUT NOT THAT MUCH FOR US

  

 

Transformed

 

On the window sill, a moth-colored butterfly twitches with a broken wing, struggling for balance, flight no longer an option. From the bed he is lying in, he reaches out an index finger for the butterfly to cross onto it like a bridge of sorts. There seems a shared knowledge between them, one of endings, finality, though the butterfly stitches across the man’s knuckles like a paper fleck traversing a taut mountain range.

Beside him, she stirs, rises up on one elbow. “It’s beautiful,” she says.

“It is,” he agrees.

She kisses his cheek and bites down roughly, erotically, playfully. “I love how much simple things fascinate you.”

“A wounded butterfly is not so simple.”

“I suppose not. Can you help it somehow?”

“I’ll let it have the run of my body.”

“Trying to make me jealous? I thought I had the run of your body?”

On the roof there is a sudden ruckus, like boulders and rocks crashing, the room convulsing from an attack.

“What is it?”

An enormous stone, or some other object, batters the roof and it collapses inward, opening up to a sky gray with thick haze falling like snow.

Within minutes, they are blanketed by the ash. The butterfly is gone or unseen. The man and the woman cling to themselves, petrified figures being buried in more heaps of ash. He pictures the woman transformed into a butterfly, healed and warm against his skin. He rubs its powdery limbs that are now uniform and straight. He takes a last breath of gaseous air and thinks to himself how lucky they are, that at least they died a beautiful death.

 

--August 24, 79 A.D.