The World's Last Spring

A short sci-fi story I made from an online prompt.

I mark the last spring as 18 years ago because that was the last time I saw a butterfly. The ground was covered in a thin frost that bit at my feet, even through my Hot Wheels sneakers. My mother was working vainly at the soil that had once held her flower garden.

"It'll get warmer," she assured me when I asked why she tried. "They said so on TV."

At the age of seven, I had only ever seen a flower on TV. Sunlight only shown on our neighborhood once a year. I had learned about the Big Frost in history class. I knew it was almost impossible to grow anything without special equipment. And only people with lots of money or special money from the government had those.

I walked away from Mom. I heard her whacking at the frozen earth with a spade. Clang. Clang. Chuck.

I wandered around the small lawn, thinking that maybe I'd go visit my friend Jay across the street, when a flicker of a bright red something caught the corner of my eye. I whipped around, staring at the landscape of naked trees, frost-encrusted grass and grey fog. I stood still, my eyes flickering around until-

There! A fluttering shock of red, a speck of warmth against the dead backdrop. It was tiny and flickered in a strange way reminiscent of a candle.

I stood in the grass, my feet soaking in the frost and gawked as the flickering anomaly came towards me. It hovered close to the ground, floating this way and that.

I knelt down, not letting my butt touch the wet ground. The flicker landed on a single blade of stiff grass, a set of triangular wings folded vertically on a twig-thin body. The wings slowly opened and closed and I saw a small flash of orangish-red.

It was a butterfly, but not like one I'd ever seen. All the butterflies I'd seen had eyes and smiles or were illustrated representations in my science textbook. There were no paints or pencils here. The insect wasn't some long-forgotten thing were were forced to learn about for a grade. it was alive, at once more and less real to me than all the drawings I'd seen.

I reached out a hand towards it. It didn't move at my approach. I landed on my knees, the wetness of the ground long forgotten. I reached further towards it, one small finger outstretched. it had seen something like this in old movies Mom had shown me. The beautiful princess with the pretty voice would reach out to the bird and the creature would hop into her open hand.

I cupped my hand and inched it over to the butterfly. I gently nudged it with my finger and it flinched. I nudged it a little more, trying to get one of its twiggy legs on to my finger. The insect didn't move.

I frowned and nudged it a bit more from underneath. It tipped over and fell off the blade of grass that had been its perch. It hit the grass with a tiny thump. I knew it was dead, but I didn't really know what that meant. I just knew that in Sunday school they said Jesus died for our sins. But He came back three days later.

I left the thing alone, walking back into the house to play a video game. Years later, having gone through the deaths of both sets of grandparents and a dog, I look back on that little s**t who didn't know what he had seen. That was the last sign of the world before endless days without sunlight. The last dying gasp of a species that neither he nor anybody else would ever see again.

I think about that day, the boy I had been, and I make myself weep to make up for the tears I should've shed.