To Sing Frogs Chapter 13b

The yellow Monarch was the only thing in my focus. Then it began to fade. A tree ten meters behind it started to steal my vision. I tried to keep my view on the burst of color and couldn’t. The distant tree grew closer and closer until I saw another cocoon hanging from one of its own hibernating branches. The hue was wiped from this illusion as more and more distant trees darted from the outside of my kaleidoscope vision to the center.

The colorful creature did not realize it had faded from my view. It continued to flex its magnificent wings, not perceiving them as anything unusual. Still, I saw no color—only translucent cocoons—cocoons hanging from every tree that came into focus. Hundreds of thousands of trees rushed at me through the tunnel with hundreds of thousands of cocoons.

I slid sideways and twisted in the drift to see if the vision would change. It didn’t. Trees and cocoons continued to converge on me from all directions. More trees. More cocoons.

Then the objects rushing at me through the kaleidoscope slowed and finally they became still. The trees and cocoons faded from focus and I saw the bright burst of yellow on the end of my finger.

My shift in the snow had re-exposed the butterfly to the relentless howling screaming wind and it now desperately clung to the prints of my finger with its last two quivering legs.

In order to save it I realized I had to place myself between it and the wind. It was too late. A merciless gust tore the creature from my finger and thrust it upward, far beyond my reach. The wings of the butterfly flapped helplessly as each blast of wind threw the yellowness higher and higher until it disappeared from my view.

The tumbling gray sky was all I could see as I stared upward. The color was gone. I looked down at my feet, one still stocking-clad, the other, naked. I felt the burn of frostbite and realized that no life form could survive indefinitely in such harsh conditions. Then I looked at another tree. I was drawn to it and felt compelled to approach. My icy feet drug one behind the other until I arrived at a low-hanging branch. Still more cocoons. There were more than two but from my angle I couldn’t tell for sure how many existed. On closer examination I saw that some of the cocoons were empty, their occupants long gone. With the hundreds of thousands of cocoons in this vision it shouldn’t have mattered. Somehow it did. For a reason I couldn’t explain, this family of cocoons had meaning. As much as I wanted to pursue the Monarch, I couldn’t walk away.

I now found myself standing in a puddle on linoleum. Feeling—pain—returned to my feet. I was in a convenience store filling a cup with blood-red slush. I took it to the counter to pay and the clerk lifted a paper coffee cup to her lips. The red number seven was prominently displayed on the side of the receptacle. The green letters where I expected to read “Eleven” were changed. I recognized Cyrillic characters from the Russian alphabet—Смерть. It was not the word for a number.

            My outstretched hand—filled with crumpled Russian Ruble notes and various coins—waited. The clerk placed her coffee back on the counter and began to remove the proper combination of money from my palm to pay for the purchase. When she finished I walked through the aluminum and glass door. I was pulled without walking toward an old black van and my eyes quickly focused on a spot on the radiator behind the gray grill. My vision fixed on a triangle of mangled yellow mashed into thin fins of black metal. It was one quarter of a yellow Monarch butterfly wing. Was this the creature whose metamorphosis I had witnessed? Even if it wasn’t, who could tell? That butterfly was gone. What were the chances of me ever seeing it again? Its life was taken from me whether or not it had been extinguished.

As my finger touched what was left of the velvety wing I felt a painful crack across my shoulders. The cup of slush dropped to the ground and the surprisingly warm, sticky red liquid sprayed up onto my hands, arms, pants, shirt, and face. I whipped around to defend myself and stood facing an angry old babushka woman with a shawl on her shoulders and a triangular scarf covering her gray hair. She shouted at me in Russian through gums with few visible teeth and cracked me over the head with her bent and knotty walking stick.

My arms rose instinctively to cover my head though it was only partly effective as she continued to yell and hit me. Finally I grabbed the stick and tried to wrestle it from the gnarled and wrinkled fingers. I awkwardly fought and pulled as if my hands were tied to my sides. The woman’s shouts were now muffled as were my own. We each struggled to gain advantage.

“John. John! JOHN!”

How did she know my name? She shook me and yelled my name again. One of my arms broke free and I swung at her head. I misjudged the distance and my bicep weakly thumped her skull.

“JOHN! WAKE UP!”

 

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