The Effect of a Butterfly

To Sophia 

“Ella?” 

“Dude, it changed my fucking life when I bought my first pack of spirit blacks. Goes down like tar but buzzes you like a sawblade…” 

The glass door to the diner shattered, a thick hail soaring inward under screaming wind, giving way to some possibly human silhouette, swaddled by tailored robes cut with bright silver hem. No patch of shards could pierce the leather cloak, almost bouncing off where his arms and mountainous shoulders imprinted. 

The sky was encumbered by a superficial layer of orange. Ella cowered in Her moment of absurd silence, the plastic color above seen through Her streaked and greased window suddenly closer. She wouldn’t reach out and touch it, the distance still enumerable, muscles below Her breasts locked in place, but it could stare out, radiate through slits in the tree leaves and caress Her neck.

Screams broke through from six people, which made Her stupidly happy despite the tears streaming on Her freckled face. A rare moment of natural reaction in Her world, some patch of ground to stand on. 

“–So I said: ‘If I don’t come in here next Sunday, and you don’t have blacks like every other dollar store in this city–” 

The viscous orange sky folded like origami, a soft creme color seeping from its pores, developing the next layer with another seventy-six feet of thickness. “Good to see You.” A riptide of purple, then bright, bright blue—All in this same process of growing and dispersing and contorting to birth a new form, grip further into Her. “We’ve been working real hard, girl, but this ought to stick. Just need…” It traced Her collar bone, bypassed Her chest and swirled a vise around Her waist. 

The man in the wine red sheepskin business suit turned to Her and smiled, picking the last of the glass shards from out his neck, dribbling, bubbling red following like rabid saliva. “Heard about everything, I’m so sorry girl, I know, but thank You for holding out.” The folks brimming Her diner screamed, cried and wailed as they happily picked at their country omelets and avocado toast, all smoking harsh cigarettes with no ashtrays. 

“D’You hear about the next execution? Shot the girl six times and covered her in turpentine, injected benadryl into Her large intestine to make it soft, then filleted Her up for family dinner—Whatever kind of family goddamn ICE would be–”

The sky leaned sideways, clipping into the surrounding forest in a spaztic battle of what color would overlay what. “You listening? Alright, alright, ’cause if nothing else this is important.” A glitched, blinding strobing that made it clear Her trees were equally flat as the layer cake sky was. 

“Whole place is going to shit! Whole country, whole world…Got me depressed as fuck, upping my dosage…Shit like that, y’know?” 

Translucent violet, depicting the past layers of colors like a hall of mirrors, the spitting image of Her ruby pendant’s facets, extended unto ever, resolved to the synthetic orange. “Ella?” Her tears bounced the colors, crystalline formations decorating Her face, adopting the texture of each new sky over Her cheeks. “You good girl?” Her orgasmic kisses, Her cherry pie, Her hydrogen peroxide. “Oh jesus…” 

Her waiter stepped over, crunching glass under his red-splattered velcro dress shoes that now matched his top. He gave a small bow. 

Wind whistled down from the vent above Ella. She wanted the tickle of a cool breeze. 

“Anything I can get you two? Just brewed a fresh pot of coffee.” Her waiter rubbed two blackened eyes, doing no good for sore, pulsating eye bags. Hadn’t slept in months. 

“Tall glass of water and something carb-heavy, as soon as possible. You understand? I don’t mean that like I’m impatient—I mean,” he tapped the table with his words, “as soon as fucking possible. Got it?” 

Her waiter grimaced, Ella made a croaking sound in the back of Her throat. One look at Her had Her waiter running to the kitchen. 

He pushed back a lock of Her hazel hair, cupping Her cheek as he leaned in. 

She chewed on Her lip, creating endorphins needed to speak. A stabbing second before liquid iron sprinkled from the entry point. “Help.” The whimper of a child, a child being crushed by the now empty black sky that may have looked frozen, cutting Her treeline into lattices, but could crash down at any instant. 

With a bone-thin index and thumb, he held up a single pill in front of Her. As black, as missing a whole galaxy as the crooked sky. “You know what You have to do. Come on, please, you need this girl, please…” 

“I love you.” Her tears sucked back up into Her ducts, running across the bottom of Her eyes and then down to join Her mucus. 

“You too, You know that, but nothing is gonna matter anymore, not Your love, not…not whatever the fuck, if we can’t help You.” 

She shook Her head, jostling a few straggling tears back out.

He tensed his hand around Her cheek, running his coarse thumb in circles, biting down on his tongue with a closed mouth. 

“Please, don’t make me.” 

“It’ll hurt. I miss the magic.”

He pulled away, sighing and slumping over his steaming cold milk and sugared coffee,

waiting for it to heat. 

  He squinted at Her. “Thought You didn’t like it?” 

She shook Her head, swishing the iron in her mouth to coat Her tongue. “I don’t.” 

“So then why? Hell, You know this isn’t the end-all…It’s intermittent solution shit, y’know that?” 

Her waiter returned with Her plate of thick-cut bacon, exclusive pink-colored pancakes, and Her old gallon jug filled with fat ice cubes and water. He took Her jug from Her waiter’s two-finger hold, and placed it beside Her. 

She looked at Her waiter, tried to smile. “Thank you.” Her cloaked man exited without a reply, an American Spirit black cigarette tucked behind a hooded ear.  

“Come on, girl, why? Why not just–”

“It could be so much better. I could make it all better,” She said. He leaned in, swiping up his coffee. It was fresh and hot. “See? I could make it all-” 

“I know. I know.” He took a sip, wincing at Her deprivation of sugar, then slapped Her cup down on Her table. “But one day. You have all the time in the world. All of it…We—I just wanna take it off your hands, for a sec, get everything in order. People are getting ripped to shreds, girl.” 

He set the pill down on Her table and unscrewed Her jug cap, pouring Her glass full of cherry tea.

Cherry tea, with cherry pie, underscored by cherry cologne. She looked back through an array of microscopes, down annals of Her memory, back to when She first made all three. I love you. 

Her sky distorted concavely, forming a shapeless maw around Her earth, tight and trying to snap, fighting Her last breath of will. Ella? Oh god, no, fuck fuck fuck no…Out of it came Her blinking single star at the back of Her sky’s throat, comically turning and spinning its glare, replicating out at eight different points, and in moments Her universe was a bundled sheet of nebula, distended belts of asteroids, Her whole ecosystem of cosmically radioactive crashes and Her errors were encroaching closer, and She was everywhere, Her hands could extend everywhere. The reaches of Her void compacted to a single dot, hell and heaven and every exoplanet trying to exist in the middle of Her diner table, demanding room and finding none thus collapsing. 

He was screaming, frozen. Everything was. But She held the last twinge of space against the black teeth. A sealed area the size of the pill, unbeckoned by Her black hole that had simplified everything. 

She tried to rewrite all pills into nasal sprays and liquids, but even something so minute could randomly break Her world. The world. 

It took everything not to throw up. 

“Holy fuck—You did it?” Archie was smiling brightly across from her, his eyes having lost their weird, flat orange and returned to blue. A bright, bright blue. He removed his rimless gold glasses, rubbed the reddened imprints on either side of his slender nose. His hair remained a dyed gaudy yellow-blonde, strands as dead as his malnourished skin. The jug was a glass of water, half-drunk. The other glass, a steaming cup of cherry-flavored tea. 

He lost his smile, and seemed to sag. “I hate that you have to go through this. But I’m gonna be here every millisecond of every goddamn day. You don’t have to understand—Just trust in me. Y’know?” 

She nodded, tears flowing freely, feeling the pricks in the tips of her fingers. An unraveling, reaching through joints and muscles. 

“I know,” She said.  

“I trust you,” She heard herself say.  

“Just please,” a voice said. 

“Don’t give up on me.”