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He cradled the fragile butterfly in his hands as he ran.
They always came in the spring when the flowers bloomed. He would sit by the door and watch them as they drifted by, first one, and then another, and then many more meandering their way across the sky on painted wings. It was the flash of color that he loved seeing the most. Orange, white, green. The colors of his mother’s kimonos when the season turned and her smile finally reached her eyes.
He wanted to show one to her. He knew it would make her happy.
His mother would go far, far away in the bitter chill of winter, beyond where his small hands could reach. His grandmother always told him not to mind, that she would be more like herself when the warmth of the sun melted the snow and made the ground sparkle with dew. He imagined her stretching out a pair of colorful wings, inviting the daylight to dance across them and warm her spirit like it warmed the earth.
In his fancy, he stumbled, and felt a small flutter between his fingers. Would she come sit with him in the tall grass and count the clouds in the sky? He liked to sit on her lap, feeling the gentle breeze embrace them as she told him stories about his father.
“Someday he’ll come home to us,” she would say, tucking a flower behind his ear for luck. “He’ll come just like the spring, you’ll see.”
He was breathless by the time he made it to her door. “Mama?” He called out to her, but she didn’t turn from her perch at the gilded vanity. He watched as she slowly combed her fingers through her hair, a flash of pale skin piercing through the veil of black over and over again as she hummed a familiar tune, low and sweet.
“Mama?” He repeated, though he suddenly felt meek and small. He could see in her reflection the way her lipstick didn’t quite meet the bow of her lips, her eyes focused on something he couldn’t make out in the dark of the vanity mirror. Come back to me, he wanted to say, as he tiptoed to her side and gingerly outstretched his hands. “I brought you something.”
She said nothing, and for a tender moment he was afraid that she hadn’t heard. But then she stopped and breathed a sigh, and his heart leapt as she cupped his hands in hers, unfolding them like a delicate book.
The butterfly lay crumpled there, its wings bent and torn at awkward angles, tiny bits of it clinging to his skin like broken glass. He felt her flinch. “It reminded me of you,” he pleaded, anxious that she might withdraw back to that place just beyond his grasp. “I thought you’d like it.”
“Your gifts are too sad, Hyakunosuke,” she said, encircling his hands once more around its shattered form. “Everything you bring me is dead.”
---
Maeyama’s body didn’t move, just like the others. Ogata hovered watchfully as the moments passed, waiting for a twitch, a breath, a mournful moan.
None came.
The birds of prey adorning the walls were hauntingly familiar. He’d seen them on the battlefield, picking carrion flesh off of corpses when the bullets ceased and a hush passed over no man’s land. It was a fitting end for a soldier. Maeyama might have thought so too, if he’d been smart enough to keep his head down. But he hadn’t, and Ogata had to mull over his morbid irony alone.
There were many placid eyes scattered about the taxidermist’s workshop. Satisfied that his former comrade wouldn’t be rising to his feet anytime soon, Ogata slunk from room to silent room, sweat beading on his brow as he endured the unwavering stares of more awful creatures than he could be bothered to count. There were some he recognized - wolves, deer, cranes - but others still that he’d never seen, hulking beasts that warped in his vision’s periphery and made his hair stand on end. He wondered if he might dream of them at night, prowling in the darkness of the woods beyond the campfire’s glow, their fury edging through the grass like whispers on the wind.
“Murderer, ” they’d hiss. “Mothers, fathers, brothers, comrades.”
The rest of the building was dismally empty apart from the subtle scent of must and decay. The stench of death came in many forms, after all, permeating the walls, the floorboards, Ogata's skull - it seeped through his skin like sweat and tears and he couldn’t get away from it no matter how tightly he clung to his clothes.
He chuckled; a shallow, listless sound. Old friends always outstayed their welcome, and death was hardly an exception.
The miasma of it was thickest in the room where he discovered the human mounts, adorning their table in silent conversation. So lifelike were they, save the heads and folds of skin dangling from the ceiling, that Ogata felt the scene had all the grace of a photograph. A memento mori, perhaps. Or a madman’s shrine.
Not that it mattered. He was in no position to judge anyone else’s sins.
“I don’t suppose you have what I’m looking for,” he smiled at one of the seated men, letting his fingers dance across its leathery skin. He was surprised by the firmness of it despite the lush and vibrant look it had from afar, their artificial rigor mortis contrasting the vibrant expressiveness of their features.
“No, I didn’t think so.”
It was their eyes that truly ruined the illusion. No amount of mastery could bring life to the eyes of a corpse. The painted glass that stared back at him did so emptily, and Ogata found himself amused enough to take the stranger’s face between his hands to appraise its features.
There was no suppleness to the touch - no warmth. The macabre semblance of musculature and expression was truly courtesy of its creator, a near perfect amalgam of art and insanity. He pondered how many bodies the taxidermist had ripped apart to understand the human form. As many men as he’d killed? More?
He might have been good friends with the man in another life. Ogata, deliverer of boundless corpses, and a necromancer breathing life back into their wretched forms. A peerless match, all things considered.
Ah, but the eyes really were so wrong, weren’t they? Ogata clawed them out, and the glass clattered to the ground with a deafening snap. It was better this way. Their aliveness was more convincing without that hollow gaze and its blackened marble hue.
Her eyes had also been the first to go, come to think of it.
Before the pallor set in her cheeks and her chest stopped heaving, it was her eyes. He had been stunned by how similar she looked to any other dying creature, writhing against the floor with pupils blown and an expression of fear that soon petered into empty, inky black. Ogata had watched with a distant curiosity, dissecting the moment in quiet contemplation like a student might observe a lesson in extinction. In the end, she was his first and greatest teacher, as all mothers should be.
He learned many things that day. He learned that his father’s name sounded rancid beneath curtains of blood and bile. And he learned that there might be something like a soul within people after all, free to abandon the flesh once it spoiled. Hers had never quite gone. He could tell because he could feel her beside him now, hailing his senses with distant, imploring cries as he smashed a glass eye beneath his boot.
--
She told him to throw it out the window, which he did hesitantly.
He didn’t know when it had died. He swore he tried to be gentle, fingers caging its pretty wings with feather-light care. As he held it up to the sun, he watched a gentle breeze catch its paper thin form and set its scales alight with velvety orange iridescence. “Are you still sad, Mama?” he asked as he shook the butterfly from his hands onto the dirt and dust below.
“A little.” She looked tired as she let her hair fall loose around her shoulders, reaching for the box where she kept her favorite comb.
When he was smaller, his grandmother would help her tease and tuck the tight black strands of her hair back into their orderly place. “I don’t know why you’re keeping up this charade,” she’d say. “No man will take you seriously now.” But she had humored her daughter’s whims until her aging hands could take no more, and the hairpieces were sold to fix the holes in their leaking roof.
His mother always dressed herself alone after that.
“You’re right, about it being like me.” She stared at the silver comb, one of the last vestiges of her vibrant youth, and Ogata swore he saw the first shimmer of a tear gather at the corner of her eye. “We’re both a bit broken.”
This was always his favorite part of her routine. She would hold her comb and tease and tease until her hair began to build and shape itself into something like elegance. He’d heard some of the boys in town make fun of the unruliness of it, muted and untidy and incomplete. His grandmother tried to keep her inside after that, but he knew she’d sneak out sometimes to gaze out towards the sea, searching for a ship that never came.
She hummed once more as she smoothed her hair, returning her trance-like attention to the shadowed mirror.
“Kagome, kagome, the bird in the cage,” she sang, her hair slipping shakily between the bristles of the comb.
“When, oh when will it come out?”
--
“Hyakunosuke.”
He couldn’t remember a time when her voice sounded this clear. He clung to the polished wood of his rifle like a vice, whirling around to search for the inevitable flash of movement at the corner of his field of view.
There was nothing. He was alone. His only company was the taxidermist’s quarry, dissecting him piece by bloody piece with their mocking gaze.
Ogata’s hands were trembling just enough that the scope of the gun danced blithely in front of his eyes. A small part of him yearned to let her ensnare him in her icy arms and drag him down to the pits of Hell. She must have been so lonely there without him, waiting and waiting, always waiting for someone who would never come to save her from her pitiful death.
She would have to wait a bit longer. He still had business here.
“ Hyakunosuke. ”
The ache in her voice slashed through the silence of the room. It was enough to make him stagger back in surprise, tripping over the body of a man and splaying backwards against the wooden floor with a heavy thud. Those eyes, so empty before, seemed to mock him now, the corner of his leathery lips curled up into a twisted smile. “Fuck you,” he cursed, scrambling over his aching elbows to press his back against the wall. “ Fuck .”
Sometimes he could make his demons go away by closing his eyes and shutting out the world around him. He would do the same as a child, crawling under his mother’s blankets and cocooning himself in their warm and comforting darkness. With labored breaths he pulled his hood up over his eyes and laughed.
And laughed, and laughed.
It really was absurd. This place, its sunken faces. They made him fucking sick.
There was a whisper of something soft against his hands, like a moth beating its wings against a torch in the night.
For a moment, he was impossibly still. He was afraid to open his eyes and see her standing there among the bodies, flesh firm and eyes as devoid of light as they had been the day she died. But maybe she would embrace him. Maybe...
He noticed the butterfly display for the first time when he slowly peeled his hood back.
It was enshrouded within a thin, black frame, faded with age and flayed against the worn wallpaper. He recognized some of the specimens as the butterflies from his hometown. Monarchs, swallowtails, swifts. All less vibrant than they had been in life, but still vivid and disorienting against the canvas. They seemed to creep into the corner of his vision no matter where he fixed his gaze, or how hard he squeezed his eyes shut.
How easy it would be, to walk away and leave this place behind. How disgusted he would be with himself if he did.
Against his better judgement, he hoisted himself up and approached. They had a sort of eerie, delicate beauty to their fragile forms and dark bodies that Ogata could have sworn were pulsing in the dim lights of the room. The way their wings spread, flashing out with such brilliant, colorful contrast against the monotony they were entombed in - it felt so familiar.
He’d gone back for the butterfly the night he crushed it in his hands. Death and all its curiosities fascinated him, its beautiful melancholy as tempting to him as bait on a line. It was still there under the windowsill, fluttering in the breeze with such intensity that Ogata thought it might have come back to life.
It hadn’t. He made it a small shrine of grass and flowers, and told it to be happy in the next life.
It was then that he heard her crying through the crack in the window. He stood on the tips of his toes to peer into the candlelit room and saw her there, doubled over in a crimson kimono that draped across the tatami in wide, sweeping arcs. Her faraway eyes were stained with tears as her shoulders shook and she scoured away her makeup on her sleeve, so relentlessly that even in the darkness he could tell that the skin beneath it was a fiery red. He’d simply stared, entranced by this mockery of grace and beauty that sat weeping on the floor in front of him. He wanted to ask her if she would be alright, if they would be alright. But he knew his words wouldn't reach her, so instead he watched. Waited. Felt sick when he closed his eyes and he could still see the way she looked so small, crumpled there.
She stared back at him now. At least he thought she did, beneath the smattering of brilliant colors that weaved across the display. The butterflies seemed to move, beating their wings furiously against the glass and sending cracks across its surface like ripples in a dark sea. A flash of red lips, an empty smile, and the glass shattered, sending broken bits cascading over the floor at his feet.
“Kagome, kagome,
The bird in the cage.
When, oh when will it come out?”
Her voice dripped from the canvas, tumbling mournfully into his ears. The butterflies began to pour from the shattered edges of the glass and scatter up the length of his arm, proboscides uncurling to lap at him as they passed furiously by. The red flash of her kimono manifested beneath the ocean of colors, unfurling behind her like a pair of broken wings. He’d crushed these too, beneath the weight of a foolish act of mercy.
“In the dark before daybreak,
A crane and a tortoise slipped and fell.”
She sang this song at her vanity, in the kitchen, at his bedside. Sometimes she would stroke his hair as she hummed, and he would smile, captivated by the warmth of her voice and the euphoria of unconditional love. He desperately wanted to drown it out, but his body felt weak, hypnotized by the way she glanced dreamily over her shoulder, eyes a glassy black.
“Hyakunosuke, ” She chimed, voice tender and sweet like arsenic. “Who is behind you now?”
The air went still and everything stopped. The butterflies, his breath, time. He saw the loose strands of hair that fell against her neck and the shaky red tint eclipsing her lips. Her pale skin, her slender fingers. She alone was more beautiful in death than she was in life.
“My son.” His mother’s hand was reaching for him. At the center of her palm sat a single butterfly, stitched together and made as whole as it had been the day he’d found it, out amongst the flowers of his youth. It lifted into the air and meandered slowly towards him, wings dancing with gentle, glittering colors.
He watched it land on his hand, so light it might as well have been weightless. “Fly,” she whispered, and when he looked up, she was gone, and the frame was as it had been before.
The butterfly in his hand wasn’t moving anymore. He turned it over and saw the pin that pierced its abdomen; pressed his thumb against the tip, harder, harder until it pierced his skin and the blood dripped down onto the insect below.
He shook the fragile thing from his hand and watched it fall to the floor, drifting slowly down until it landed with nary a whisper.
“That path doesn’t exist for people like us.”
He turned away, thinking of broken and beautiful things, things that had been loved and lost, things that sung his name on the wind and called for him to remember that he was painfully, endlessly alone.