Crimson Butterfly

Through the eyes of a human experiment.

 

I can hear them.

 

Dull, distant voices. Blurred white shapes that have vague human form. Everything is distant, blurred, far away. I've stopped feeling much of anything.

 

I can't remember when it started, who I was with, where I was, I know who I am yet a name fails to come to mind. Was I always here, in this place? Always submerged in this iridescent sphere and the strident glow of the liquid gel, rivers and streams of red against a dark shade of pink. I remember panicking when I first woke up here, unable to breathe, and cold air was being puffed hard onto my mouth and nose by the air mask. The feeling of that plastic cover was more stifling than helping. I remember trying to tear it off. Something was coming out, coming out everywhere, something warm at first but then icy cold, something thick and steady and thinking about it made me think 'four pints'. (Why 'four pints'?) The mask was ventilating, sucking out something as much as it pumped out the cold air. I was being drained. I HAD TO GET IT OFF.

 

It's cold. So cold that I can't breathe. I think I'm wheezing but I can't hear it, only feel. My lungs constrict tighter and tighter, without expanding, and tries to force lukewarm air up my throat. It's choking me.

 

FEEL. I remember something about nerves, nerve endings that feel pain and other sensations, and remembering that I feel like I'm going insane. I want to tear out my nerves and crush them into a pulp. I DON'T WANT TO FEEL ANYMORE. When did those words loom large in my head? Did I feel pain? Do I, at this moment? I must have once. I remember...pressures. Needles. Cold needles. Needles that turned my blood and my flesh to ice. Needles melting once it punctured my skin"something pops, like a bright red balloon, every time"and then it dissolves into my blood, my body.

 

Me. It focuses on my back. My shoulders. I think of...bubbling surfaces, bubbling because they're burning so hot, so furiously and so intense. Black tar. Burning. The air in those dream-like pictures turns into invisible heat waves that distorts my vision. I need to focus on something, so I open my eyes. No use. Every time I see, rather than look, I see those people in white. They're just standing around, watching me, watching something that's shaped like a rectangle and shines brightly. There's lots of those, neat and orderly in columns and rows.

 

I can't focus. My body feels numb, thick, as if there's a second layer of skin stuck on my body, a thicker, more leathery layer. I wonder if I've turned into a football. Ha ha. I feel no humor, but sometimes I find myself pretending. I can't really laugh. I barely get enough air through my stuffed up nose and mouth as it is. Something's piercing both layers of skin, more needles, IV needles, and they don't melt like the others do. They pump streams of liquid ice underneath my skin. So much ice. I'm so cold. I almost feel bits of frost clinging to my face.

 

...A name. I hear a name, and I see a face. A boy's face, caught between childhood cuteness and adolescent good looks. He looks nervous but he's smiling. Or he's practicing. He's standing in front of a bathroom mirror. Someone calls to him, and he replies. He hurries out into a hallway, past a door and down a walled in staircase. I see a woman, longhaired and pretty. I feel nostalgic when I see her. I don't know why. She looks confident and calm. She teases the boy quietly, and another female, a teenage girl a few years older than the boy, smirks and grins, and builds up on the joke. The boy is crushed. I felt that first bit of dread before it blossomed into a flower of dismay and depression. It's like saying how a purple iris is laced with blue at the edges of the petals.

 

His feelings turn to anger. The women laugh. He sits down at a table and they all eat a meal together. Afterwards the boy has to leave. For school. I know it. I've seen it before. A big white building with a clock high up on the front outside. Lots of kids his age milling about but generally moving towards the glass doors. Rows of lockers that they used purely for switching one set of shoes for another. Bright hallways, bright because of the morning sun turning it vivid and white and pale yellow. The boy enters his classroom, and immediately becomes embarrassed at the sight of a girl he likes.

 

I know who I am, minus the name, and I know that boy. He's my little brother. He's the one they let go while they took me and told my mother that I'd been killed in the crash. He's the one that grew up in that bright place, that soaring freedom, while I have always been here, feeling a pain that I always forget, drifting about in red.

 

I think, so they say, it's normal for one deprived person to envy the other, but I don't feel much about that boy. I see what he sees through his eyes, and I see how more or less happy he is, a normal boy. What am I? Sometimes I feel curious but it never lasts for long. What am I compared to him? He doesn't know that I see what he sees, as I always have, day and night, sleeping and awake, since the day we were born. He comes to my so-called grave sometimes, when he is especially depressed. Why? I gaze at my own tombstone, at the silver-white strains of incense smoke and the lily flowers whose curved white petals seem strange to me. There is a name. I know it's a name, and I know what those lines say, but still a name does not come to mind.

 

I wonder. And then I wonder what it was that I was wondering about.

 

...They're moving. The people in white are shifting to one side or the other, leaning in close to exchange murmurs that they think, or it never occurred to them, I can hear. It's true that most whispers are reduced to headache-inducing waves, because I know what they are but I can't find their meaning. I know but I can't find it. I can't even search for it. I'm drowning, I'm suffocating, I'm floating in red. What are they saying? What do they mean by that? Have I always been here?

 

My hand slowly clutches itself into a grasping claw, then flexes outward yet more slowly. I moved. It's a blank surprise to me. The second skin attached to my body dissipates, first coming off in clumps and pieces broken up by the pressure of the red water, then dissolving into ash. Then nothing. A strange sensation runs through me. I can visualize myself moving my legs and my arms, but in reality I'm still immobile, still floating and drifting. I can see my head lifting and my eyes opening. I can see my hand gliding forward to press against the crescent curve of the glass. In reality my head is still bowed.

 

I know what I look like, generally. That boy and I are almost identical because of family genes. I can base my looks off of his, but I'm sure...there are scars, bone-white scars, that criss-cross my face and my body, everywhere but my hands and my feet. My hair...is white. Or was at first. Now...

 

The needles. The melting needles.

 

I feel heavy. My body is actually falling to the bottom of the glass. The people in white are turning to look at me, surprised. A few seconds later they burst into excited discussion. My body rolls backward a bit. I open my eyes. I feel no fear, no pain, no doubt, only a deeprooted calm that is a part of me as much as my skin is part of me. It's both a shield and a sheath. A shield because of what I once needed to be with me but never was there, and a sheath because I knew and understood what I was going to do, even as I felt that I had forgotten why.

 

Do you see it? The crimson butterfly.

The figures in white were all going to die.

Author's Note

Used as an entry for an unofficial online contest.