her, but I was forever the realist and I wasn’t convinced that his body just simply hadn’t let go yet.
Still, I hoped she was right.
What I did find amazing, was how we’d all settled into this new normal way of life. After a week and a half had passed since the accident, I had gone back to work, needing the daily reprieve from the monotony of sitting within the hospital walls without any end in sight. I’d spent my days tattooing and daydreaming about what I was going to do with the shop once Gus and I made my status as shop manager official. And I never let my phone out of my sight. Just in case my parents called.
Now, it’d been about three weeks since Jake’s accident, and it was a few days before Christmas. I’d gone to bed early, exhausted after a day of work, then sitting at the hospital, and cooking dinner and doing laundry with Audrey. She was out of work for the holiday break and we had plans to do some last-minute Christmas shopping before I went down to see Jake, and when I woke up, she was already missing from what I’d begun to think of as our bed.
Stretching my arms overhead, I relished in how refreshed I felt. It’d been weeks since I had slept so well and there was only a faint twinge of guilt in regard to that. I opened my eyes to stare at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the old house, and smiled when I heard Audrey’s singing voice come from the kitchen. With the assumption that she was making tea and breakfast, I sat up to rub the sleep from my eyes, with all intentions to join her. But before I could press the heels of my palms against my face, I was stopped, rendered stupid and stunned, at the black and yellow figure of the butterfly.
So small and perfect in its design, it was perched precariously at the bed’s footboard and apart from the gentlest twitch of antennae, it was motionless and almost looked fake. My heart hammered wildly in my chest as I reached out slowly for my phone and quickly texted Audrey, telling her to get in here right now to make sure I wasn’t completely losing my fucking mind.
It was possible. I hadn’t seen Dr. Travetti for some time, not since the session where I told her to call Audrey’s family. My condition could’ve deteriorated in that time, whatever the hell my condition even was exactly. Things felt too okay while still being so bad, so I could see where my mind would start conjuring these simple delusions. Why the fuck would a butterfly be here, in my girlfriend’s bedroom, in late December? How the hell was it even alive?
The more I sat there, frozen solid, the more I thought about it. And the more I thought, the more I began to think I really was seeing things. There was no possible way there was a butterfly in here right now, and just as I began to feel self-assured in my ability to talk myself away from the brink of insanity, Audrey entered the room and stopped with the smallest of gasps.
“Oh, my Lord,” she whispered, clapping a hand to her chest.
“Wait, you see it, too?” I answered, my voice hoarse and embarrassingly shaken.
Audrey nodded and quietly tiptoed to the bed, climbing on to sit beside me. “How long has it been there?”
“I don’t know. I just woke up.” Then, I turned to her and shook my head. “How is that your first question, and not how the hell it’s here in the first place?”
“Because I know how it’s here,” she replied simply, keeping her eyes on the butterfly that hadn’t yet moved.
“Oh, really? How?” I challenged, narrowing my skeptical glare.
“It’s a message.”
I didn’t mean to roll my eyes but I did, accompanied by a steady shake of my head. “Audrey, come on …”
Her eyes met mine then. “I get that you have an explanation for everything, and that’s fine. But what could possibly be your explanation for this, if it’s not that?”
Sighing, I turned toward the butterfly again. It still hadn’t moved from its spot on the footboard, but its wings lifted and dropped in a slow rhythm, almost in time with my breath.
“I …,” I’d begun to speak, but I was stopped short by the reality that there was no logical explanation for this. Whatever I could say would sound