BUTTERFLY MAN

When the sky could get no bluer, the delicate butterfly wings sliced into the air like a scalpel attempting to remove a deadly lesion.

He was a father; but he didn’t always think of himself as father first. His thoughts were about daisy chains of impossibilities. He could see his personal history the way you might replay the horror of a slow-motion car crash. It wasn’t that his children hated him; but he often felt the sting of their disdain.

Maybe there were times he should have counseled, but he became silent. When he looked at his own parents, he could see how their pain became his flaws and now his imperfections became his children’s inevitability.

Divorces were the corpses of the many mistakes he made with his life. Only when it was too late, did it become clear to him why he had been so wrong, so many times before.

The butterfly paused to tiptoe across the crusty sienna nose of the Echinacea. It would be like that all summer and every summer after that. A butterfly’s seeming allegiance to beauty was so wrongly attributed. Butterflies could fly forever on the wings of sorrow.

The fluttering legacy of damage.