by Sid Prise
Daphne Mae was going to die today. She sensed it. Nine years of life was a long stretch in a West Virginia hollow, amongst a thousand shades of green, a warm embrace of buzzing invisible insects, birds and bullfrogs. She sat on the porch of her family’s house, a ramshackle fortress of wood, brown gone green with the delicious rot, and watched the pond, a cool respite from the heat, a bath of frogs and leeches. She picked at a tick that had lodged in the small of her olive back, and tried to think of butterflies.
They were her passion, delicate gossamer wings, painted like signs on God’s highway. She knew them all, the various shades and splotches, which she endeavored to capture in paints upon sallow, manila sheets of construction paper. She had saved three weeks to buy the pad, and she guarded it with her life. She made her own paints with the various juices of berries and bark. She painted, forgetting her hunger.
It was a long time sitting on the buckled planks of her porch, sketching with a broken toothbrush, a dizziness overtaking her that seemed to make the wings flutter there on the page. Mommy and Big Sis were gone, working long hours; Daddy gone year now, before Daphne Mae knew him. No one to watch over her, so she skipped school, and concentrated on her painting.
Daphne Mae was bored in school, bored with every subject but Art, a place where she shined. In that class, she got Bs and As; she failed nearly everything else. It was so boring, sitting there in a hard plastic seat, at a hard plastic desk. She kept daydreaming, a dizzy space her head wandered into almost beyond her control. Her teachers thought her stupid, or worse, lazy. Her fellow students thought her the same. She was shy, and was often picked on. Mean girls and mean boys trailed her constantly, calling her trash, and worse. So, Daphne Mae stopped going.
“They won’t miss me,” she breathed in the warmth of the afternoon, picking her tick and sketching blood red and golden yellow, shaping the splotches into wings.
The wings looked like eyes. They looked into hers with a secretive, pensive gaze. Something was expected, something to be revealed. Daphne Mae often looked into her own eyes in the pond, at her face and her six-year-old’s body. She was small, easily picked on. But her dark hair framed a very wise face, skin bronze like the Cherokee in her ancestry, eyes of opal black that stared the objects of her gazes clear through. She would be an artist someday.
But, the hunger. She had not eaten all day, and the day before had only a slice of government cheese. They had feasted on it for weeks, and maybe it had gone bad. It did not sit well in her stomach. But she knew this dance of hunger. It began in the stomach, but soon left there. What became of it was dizziness, a strange feeling of flight, as if her head and heart would soon fly out of her body. Something expectant in those eyes, she thought. She would die today.
Butterflies, butterflies. They were free, spirits floating like angels, drinking their nourishment from the flowers. Daphne Mae had tried her tongue at those flowers, moved by hunger and by the inexplicable need to taste what her muses tasted, her inspirations. But she did not like the taste of flowers. So, she shivered there, in the warmth of afternoon, wondering at a life in the clouds.
It couldn’t go on. Every day, fifty like her slid into a final dizziness, a final darkness, the shadows of which began to gather into her periphery. Fifty children in America. Daphne Mae accepted it, knowing it would come. What could be done, after all?
Hunger was a specter that had haunted her all her life. Her six-year-old’s body, her skinny legs and arms, her wise face framed in black, her dizzy, otherworldly temperament, her butterflies. It all made sense.
But what was life to a nine-year-old child? Surely, there were other worlds than this. Some roll of the dice that could lead Daphne Mae to some other life, a life of proper paints and easels, the taste of meat and milk, a television and a Daddy. Reincarnation? It seemed to Daphne Mae too easy an answer, too convenient. The righting of wrongs. What if things were just wrong?
One life to live. But, painting, Daphne Mae didn’t worry about injustice, or politics, or where her Mommy and Big Sis were, or when they would get home. She didn’t worry about all the mean kids at school, nor her mean teachers. She didn’t care about the taste of flowers.
She worried only about a color here, a line there.
An artist. Daphne Mae wondered at her talent, her head and heart, and wondered if she might, in another life, have ever gone to college, to art school, to hone her craft like a stick of whittled wood becoming a chair leg, or a flute. God had given her a gift. Why would God have given her a gift, just to let it die with her now?
But perhaps art wasn’t about becoming famous, nor learing more about it. Perhaps art was right here, right now. Those eyes. They peered into her own with bravery and a clarity that made Daphne Mae shiver in revelation. This moment, this realization, was the key.
Acceptance. It was Daphne Mae’s lot. To slowly starve, to throw down her hands when the mean girls pummeled her, to make her own paints with berries and bark, to wait here in this hollow, knowing she would never see her Mommy or her Big Sis again. The darkness was moving upon her, seeping in from the periphery, making tunnel vision in which her butterflies’ eyes became everything.
“I love,” she said to the hollow, to her family shack, to the pond with its frogs and leeches, to the tick buried in the small of her back, to her God that willed or allowed, to the butterflies, wondering what she meant. Could she love all?
A butterfly fluttered down from the trees, settling on the buckled boards of the porch. It had the markings of eyes on its wings, and Daphne Mae smiled. Then another came down, then another. Then another, then another. A swarm of butterflies descended, one by one, and Daphne Mae dropped her toothbrush and her artwork, and lifted her arms like Jesus, straight out from her body. They settled there, on her arms, and lifted her clear from the hollow, beyond the trees, beyond the clouds.
They found her there, careworn Mommy and old-before-her-time Big Sis. There she was, beside her drawings, her stomach shrunk down to nothing, in bib overalls she’d worn since she was six. A phone was a luxury denied them, so they drove in their ancient jeep to the mall and pumped a quarter and a dime into the payphone, and called the coroner.
Shame. It poisoned their grief. Surely, they could have done more. Big Sis could have saved that slice of cheese, Mommy could have taken those extra hours. But they were hungry, too. Big Sis felt the dizziness, Mommy incapable of putting in a seventieth hour. But Daphne Mae was dead. All fell into ridiculous self-parody in the darkness of that fact.
There would be allegations. Neglect. Unfitness. The bureaucrats who were conveniently absent during the starvation would rise up to be there to accuse. Hell would visit the house of Daphne Mae. Newsworthy would be her ascent into the clouds. Newsworthy for a day or two. Then, forgotten.
Another day in America.