The Ones They Left

by August Brown

The monarchs passed last spring on a migratory route to Canada, blowing in the wind with the topsoil and filling the air with tangerine clouds. The sky had been bleached a powder blue, reminiscent of aching knees and a red-knuckled hand, before the last straggling kaleidoscope cleared the pines at the northern turnpike and disappeared. Summer was settling in and nothing was left but the throbbing freeway and the broken bodies of the ones who hadn’t made it out. I saw them all through that summer, mounted like trophies on the grills of eighteen-wheelers. Others hung from exhaust pipes, tattered like Old Glory clinging to the bed of a pickup with a minimum speed of seventy. People scraped the bodies from the tailpipes and engines and crushed them into pills they swallowed in the dark for good dreams, pinned them to walls with blue thumbtacks, hung them from mobiles that caught the light and fluttered in the wind. I watched an especially large one burn with the scarlet tip of a cigarette and go up in smoke like fine lace.

A woman lives near the freeway and grows butterfly mixes in plastic pots. I guess her yard is a sort of pit stop for the monarchs, an oasis in the big patch of raked dirt reaching from a wire fence to her front door. The woman will let you in if she likes you. Her living room windows are clear and wide, with towels stuffed in the gaps to keep out the dust from her yard. Cars pass on the road and the house rattles, rattles in a way as deep and satisfying as poking a bruise. The woman will tell you that the shaking sets her heart fluttering like wingbeats. She’s wearing men’s boxer shorts with blue and white stripes and a bralette so small as to suffocate. On her back the woman has a tattoo of a monarch, stretching from the lower ribcage to the top of her shorts. Painted rocks clutter her living room. It always makes me think of the people who go crazy at Burning Man or in Slab City and make entire Jesus mountains. She says she got the ink when she was seventeen years old. She got it to remember the feeling of flying. I wonder what it’s like to be wild with wings on your back.