“The Butterfly Orgy” by Matthew Dexter
by Matthew Dexter
Monday, January 30th, 2012
Illustration by Cody Pickrodt
“Get the hell off my arm and let a woman free.”
“Why are you here?” the security guard asked.
He was holding my wrist and watched the dirt under his thumbnail as it pressed into my veins. The vertical lines on his nails were indicative of a health issue he was not aware of. His teeth were yellowed (not from smoking crack like most of the shoplifters he brought into the little office in the back corner behind the dressing rooms and inflatable rafts which hung from the roof) but because he never brushed them or drank too much coffee.
“Most people steal things they can stick under their shirts,” said the shop owner.
“Or their purses,” said the guard.
They guided me into a folded chair that was so cold I winced when metallic met woman through the little holes in the back pocket where I kept the pliers. Anthrax posters were hanging on the walls and some horrible melody was playing in the cassette deck on the table. I cursed myself for being so careless as to cut gashes through double layers of the maternity jeans I always wore on my missions and bore the scabs on my ass cheeks from fresh thefts down the street: bottles from baby stores, liquor stores, and apothecary shops.
“What were you thinking?” asked the shop owner.
“She threw these in the dumpster out back,” said the guard, holding up my tools as trophies, some monument to the sport or degradation of shoplifters.
“Was it necessary to take money from my store?” the shop owner asked.
The room began to spin; the walls, ceiling, and floor began to fold inward as if they were smooth papered layers of origami cranes. I needed to buy the stroller for the baby because everything was so goddamn real, still part of me seven months after my husband stopped referring to the miscarriage as “an accident” and the boy’s name was no longer spoken over dinner. The wheels spun in circles as I fingered the plastic spokes and buckled the tiny safety belt while maternity jeans hung from shrunken ass cheeks. Nothing fancy: just four wheels so the kid could get around town.
“Do you have anything to say?”
“You want a sip of coffee?”
I wanted to tell him how good it was when the guard squeezed my arm, when the blood rushed through those veins, that slit inside of me that feels so alive when I steal, and the sound of the wheels as it rolled past the inept security cameras and outdated alarm system. I needed to tell them that the mention of steaming liquid is an aphrodisiac and we can fix this problem, the three of us, right now, an hour beneath the waterfall and magma of a woman who only knows how to fly. Instead, watch the butterfly outside the window and the ladybug crawl across the table and admire the muscles that made me wet my wings.
“Should we call the police?”
The shop owner looked closer, hunching his shoulders to inspect the labyrinth of lines around my eyes: more than sun damage and smoking; he got lost for a minute and then found his way out.
“This is your moment to speak.”
The tattoos on the guard’s arms were all distorted by decades of debauchery and a wife with no mercy. Was it a pirate smoking a pipe or a rattlesnake making love to a palm tree? The ocean of my mind swallowed his smell, wallowed in the ink as the sweat fell from his forehead and dripped the bridge of his nose before being sucked into hairy nostrils.
What the hell was there to say? The husband can’t look me in the eyes, the neighbors stopped calling the cops and complaining about the noises of the naked pregnancy parties; now they are so friendly, quick to pat my shoulders and look at my flat belly.
“You will get over this,” the old lady who lived next door told me. “You didn’t plan it.”
That was the first time I saw the woman’s face up close, not just peeking her chubby cheeks from behind the curtain of her kitchen at three o’clock in the morning, watching the wig-wag headlight flashers and the Mars of the police cars that had come to terrorize the baby.
“Why should I not call the police?” the guard asked; hand on his cell phone.
I wanted to tell them about the abusive marriage, that the stealing was like making love, the orgiastic tunnel of light in the cobwebs of my head that catapults a million roman candles as my bag gets stuffed with whatever satisfaction money can never provide; the baby from the husband that doesn’t give a shit; the crib in the house that is covered in sympathy cards stained by tears and the carriage that almost set me free.
“Are you on drugs?”
“Do you have money to pay for this item?”
I took them by the hands and let them touch, slowly at first and then plundering the body of a woman who has lost all treasures. Sunken breasts and shipwrecked, they begged for mercy and promised that no charges would be sought. I was defiled, free to go, but there was no place left but the table. The butterfly was banging its wings against the window. The interruption of justice being desecrated, the edges of the folded chair so cold against bare skin, frozen for one moment we were feathers in the wind, fathers and mothers and almost spoke the same language.
“Where do you come from?” asked the guard.
He was nibbling my earlobes as the shop owner stroked the sweat and makeup from my forehead, painting a portrait of pardon in the air for one fleeting moment before the work of the artist was destroyed by the guilt of gravity.
“Who are you?” asked the shop owner.
Could only tell him where I had been: the bathroom floor where the baby bled into the grout between tiles, the hospital room where the nurses had nothing good to say, the drive home with the husband, the weeks that merged into one image of a child stealing candy from a clerk, the months of hiding my supposed weakness from my family, the days that rolled into one.
“You are free to go,” said the guard.
They could no longer look me in the eyes. The butterfly was gone. The ladybug was wiped under a thumbnail that knew nothing of losing everything. The moon was out as I rolled that stroller forward over the security scanner, out the front door into the sun.
Matthew Dexter Like nomadic Pericú natives before him, Matthew Dexter survives on a hunter-gatherer subsistence diet of shrimp tacos, smoked marlin, cold beer, and warm sunshine. He lives in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
