Charlie Kieft
I found her in our attic while spring cleaning. Danaus plexippus. Probably the most famous insect in North America, besides the mosquito. I tried a drawer on my dad’s rolltop desk; it didn’t budge. I yanked. The drawer sprang open and she—I imagined it was a she—fluttered out and danced around in the dim, dusty light. I gasped. A monarch butterfly!
I looked around for a container in which to trap the Monarch, but she alighted on the back of my hand, as if to say, I’ll come quietly. Goosebumps. I felt chosen. Slowly, gentle, I tiptoed to the ladder, began to descend one-handed. The Monarch fanned her wings imperiously. I heard Lori getting out of the shower, had her name ready on my tongue, when I slipped and fell. Lori found me crumpled on the carpet, ankle twisted.
I can’t find her anywhere, I whimpered.
Who?
We Googled attic butterflies, hoping for explanation. Instead, we found a headline that broke over us like a sheet of slate.
“‘Inconceivable Loss’ – Monarch Butterfly Feared Extinct in the Wild.”
***
Should we persist in spring cleaning—reaffirming the order of our crap—even when the natural order is disappearing? Maybe. It’s one way to stay sane, and how I appeased Lori’s longing to escape the burbs. It was my parents, after all, who’d died, who’d left us the 60s split-level, just as my grandparents had left it to them. Lori despised it. I liked not paying rent.
It was Lori who found our next visitor. Or it found her. She ascended the attic ladder while I, swollen ankle in a boot, listened from below. Clambering through my parents’ things, she breezily suggested what to keep (not much) and what to purge (everything). It felt like an intervention.
Then I heard Lori’s breath catch. Oh! What’s this?
Through the open trapdoor in the ceiling, she showed me a coffee mug with a plant growing out of it. The plant was purply green, lobed, with pink buds on the cusp of blooming. I’d never seen it before. Neither of my parents had been plant people, unlike Lori, the houseplant queen. Even she didn’t know what it was, beyond some kind of succulent. The little mystery held close, Lori began to descend the ladder. Somehow, the mug slipped from her fingers. She overreacted and slung it over the banister.
No!
It smashed on the entryway tiles below. We searched through the mess. There were ceramic shards everywhere. Best Dad 1995 still legible. But no soil. No plant.
Perhaps no human apart from Lori and me had noticed that plant’s existence and anonymous disappearance. There was no headline. In lieu of a funeral, we ordered potstickers and watched David Attenborough.
***
We hadn’t been in the attic for two weeks. But Lori demanded the purging continue. We had to sell the house before winter. She opened the trapdoor, climbed a few rungs, poked her head into the attic.
Holy shit! Holy—get up here!
What!? I squeezed onto the narrow ladder beside her and stretched to peek over the joists. I gasped.
The attic frothed with life. Every surface subsumed. There were plants of every family. Insects of every genus. Worms of every shape. A centipede, a patch of pink mushrooms. Birds: squawking, chirping, waddling. Campephilus principalis. A lacy lichen. Moss. Stellate flowers, awaiting soulmate pollinators. Bats, circling for absent fruits. Aquatic creatures too; my mom’s old aquariums were somehow filled. They held tiny oceans, cubic ponds, full of fish, crustaceans, other wriggling things, corals, starfish, octopi. Castanea dentata. I saw lizards, snakes, frogs. A fucking deer, antlers like candelabra. Molds. Seaweeds, dripping. An enormous black nest (or fungus?) clung to the rafters. Bison bison, calm as the moon, chewed a wad of cud. The sounds! The smells! We were spellbound.
The plants, they’re all flowering or releasing spores, said Lori.
That’s good, right? It is spring, after all, I said.
She sighed. They’re desperate.
We tiptoed to my dad’s rolltop desk. I opened it, after shooing away a few seabirds and a crab. We sat on its leatherette top, side by side, luxuriating in our private paradise, until the light coming in through the small, circular attic window faded to dull red. The nocturnal shift awoke. We were starving by then. I agreed to make dinner while Lori stayed with the living attic, kept watch so none of our visitors disappeared. By the time I returned with instant ramen and a kettleful of hot water, Lori had fallen asleep.
Still full of my parents’ junk, the attic was once again devoid of life.
When Lori awoke, she wailed.
***
We climbed into the attic several times a day and night. We tried rituals, incantations, praying. Months passed. No more miraculous life appeared. The extinction headlines were endless, ubiquitous, like ads for hell. We sobbed constantly. Humanity mourned in its usual indifferent way, using the same half-dozen emojis in every language.
Lori and I gave up on waiting. We emptied the attic in one horrible day, snapping at each other over tiny things—a table leg scraping the wall, imperfectly stacked boxes. It was murderously hot. We dropped the last load off at Goodwill and took our charity receipt.
All that remained in the attic were my dad’s rolltop and my mom’s largest aquarium. Neither would fit through the trapdoor. I had no idea how they’d gotten them up there. They’d stay forever, I supposed.
Lori called in some pomaded fool to appraise the house. He asked to see the attic. Sure, we said. I pulled down the ladder. The appraiser looked up.
He sprang back. What the hell is that!?
Lori and I met eyes with our latest visitor. Huge, golden, almond-pupiled. Panthera tigris tigris.
Hi, buddy, Lori whispered.
Three smaller pairs of eyes clustered into the trapdoor’s frame.
My chest quivered. Cubs.
We can’t leave.
You’re sure?
Lori grabbed my arm. Yes. This house is all we have.
I grabbed a rung.
#
Charlie Kieft is an American writer living in England. His fiction has been published by Jersey Devil Press, is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, and was longlisted for the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize. He also runs a small flower farm with his wife and two cats.