PRINCESS
by
Vivian Lawry
There was no road noise at the head of the holler, just the scissor-y whir of the reel mower and the soft murmur of insects. The smell of cut grass wafted up on the summer air, herby and green-smelling.
I stopped to knot a bandanna around my sweaty forehead. Roses along the critter fence bloomed pale pink, perfuming the air, smelling like no other flower. I didn’t stop long, though, lest the bees decide I was trespassing.
Beestings have laid me low ever since I was a toddler and stepped on something in the yard. Daddy said it might be a bee, but more likely a spider or suchlike. My foot swelled up four times its size, and at the hospital they said it was a good thing we got there when we did ’cause I could’ve died. They gave me a shot of something and sent me home. I don’t remember much between screaming bloody murder in the yard and lying on the couch, whimpering, begging Mommy and Daddy to rub my hot, itchy foot. Since then, insect bites of any sort swell me right up. Mosquito bites last for a week. One time I got a sweat beesting on my eyebrow, and my eye swelled shut and half my face puffed up like a circus fat lady.
So I spent as little time as possible near the roses and headed out back. It was a little cooler by the crick, or maybe I just imagined it because the water was burbling over the rocky bed. It had been right dry, so the water was running low and louder than usual.
In spite of the breeze bein’ cooler, I didn’t tarry there, either, because the cooler breeze was smelly. The outhouse sat over the crick, but when the water was running so low, it didn’t really wash the waste away.
Mowing done, I’d earned a rest. I flopped onto the wood porch swing, worn smooth by decades of butts, and made my own breeze, lazily toeing the swing back a little, breathing in time with the creak of the chains.
Great-granny sat in the ladder-back chair, the one with a woven seat made from strips of truck tire inner tubes. She’s blind but does what she can, like churn butter. Right then she was snapping green beans for supper. She seldom talked to me, and she wasn’t talking then. I yawned and went to find Granny.
She was in the backyard, her hatchet in one hand. Her other hand clamped the legs of a big, old red hen, not good for nothin’ but the stew pot. Granny brought the hatchet down true. She brushed the head off the chopping block and threw the body aside to flop around on the ground and bleed out.
Granny picked up the body from the pool of bloody mud the hen had made. I was looking at the drops of red spangling the grass when a cloud of butterflies floated in from the pasture and settled around the little pool. I ran to tell Granny.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “They puddle like that right often. They drink lots of liquid from muddy patches—though not from ponds or streams or such; their eating tubes can’t handle that.” Granny stepped to the cast-iron kettle sitting over the fire and held the hen’s feet to dunk it into the boiling water. While she plucked the hen, I watched the butterflies: little blue, white, and yellow ones, and the dramatic swallowtails and monarchs.
I eased my hand into the bloody mud and lifted it up, covered in rust red and butterflies. They stayed on my hand a right long time. That was more excitement than I’d seen since the black snake moved from the corncrib to the front porch.
A few days later, when I scraped my knee climbing the maple tree, I ran for the pasture where butterflies flitted from joe-pye weed to clover to hawkweed. I propped up my knee and soon had a rainbow mountain. It seemed that for the butterflies, blood was blood. I showed Granny my scabbed knee but didn’t mention the butterflies.
A few days later, when I went out to the meadow, I made sure Granny was in the house. Pulling out my pocket knife, I drew it up my left arm, wrist to elbow. I smeared the red line around and sat still as a stump on a big flat rock. Waiting for the first butterfly felt like forever. But the butterfly sleeve I ended up with was worth the time.
I told Granny I scratched my arm on a raspberry bramble. She swabbed it with alcohol—which burned like bejesus—and it healed with nary a sign.
The next time I fed the butterflies, I pricked all the fingers on my left hand and dripped spots along my right arm. This time, the butterflies came sooner. Each one weighed less than a safety pin.They left tiny red footprints like itsy-bitsy chicken scratches, but I imagined they were really a secret language.
I told Granny I’d pricked my fingers quilting. She inspected the quilt in progress on the frame, declared it was a good thing she found no blood stains because if she had, she’d have pinched off my arm and beat me with the bloody stump. She made that threat often, and I still had both my arms. But she likely would have tanned my butt, and sent me to get the strop to do it.
I dreaded the end of summer. As autumn approached, I fed the butterflies every day. That last day, Granny spied me on the rock and shrieked. She ran flat-out to the meadow, skirt and apron flapping around her legs. I’d never have imagined such a thing. My bloody knife had fallen from my hand and slid off the flat rock where I lay, made over into a fairy princess. Butterflies covered both arms and both legs, my bare chest, even my face. Too content to move, I just drifted.
THE END
photo: Harry Rajchgot
JONAH magazine 