LUNCH AT MY GRANDMOTHER’S was whole grain bread in a wicker basket, slices of salami and patties of bologna, cubed cheddar cheese, tomato wedges, quartered pickles, Becel margarine coiled by melon baller, a flask of French’s mustard, a vase of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, and whatever hard candy I could smuggle from the glass jar in the pantry without her noticing.
I eschewed the sandwich I was supposed to make. Instead, I suckled each ingredient separately. Even the margarine got sampled, its saltiness complementing the crusty bread that I’d swallowed mere moments before.
A thicket of raspberry bushes oppressed the kitchen-side window. Perched on the edge of my seat, two pickles tucked under my upper lip like vampire fangs, I watched the butterflies that flitted over to sample the swelling red berries. My fingers itched, shredded napkins into confetti, twitched around a phantom butterfly net.
From a young age, I delighted in the awesome destructive power of a magnifying glass. That focused speck of sunlight, my theophany, would hover over insects and deliver my judgment until their thoraxes split and sizzled.
As I grew older, my technique became more refined. A butterfly net and a thin syringe of formaldehyde replaced the magnifying glass. Now, after lunch—after every lunch—I would bunker beneath the raspberry bushes, crawling on toes and fingertips to avoid the thorns overhead, and I would ambush butterflies with my net.
Occasionally, I caught one.
Net pinned to the ground, monarch or painted lady contained within its silken web, I constricted the net’s free space with a hand, until the butterfly was robbed of any room in which to struggle. The needle slipped in effortlessly, the syringe slowly draining into the insect. The tricky part was pinching its thorax between thumb and forefinger, wings behind its back, so as not to damage the specimen.
There’s an irony in that, I suppose.
Relaxing the butterfly’s corpse required humidity and a sealed glass jar. Slowly its wings would soften, splay wide, reveal the butterfly’s beautiful colours. I tumbled the insect from its jar, onto a styrofoam plank, beside a tray of pins.
The pinning process was meditative. I eased the wings apart with forceps, never touching them with my fingers, lest the scales be scraped off and the corpse’s beauty marred. I fastened the body to the styrofoam with a single spike through its centre. The rest of the pins I placed so as to force the wings apart without penetrating them. My painted lady on her canvas.
Then I’d go outside, and find more butterflies to hang in my room. My Grandmother watched me from the kitchen window as my net smacked into the lawn over and over again.
Whenever I caught something, I looked up at her and smiled.