The Cabinet

Written for Melissa’s Fandango Flash Fiction
Challenge using the image shown below for our
inspiration. Here’s where the image took me.

My father kept them in a cabinet, row upon row, pinned through the thorax, wings spread wide as a last gesture, as if arrested mid-flight. Papilio, Morpho, Danaus. He knew every name.

 I was 12 when I understood what the pins meant. He let me hold one …. a great swallowtail …. its wings, the color of old parchment, and I felt the incredible lightness of it. Something that had crossed whole meadows on a warm afternoon now weighed almost nothing.

“They were already dying” he said, reading my face. “I only made the moment last.”

He is gone now. The cabinet stands in my hallway. I pass it every morning on my way out and every evening on my way back, a kind of habit that has become a ceremony. In the amber light of dusk, it looks almost alive …. the wings seem to shift …. and I find myself half expecting one to lift off, circle the room, and vanish through an open window.

This is what I cannot let go of: the feeling that the ones we love are always just arriving or just leaving, in and out of the light, never fully caught …. and that the kindest thing we can do is spread our hands open and let them be pinned to nothing at all.

NAR©2025
#FFFC

This is “Elusive Butterfly” by Bob Lind

Melissa’s Fandango Flash Fiction Challenge #369

^{Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thank you for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.}