Sorrows of Butterflies
Leonid is sitting on the road, with his legs spread like the sort of some old man’s garden scissors, and drawing something, moving his finger on the ground, when a pigeon flies above him and defecates on his curled hair. It happens none the first time. This pigeon lives next to Leonid’s house. The nest it has is the same as Leonid’s hair in the morning, and its lovely family the way Leonid’s family, a wife and three children. Everyone knows the defecating of a pigeon means richness. And Leonid knows it, too.
He runs into the house and shouts, “we will be rich, dear! We shall!” He often does it when his hair or shoulders or back have some bird’s shit. But, sadly, he’s not rich, just a plain working man whose trash takes up space on the planet, nothing more.
Leonid understands many things like why collecting flowers exists or fishing or painting and imagining, but one thing he doesn’t know is why his parents named him Leonid. He’s been asking his mother and grandmother about it, but they always answered him as if Leonid was adopted. Leonid feels it so, looking in hindsight.
What he remembers solidly is watching TV switched on by his mother to avoid looking after him and the cartoon movie called “Karlsson-on-the-Roof.” Time these memories fly into his mind, Leonid takes a cigarette from behind his ear and lit it with his little finger as his late uncle used to.
He slumps into the couch, inhales and exhales smoke, and starts rubbing his hair, which was a bad idea because of the white shit that now is smeared across his head and slipped between his fingers. But Leonid doesn’t care about it. The veranda’s filling up with blue smoke. His eyes catch a clumsy fly crawling along the windowsill, and Leonid thinks this sluggish, lethargic fly looks like one of his colleagues or, perhaps, Leonid himself. And in this case, such a creature doesn’t have a chance of being. Therefore, Leonid gets up, Leonid reaches the window, and Leonid burns the fly with his cigarette. He’s feeling better than a minute before or a day, week, month, even the year before. He is feeling better than ever.
He looks at the dying fly kicking with its paws and wings, it seems like life-fighting inside, and Leonid doesn’t take his cigarette out but smashes it harder. So hard as his father would grab him by his ear and grip it agonizing until it turned into a blood-poured plum; tears would roll down the white-skin face, but the young mouth wouldn’t make any sounds. Besides Leonid's actual faults and guilt, his father has been doing this even because of allegedly Leonid’s wrong look.
Presently Leonid is more indifferent than angry to that man who was offended by his poor life.
The door opens, he takes his hand off sharply, and the fly defeated by death falls to the floor. It’s Leonid’s son who entered the veranda, Vanya. The little boy is around seven or ten (in truth, Leonid always forgets it). He wears an overall red jumpsuit and a straw hat and holds a butterfly net in his left hand and a jar for his loot in his right. Leonid glances at the dead fly, then at his son, and repeats it. It seems Vanya had time to look at what his dad had done. And when he squints and opens his mouth to ask about it, Leonid says, “where are you going?” in a way that makes it hard to even make a sound as though the fly was killed by Vanya a few seconds ago, not by the hand messed up with pigeon’s shit.
“I’ll go hunting,” Vanya says and swings his net slightly, fighting the wish to look at the thing his father did with.
“Do you have another one?”
“What?”
“The net, do you have one more?”
“If you bought it, I’d have one, but–“
“Well, we’ll hunt in turn. Let’s go,” Leonid takes the net and goes outside.
The pigeon sits on a branch, watching Leonid run with shit in his hair and the net in his hand. He looks like he’s been waiting for this moment his whole life, and nothing can prevent it. He looks like that for someone unless the pigeon. Perhaps this pigeon wanted to have Leonid as its toilet again, but after such a scene, the bird probably thinks this man is poor enough, and defecating on his head would be a waste of shit. So the pigeon coos and flies away so as not to be annoyed with this misery Leonid.
Leonid runs to a vacant lot across the road, overgrown with weeds and flowers above which so many butterflies flutter. Vanya runs behind his father but stops and watches as he begins to catch butterflies. Leonid dives into tall weeds. He is swinging the net, bouncing like one of those deflated balls children lost here, and wheezing due to his excess weight. He falls on the ground and vanishes, then half of Leonid appears, then vanishes again, and so several times.
Vanya hears footsteps behind his back and turns around. He sees his mother, Alexandra, who walks toward him and looks as she usually does when Leonid behaves in the way of infantilizing himself as she sees it. Vanya shrugs and sighs. His mother approaches him and lays her hand on his shoulder.
Butterfly hunting is a new thing their father does. Leonid was climbing upon the trees, imagining he looked like Mowgli. He was building sort of shacks into bashes, and also within this vacant lot. One day, he created the airplane he’d been dreaming of since childhood, but that try was unsuccessful. And he also played hide-and-seek, scaring his relatives by leaping out from hidden places like in a closet, under a sofa, or behind curtains. One time, he’d made wooden crossbars on the ceiling a person could hold on to, and then he had hidden there and jumped down when his wife stepped into the room. After that, there was the ambulance going to their house and growling with its siren. Afterward, when Leonid got fired from his work and Alexandra told him to find some money for their children, he tossed around some ideas and decided to take his collection of flowers and go across the town, knocking on each of the doors and offering to buy some flowers for a symbolic amount. But all that work went down the drain because people refused his offer and did it angry sometimes. It didn’t make an impression on his wife, either. She didn’t go downtown for a long time, sending her children to shops to avoid hearing all the gossip about Leonid and blushing.
Alexandra doesn't like to play everything by ear like Leonid. Her mother taught her that life should go according to plan strictly; there should be no turns here. And everything went as her mother needed, but lo and behold, Leonid appeared in Aleksandra’s life.
Neither Leonid nor Alexandra they don’t know why they married. It happened fortuitously. Although it’s hard to say there was some luck there, quite the opposite. They met in the cemetery. It was the funeral, as it were, of a neighbor who was significant to them; they had to look like he was significant to them. And when everybody stood in a line to kiss that yellow dead man, Alexandra and Leonid were still away and, accidentally, had a chat about that. They found they both hated kissing the dead, and perhaps it was the main thing for them because of it their romance happened.
“I’ve caught it!” Leonid shouts excitedly, “come here! Carry the jar!”
Vanya looks at his mother like his father killed someone and asks Vanya for a jar for amputated fingers. Alexandra slaps his shoulder quietly and winks, which means, yes, you can run to your damn dad, just take him for granted: he’s such a person and won't be different, never.
It is a Vanessa. It’s trying to struggle out of the net, thrashing about up and down. Two big moons, two human winking eyes watch the insect that possibly doesn’t know it lives only one month because it’s fighting for life as if its life will last similar to humans.
Vanya runs up to his smiling father. Now, Vanessa is in the jar and probably understands it won’t let go back into the air. So won’t lose the loot, Leonid puts it on the ground next to a little tree growing in the middle of this vacant lot and carries on his hunting. Vanya stays by the jar and wants to remind his father he said they would take turns catching butterflies. But he decides not to call his father because it doesn’t make any sense.
Talking to Leonid to stop doing something he wants to is hopeless. Now and then, Leonid asks his children to play with him instead of children doing it. A couple of years ago, on Leonid’s younger son’s birthday, Alexandra bought a train road as a gift for her son, and she gave it, and her son was playing with it for a while when Leonid entered the bedroom (regrettably, entered) and started to play with the road, too. In a few minutes, Leonid was playing alone because this game bewitched him so that he didn’t see his son teared up and ran away to Alexandra to complain about it. Yes, after such things, Leonid always apologizes. Leonid loves his children probably more than anything. Long story short, Leonid is just a grown-up child, and he can’t help it.
Alexander and Alexander are the names of two other sons of Leonids, which he came up with himself, and he’s proud of it. In their family, they call each other in a shortened form, so there are three Sashas under one roof, which brings little trouble from time to time. For instance, during sex, if to speak more precisely, at the start of the sex, when Leonid called Alexandra in shortened form so that she would assess his outfit, there was an accident. On that day, Leonid bought new underpants with a leopard’s face right on the very place everyone knows about. And when Leonid shouted: “Sasha! I'm waiting for you!” Sasha appeared at the door, but it wasn’t the Sasha Leonid was waiting for. There was his son, who looked at Leonid lying on the sofa like tanned cattle lying on a beach and wanting to destroy your sand tower, and on top of that, the wild leopard’s eyes were staring at Sasha. Little Sasha got scared of his father, started to cry, and ran away to Alexandra to complain about it. These children often ran away to Alexandra from their father to complain about him. Now they barely don’t do that because they suggest themselves as adult men. “Adult men don’t complain” is what their grandma likes to say.
Vanya turns around and sees his mother going away. The butterfly is hitting the transparent walls. Leonid is bouncing across the vacant lot. Vanya is left alone. He feels, for a moment, as if he’s abandoned. This place is becoming wilder, more empty. His father is further; it’s only his father's head flickering somewhere, and in a few seconds it’s only the net doing it. The wind stops. Eternity silence takes this place under its blanket. Vanya may hear butterflies’ wings fluttering and sounds of the flies. A couple of more seconds and his mother will get home. His father has vanished already. Vanya makes up his mind to rush out of this terrified place and after his mother.
All of the family are sitting at the table in the kitchen and drinking tea when Leonid comes in with a grin and the jar and the hardened pigeon shit on his hair.
”You need to have a shower, dear,“ Alexandra says politely, but looks in a way like some public toilet cleaners when you ask them something like, “can I go in already?” and they think, “yes, you can, a son-of-a-bitch, and I’ll clean your shit after that, it’s okay, the son-of-a-bitch, welcome.”
“But first, I want some tea,” Leonid replies and puts the jar in the middle of the table, which his wife obviously doesn’t like.
Butterflies are hitting lazier than before. It appears they’re exhausted from and, perhaps, come to terms with the finish of their life. The children look at the jar, sipping tea and glancing at each other.
“How’s that, kids? It’ll be my new collection!”
“Don’t try selling it, for heaven’s sake. I don’t wanna hear the word of you across the town, dear,” Alexandra says, but she doesn't know why she added “dear.”
Leonid just smiles at her and starts making tea himself.
The sun goes down. Sunlight lays on the table, on Leonid’s hands, and bends through the jar, illuminating half-dead butterflies. The children and Alexandra left. A kettle boils, and steam is mixing with red sunlight. Leonid focuses his gaze on these tangerine color clouds going to the ceiling slowly. It seems like a sort of magic. “There’s enough water in the kettle,” Leonid thinks and decides not to turn it off. He takes one butterfly from its jail, lays it in front of himself, and pins the wings with two spoons. The butterfly is on the surgical table. Leonid lit a cigarette, looking at the insect. He takes one puff, exhales smoke, and touches the head of the butterfly with his cigarette carefully. There are some tiny twitches here. And the butterfly is dead. Leonid turns around somewhy and, in the little window of the door, he sees two eyes, two big moons, as it seems to him, of Vanya that look scared like his own, and disappear at once.