They call their friends entomologists

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((Iris Waite continued from Cut Crease))

Back before the second grade, when Iris and her dad had first moved to Salem, she’d hated their house. She hated it because it was big and empty before all the furniture got moved in, and it didn’t smell like the house she’d lived in for all of her life before that point. She hated her dad’s new bedroom, because it was on the first floor while her room was on the second floor, and if she wanted to climb into bed with him when she got scared at night, she had to go all the way down the creaky staircase and creep through the living room to get there.

There was a series of tall windows in the living room that looked out into the backyard, and in the middle of the night, the backyard vanished entirely into blackness, untouched even by the light of the streetlamps out front. She was always sure that something was lurking out there, ready to reach long arms through the windows and drag her out into the dark as she tiptoed past them, trying not to look at her ghostly reflection.

She loved their house now; she loved her bedroom with her canopy bed that matched the lace curtains on the window, and the game room with the big flatscreen TV and pool table that was just down the hall. She loved sitting on the back porch and eating breakfast on warm summer mornings. Iris especially loved having a walk-in closet in her room. Even in the rocky period immediately after the move, her big closet had been one of the few silver linings of the whole house. Iris had been scared to death of the monsters that supposedly lived in her backyard, but she’d never had more than a passing thought about monsters in the closet.

Her closet was a comforting place where she could hide away when she felt like it. An enclosed space, where everything was dark and quiet. That was where she’d always hide after the really bad days at school, wedged into the back corner of the tiny room behind her hanging clothes until her sniffling and crying faded, and finally there would only be the hum of the air conditioner and her own breathing.

Iris hadn’t done that in years, of course. Now she cried in the shower like an adult.

These days, her closet was just a closet, and the top shelf occasionally pulled double duty as storage space and a place to stow things for some in-progress projects. Today, she unfolded her step-ladder from where it had been leaning against the wall and stretched up onto her tiptoes to retrieve the plastic container that had been placed on the shelf a few days before. She cradled it close to her chest with both hands, making absolutely sure it was secure before she stepped back down and brought it from the closet to her desk in the opposite corner of the room.

She had already set out a new pinboard and her case of various pins organized by size, along with a dainty pair of tweezers. Setting the tupperware container next to the pinboard, she carefully popped the corner of the lid and lifted it off while disturbing the container itself as little as possible. Nestled inside, resting daintily on a layer of dampened paper towels, was the (almost) perfect corpse of a zebra swallowtail butterfly.

Iris had found it at the edge of the school parking lot, looking like it had dropped dead then and there. It must have gotten lost somehow, since there was no garden to speak of anywhere on the school grounds and only a few flowerbeds. She had been ecstatic to find a swallowtail in such good condition, especially so late in the year. They rarely showed up in Massachusetts, and she’d wanted one for her collection for ages and ages.

Picking up the tweezers and moving with delicate precision, Iris lightly tested the movement and elasticity of the butterfly’s antennae. This had always been the hardest part to her. Antennae were so easy to damage, and when she’d first started out pinning insects, her hands had always seemed to shake. More times than she could count, she’d broken the antennae or pulled them clean off because she couldn’t keep still. Even now, she didn’t want to spend more than a few seconds on them, so as soon as she was satisfied that they had softened up enough, she switched to the legs.

The legs received the same treatment with the tweezers. Iris carefully manipulated them to make sure the moisture from the paper towels had allowed the corpse to regain some of its flexibility, rotating and gently stretching them. She couldn’t help grinning to herself a little when each leg moved just in the way she wanted it to.

People thought that displaying insects meant scooping up any old dead thing you came across and sticking it to a piece of corkboard with a pin. In reality, it was a very involved process, and almost nobody ever wanted to hear about it. Insects went through rigor mortis just like any other dead organism, stiffening and curling in on themselves. They needed to be softened up so that they could be posed properly before display. A closed box with damp paper towels was enough to do the trick over a few days.

Then came the part that people usually thought of: the pinning. Affixing the carcasses to pinboard was the intermediate step, not the final one. It was like sculpting, almost, arranging the insect just so, to best show off its form. It would be left like that for a few days more, allowed to stiffen again, and then it would stay in that position, all ready to go in the final display box.

Maybe it was cliche, but butterflies and moths were Iris’s favorites. She loved spreading their wings out so that the colors and patterns looked just like an illustration. They were usually the ones people actually wanted to look at when she offered, anyway.

Iris carefully took hold of the butterfly’s thorax, pinching it lightly between her thumb and forefinger like she was poised to throw a paper airplane. The pressure made its legs and wings appear to flex, and Iris giggled a little under her breath. There was always something silly about it that reminded her of, oh… the Muppets, or something like that.

The fingertips of her free hand lightly glided over the pins resting in the open case off to the side, before she settled on one that seemed the right size. Holding the butterfly against the pinboard, she took aim, and with all the care of a nurse administering an injection, began to slide the pin through the hindwing, close to the body..

“What are you doing, honey?”

Iris started at the sound of her dad’s voice. Her hand jerked, and the pin pinched between her fingers went through the butterfly’s wing unevenly, tearing it.

She sat still for a few seconds, blinking at the butterfly and the haphazard pin. She finally registered the creak of her bedroom door as her dad eased it open all the way, and then his muffled footsteps in the carpet as he crossed the room to look over her shoulder.

“Oh, that’s a nice bug. Did you find that today?” His hands came to rest on her shoulders. The weight of them was familiar. It had always comforted her.

“Y-yeah!” Iris snapped herself out of her momentary trance and leaned her head back to smile up at him, though the corners of her mouth were a little tight. She had been so focused on what she was doing that she hadn’t heard him come home. “Uh, actually, no. I found it a few days ago and had to let it soften up. But I’m pinning it today.”

She’d let go of the pin, leaving it stuck in the butterfly’s wing at an angle. Her newly empty fingers tapped nervously on the edge of the desk.

She had reminded him to knock when her bedroom door was closed. Sometimes he remembered, and sometimes he didn’t. It didn’t really matter, she guessed. It was his house almost more than it was hers, right? He’d paid for it.

“I was just coming up to make sure you’d gotten home safe.” He bent to kiss the top of her head and then straightened up and started to step back. Iris’s nervously tap-tap-tapping hand left the desk and darted up to rest over his, keeping it on her shoulder for a few seconds before she dropped her hand again and let him pull away.

“Thanks, Daddy,” she said, halfway turning in her chair to smile at him again. There, that one felt better.

Her dad was already half-turned himself to leave the room again. “I’m going to make dinner. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

“Okay!”

He actually was just making sure she’d gotten home from school okay, she guessed. Sometimes that was an excuse and he really wanted a longer talk, usually about something that he had noticed was bothering her or her grades or someone he’d been seeing that he might start bringing home. Iris was a little relieved it wasn’t any of those right now.

Her dad left the bedroom door standing open behind him when he left to head back downstairs.

Iris thought about getting up to close it again, but decided that it was too much trouble and turned back to her desk. She might miss him calling her down for dinner if she shut it, anyway.

She sat there and looked blankly at the lopsided butterfly, the smile that had been fixed on her face slowly fading second by second until her expression became blank as well.

It wasn’t that bad, really.

She exhaled slowly through her teeth and began to ease the wayward pin out of the butterfly’s wing.

It wasn’t that bad. Really! The tear was really small, all things considered. She could hide it easily if she spread the wings just right. And it could have been worse. It could have been her thumb instead of the butterfly’s wing.

She could fix it up, and nobody would know the rip had ever been there, except for her.

It would be just perfect.

((Iris Waite continued elsewhere))