Tangles in the Weave

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In my dream I look down at my chest and see through myself. I am made of golden strands, woven together. I am threadbare like linen in sunlight. Within me is a heavy tangle, and when I look close, I see a caterpillar, winding the threads around itself from the tail up, into a luminous cocoon.

The elders at butterfly house say that at 16 years old, my metamorphosis is overdue. I’m anxious about it: about being a late bloomer, about the process itself — most of all about being different from the others at school. Missing two weeks for some mystical butterfly transformation doesn’t help my worries about being left out. In the afternoons I used to go to the woods with a big gang of friends, climbing trees or old buildings, making up games, foraging. I was always the quiet, shy one in the group, but they all seemed to like me. Now that I feel the metamorphosis coming I am too tired to keep up with them. For weeks I’ve felt a dire hunger that doesn’t go away no matter how much I eat. An exhaustion has crept into me, the feeling that I might fall asleep on my feet at any moment and sleep for an age. And every night, my dreams are wound in golden thread. 

“When your metamorphosis happens, you’ll need to be in a quiet place, where you won’t be disturbed,” says Joja, an elder at the butterfly house. “You won’t be able to come out for a week, perhaps longer.” She wears a yellow robe with brown underneath, and when she moves and turns the colors flicker like wingbeats. “You should do the change here, Ever, and not at home. Butterfly people will know how to take care of you.” 

I tell my parents, but they’re worried for me. My mother and father’s souls are red wolf and orangutan, and neither of them has the kind of metamorphosis that butterfly people have. 

“What do you mean, you can’t get up for weeks? Surely you have to eat! We’ve taken care of you all your life, why are we supposed to stop now?” my red wolf mother demands, her head tilting side to side, hands wringing. 

My father puts an arm around her, presses his face to hers. 

“If Ever is going to be a butterfly woman, she’ll have to go through this,” he says. “I think it’s a good idea to take her to the butterfly house.” My mother wrinkles up her face and trots out of the room. My father looks at me and shrugs. In his slow, methodical way, he scratches his head, crosses his arms. “I had a difficult time growing up,” he said. “People with ape souls like to stick to their families, especially when they’re young. But my parents had reptile souls. They wanted me to be independent, fend for myself. I moved to the ape house when I was younger than you are now. But your mother has never been without a pack around her. She doesn’t like to think about you leaving.”

“I’ll come back when it’s over,” I tell him, and he smiles like he doesn’t believe me. 

* * *

I eat one breakfast at my parents’ house before school, and another breakfast once I arrive. I am too tired and hungry to learn. My friends notice what’s going on and interrogate me in whispers in the back of the classroom. I try to explain, reassured by their attention.

“Tell the teacher you need to go to the nurse,” says Benna, a waterbird girl.

“Or go take a nap in the resting room,” suggests Merve, a lizard boy, who naps all the time anyway.

“Don’t bother with all that,” Kera butts in, an octopus soul sitting at the next table, eavesdropping. “Just leave if you don’t want to be here.” 

I tell the instructor I’m not feeling well and go for a walk through the school garden. The garden is arranged in growing concentric circles, with rings of bushes and trees and low plants. The food grown there feeds the school and some of the city beyond, and not just the humans. There are hundreds of different flowers there, meant to attract all kinds of pollinators. There are even a few butterflies, though none are the same kind as my soul. My butterfly, the Miami Blue, went extinct over 200 years ago. All of its souls were released into the universe, and one of them landed in me. But I feel the butterflies in the garden whisper to me in their fluttering. They land in my hair and on my hands, and their tiny tongues unroll to lap at me. I can smell them, and read the way they flit. They’re welcoming me. Grow up, little sister, they tell me. 

I lie down in the grass next to the herbs and almost fall asleep. As I doze my hand stretches into the mint and drags a stem toward me, rhizomes coming free from the earth, and when the sharp-fresh taste hits my tongue I realize I’m mindlessly eating again. 

A green caterpillar dangles by his back feet from the stem I hold — a moth caterpillar. Someday, I know, he’ll be a beige beauty with dusty wings. He lets himself fall onto my fingertips and I put him back on a nearby plant. I lay back in the grass and listen to the minute gyres in the air from the butterfly wings.

I am tiny, so small that the rustling heads of grass stems swaying in the wind are as big as houses. One beats toward me in a breeze, but I let the same breeze tumble me wingtip over wingtip and I right myself, three fast beats to lift my featherlight body above the heads of the grass. I am so small that I can see how the air is made of tiny wavering strands of golden light, how my wingbeats pass through them and lift me upon them. And how the strands wend and weave their way through every living being — through my wings, through the heads of grass, through the body of the immense human girl asleep below me. I follow the threads awhile and find a place where they hang heavy, golden beams dragged down by the weight of a soul caught in them. 

“Who are you,” I flutter.

“‘Ōʻō,” it tells me, and its name is a haunting birdsong. “Help me,” it pleads, a black marble with wavering edges, tied in knots by the strands.

“I can’t,” I tell it. “You’re trapped in the web of life, because you have no bodies to go back to.” I flutter and flap around it. My six tiny feet tug at its bonds but they don’t budge.

In response, the soul caught in the thread weeps a wavering melody.

“You’ll be born into a human,” I tell it, as if that could ever be a comfort.

“Why?” it wails. “Why should I become one of them?” The notes echo and the soul twists and struggles in the strands of golden light.

“Some think it’s to teach them,” I find myself saying, the words not my own. “Some think it’s to punish them. But I think it was the only way to save the rest of us,” though it is too late to save ‘Ōʻō, I know, as it was too late for me. 

‘Ōʻō’s soul swells and turns heavy. It drops through the threads of the web of life and out of sight. 

I awaken on the grass in the school garden, sweating and confused. Reality is a bucket of cold water over my head and I stand up on two legs, shaky despite their immensity. My body feels cavernous, though before the vision it was the body of a normal human girl. I walk to the butterfly house without going back to school.

“Joja,” I call in the empty wooden room, built in a hexagonal dome like so many structures in the city. Joja emerges from an alcove as if she’d been waiting to greet me the whole time. She has this delicate tread that makes it seem like she’s floating. When she takes in the look on my face she sits me down on a cushion and tells me to explain. I recount the vision I had, lost in my grief for ‘Ōʻō’s soul. 

Joja waits a long while before she starts to speak, and when she does, she speaks to herself, not to me. 

“Two centuries is not enough time to mourn extinction,” she mutters. A long pause. “You know what happens to butterflies during metamorphosis?” she asks me. 

“Of course. We shed our caterpillar skin, to reveal the chrysalis. Inside we liquefy all but the most important organs, and then our hormones signal our imaginal discs to begin producing our adult body parts.” I recite all this as if it were an exam question. We’ve discussed it at length already.

“All true,” Joja says, “but what does the caterpillar feel and see when it is transforming?” 

“I don’t know,” I reply.

“Humans couldn’t know, before. Humans didn’t understand that any other animal could feel, or dream. But in the chrysalis, during the weeks of metamorphosis, butterflies undergo visions, as you have started to. Butterflies experience a kind of death and rebirth in their lifetime, and so they spend time awake in the place between living and dying. The threads of the universe, the web of life, where souls hang waiting for their new bodies — this is the place you’ve begun to see. A place that’s here, but not quite.” 

“Did you see that place?” I ask her.

“I remember the weeks I spent there during my metamorphosis like it was yesterday,” she says. “Ever, bring your things from your parents’ house. Your change will start tonight.” 

My parents walk with me the mile-and-a-half from our home to the butterfly house. Bicycles overtake us as we pass through the sturdy, 200-year-old oak trees that shade the streets. My mother chats idly to my father and me about city happenings: the council approving a new restoration project on the land around the city, the family of hedgehogs that live under our house. I try to pay attention, but my mind is fluttering on a nervous breeze. She starts gossipping about the humans who moved in above us. “Plant people, if you can believe it,” my mother says, “never met anyone like them. Slowest talkers I’ve ever heard.” My father catches my eye and smiles slightly. My mother’s a chatty one, and I can picture her talking over a couple of slow-methodical people with tree souls, moving at the pace of sunlight and rain. I smile back at my father, if only to combat the fear that’s rising in me. 

It starts to drizzle. We pull up our hoods and quicken our steps. I fall behind, exhausted, and they wait for me, looking back with concern. When we finally reach the butterfly house, water is trickling in rivulets over the wooden arches of the hexagonal dome, collecting in the corners into thin streams, which drip down into stone basins and into the house’s water system. Joja waits near the door, invites us inside. My parents stand around awkwardly, guests in someone else’s home, but Joja tends to them while I drop heavily onto a cushion. She makes them tea and they sit around chatting as I doze. 

At last I feel hands grasp under my arms, my father and mother lifting me up, and they take me to the alcove where a hammock hangs like a chrysalis. I am nearly asleep when they wrap me inside, my mother lovingly tucking in my feet. As Joja covers my face with a green sheet, I see my mother is crying. 

There is a quiet green darkness for a time, the only sound my heartbeat. I feel my body melt away but I am still breathing, heart still beating. I am a pulse tied to a golden thread. Every way I turn I see the strands forming an infinite web, until suddenly they materialize into an entire world. Trees and plants and light above, and below a rich universe of soil and things that live in it — mycelium and roots and tiny crawling things growing along the paths of the endless threads. 

I follow a strand and find my human body, hanging wrapped in a hammock, and for the first time I perceive that I’m a universe. Microscopic things live on my skin and hair, inside my lungs and in my innards, little cells which are part of me but not, living and breeding and dying in my body, their home planet. I watch them move and work for an eternity. Generations of tiny organisms rise and fall as I float through my body, observing. They eat the dead cells on my body, they eat the food in my body, they swim in my veins and fight my blood cells and lose and die, or win and fight on and die a moment later. I am a world, a battleground, an ecosystem. Awestruck, I watch the lives that enliven me. 

At last, a thread tugs me away from myself. I don’t go willingly, but it keeps pulling until I am torn from my place in the world and flung out into the open air. Momentum carries me through the city, my weightless body adrift on threads that hold me aloft like a spider on gossamer. The city is a hodgepodge of buildings, overgrown in every possible surface with green. Some date back to the olden times, sterile constructions of steel and glass and poured concrete, the only charming thing about them the trees and vines which conquered them. The buildings we make now are smaller, made of wood or dug into hills, designed to be overgrown and rained on and decomposed, to be a part of everything else. 

Throughout the plants and tiny glowing pinpricks of life that are soil creatures and single cells, the golden threads of the web of life tangle. The whole city is a glowing organism. The roots of every tree wrap around its neighbor’s in the soil, bound by threads of fungi, whispering to each other. I can hear them speaking in a slow, earthen language about the taste of the rain, and laughing to each other about how it makes the worms tickle their roots. The life that exists under the earth is as dense and complex as the life above, perhaps more — an invisible world brought to light by the glowing threads. Aboveground, things move faster. In the rustling underbrush martens and foxes hunt tiny rodents and birds. Insects do their humming labor of eating and decomposing and pollinating. Birds of all feathers and songs flit and soar, eating insects, digging the rain-dancing worms from the topsoil. The divisions of underground and overground, of air and land and water, are all artificial. The worlds blur, each into the other. 

And then I notice the humans. I watch as they come and go in the city, passing from their dwellings to their soul-houses, in the gardens picking and weeding and tending, in the fabrication workshops printing tools or toys, in one of the communal spaces drinking tea or eating cake and knitting or sewing or reading or swapping stories. They’re wound up in the threads — and yet, at the heart of each one, a little knot is tied, an anchor for a dark spot, a lost soul, like the Ōʻō I met before. The souls of the beings who came before are bound into us like weights. No one I see is without one. Each of us carries within ourselves a reminder of the devastation of the Extinction. 

I am drawn to a cluster of people in a building I have never been to before. I know what it is — it’s called Hospice House, where the sick and elderly live out their last few weeks under constant care. It’s dug into a hillside, to keep it cool, and all around it I see the roots of grass and shrubs, a subterranean bower. But inside the hole in the hill is a crowd of 10 humans standing around a departing loved one. I watch the scene for a long time, though not much happens. Hands are held, cheeks are stroked. Words are spoken which I realize I cannot hear. I hear only the sounds of life: beating hearts, the slow, rasping breath of the dying. After a time the person’s chest falls and ceases to rise. I know they are dead, but the life within them doesn’t stop — the tiny beings that lived in and lived with them continue on as if nothing has happened. Soon they will be more alive than ever, as the organisms who break down bodies after death arrive to decompose them. The threads go on. The life continues. But as I watch, the soul which lived in that human disappears, or dissipates. The black hole of it is sapped away in the thread, like a butterfly tongue lapping up nectar. It’s gone. What was it, and where did it go? What soul has been eliminated forever from the world? 

As I contemplate I’m dragged backwards, out of Hospice House, through the forest-city alive with golden light, back to a place where a heavy soul hangs in the thread. At first I’m confused as I’m trapped in a tiny space, a dense knot of thread inside a human body, and then I remember: I am this human, this is my body. And my butterfly soul is there, inside with me. Tied into my chest, somewhere above my stomach, a knot of golden thread fastens a dark, heavy object within me. It’s an orb, like glass made of smoke, and inside is a pale blue butterfly. 

“Ever,” it calls to me. “Ever.”

“Hello?”

“Ever,” it repeats. 

I can finally meet the soul that lives inside me, and instead of asking any of the million questions I have for it, I blurt out the first silly thing that comes to mind.

“Hello. Do you like living with me?” If I could blush without a body, I would. 

“Well enough,” it replies, laughing. “You’re young, still a caterpillar. You haven’t become much of yourself yet. But I’ve waited a long time to be reborn into you. I’m ready for my time on Earth to end.” 

“But we’ve barely started living. You want to stop existing already? Like the soul of the person who just died?” 

“Your life is just beginning, but I’ve hung alone in the web of life for 200 years. I’ve been waiting to be released since the last of my kind died. She fought hard, but she died alone, eaten by a crow, on a tiny island far away from here. I’ve seen the last of us leave this Earth. I’ve known a sadness deeper than you’ll ever understand. And I’ve been sent back, to live one last time, to see the rebirth of the balance of the world. When that’s done, I want to rest.” 

“But when you’re gone, when I’m gone, who will remember you?”

“Why do I need to be remembered? Everything that was a part of me is still here. There will be new lives, new butterflies.” 

“If the souls all disappear, eventually we’ll just be humans again, and not a part of the world anymore,” I plead.

“Humans have always been a part of the world,” the butterfly laughs. “You just forgot.”

“But we might forget again,” I insist. “We forgot once, and nearly drove everything to extinction.” 

“Look at this web around you,” the butterfly tells me, and I obey. All around me hang the trillion golden threads — the endless complexity, the unbreakable interconnectedness of the web of life. “Nothing is ever lost, in the web. Not even souls. Humans drove so many things extinct in such a short time that the souls built up, like silt in a stream, and had to find new paths out of the world. We’re flowing out through humans. We are mourning our extinction through you, and that will take time. There are many souls still trapped, and it will take generations of humans to release them all. But I don’t think humans will forget centuries of lessons so easily. It will be up to you to make sure your children and grandchildren know they are a tiny part of a greater world.” 

“Oh, I will, I …” Another question is perched on my lips but I feel the threads begin to pull me. I try to say goodbye to my butterfly soul, but I am not sure I manage before I’m dragged away, into a new blackness, and dreamless sleep. 

“How are we?” 

Joja’s wrinkled, smiling face hovers over me as I awaken in the butterfly house. Only my head is poking out of my hammock chrysalis, but I wriggle my way free, feeling the urgent need to stretch my cramped body. I spend several minutes on the floor, unfurling. 

“How long was I in there?” I ask Joja. 

“Around 10 days,” she says, and I am not precisely surprised — the metamorphosis felt both like forever and no time at all. I feel a weird lightness on my shoulders, though, the feeling that I should be moving what isn’t there. I rub one shoulder blade and Joja gives me a sad smile. “You get used to the feeling. It’s the wings we’ll never have.” 

I spend many quiet hours drinking tea and watching rain trickle down the windows of butterfly house before I am ready to speak to Joja about what I’ve been shown. She gives me space, fluttering around tidying bookshelves while I ponder. When I’m ready, I call out her name and tell her everything I have seen, every detail I can remember. I only say it once, and she writes my story down. We discuss a few things, but she doesn’t ask many questions, and can’t answer all of mine. Somehow I feel the magic of the metamorphosis will dissipate with too much retelling. 

I realize, now, that everything I saw in the vision is what all of us already know. There is a feeling of connectedness in the world that binds us to every living thing. When we see a great beautiful tree, or help a beetle flipped over on its back, or watch foxes hunt rabbits in a meadow. When we see the beings that are the cousins of our souls, or connect to our human friends and families. It’s like my butterfly soul told me: Nothing is lost in the web, and the web is not lost on us. The vision just helped me see clearly what had been there the whole time. 

After the metamorphosis I no longer feel exhausted and starving. I go back to school and feel excited to be in class, I rejoin my friends on their afternoon romps through the woods of the city. Most importantly, I go back to live with my parents. My mom cries again when I show up, two weeks after I last saw her, and gives me a hug like she’ll never let me go again. My father is delighted, cracking endless jokes and singing out loud as he makes us dinner. 

I am becoming myself. The parts of me which were full of teenage insecurity and indecision have a newfound resolve. I sign up to sing in the school choir, something I have always been too nervous to try. I take flying lessons in the city’s solar gliders, and I meet a boy there. His name is Saturn, and he’s quiet, with beautiful, dark, curly hair, long to his elbows. He has a moth soul, the bog buck-moth, and I realize I’ve seen him before, in the evenings at butterfly house. He went through his metamorphosis a while before I did. We haven’t told each other what we saw, but I can tell in our quiet moments together in the woods that he would understand. 

One day we climb to the top of the abandoned steel ruin on the outskirts of town that sticks up from the forest like a jagged tooth. We watch the sunset over the city together, the birds chirping their evening songs as the bats awaken, lights turning on in the little houses between the trees. We don’t talk much. I laugh as a moth flies up to him, lands on his bare arm. Its feathery antennae work to discover him, its brown wings drag along and tickle at the little hairs on his forearm. When it flies off we look at each other, and I lean over to kiss him. There is the tiniest hint of surprise in his eyes before he closes them to kiss me back. Neither of us know what to say after, so we hold hands on the rooftop and watch the night creatures come alive. I swear, in the last light of the day, you can see a hint of the gold, the strands of the universe, sparkling in everything.

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