So here is a thing. It isn’t meant to be a full story and it won’t read like a story. Doing bits and pieces of stories has been something I have played around with here in the past. It’s a bit of character study as well as digging into different thoughts on fiction.

You have been given a bit of warning in advance. Read at your own risk.

Seventh Butterfly

It’s a process. You can’t just shove a pin through them and call it a day. Terrence learned that lesson a while back before he found some of the groups online.

It had been the smell that pushed him to find more information. Rotting, filthy, a rancidness that made his skin crawl. The whole of it though, when he first started the collection, had given him the willies something fierce.

That’s the thing of it though, he never could place his finger on the reason he started doing it in the first place. Maybe it was that first moth. He jammed a tack through its body before the thing had properly died. The milduey powder on its wings wouldn’t wash away from his fingers though.

Flickr Creative Commons via Jacob Enos
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He scrubbed and scrubbed, so much soap and still the remnants remained to remind him of how it had squirmed. He heard its screams when he closed his eyes even now. That stuff stays with you.

Didn’t stop him though. He started small, just his apartment. Any bug, any small creature that approached him. Each one of them stuck with a pin. The battle field of impaled vermin had covered his kitchen counter.

He washed it all away with bleach and cleanser. A vast swath of bodies and pins whisked into the garbage. It sat in there, rotting, for over a week before he had the gumption to explore.

He could pretend, at least for a little while, that the smell wasn’t getting out of hand. He sat in front of the television most days. Couldn’t remember the shows he had seen but it kept him company, kept his mind off the smell in the kitchen.

When the odors had become unbearable any longer, Terence collected the bag. He tied the ends together and then used a twist-tie to seal it further. The smells lingered even after he had dropped the bag down the garbage shoot.

He scrubbed the trash can when he had gone back to his apartment. Scrubbed it in the shower, twice with the toilet brush and cleanser, and once more with dollops of bleach. It still felt unclean but the bleach wiped away any other lingering smells.

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If you enjoy these stories, consider leaving some coffee money in the jar or you could buy a book or two. Either way helps keep the stories flowing.