Papilio

Your basement looks like a Dexter kill room. Clear, plastic sheeting drapes across the ceiling along the walls to the floor. A makeshift greenhouse. Inside, you finish screwing in the last of the grow lights and flick the switch. The lights shine down on a room of potted plants. You’ve purchased Aster, Heliotrope, Zinnia, Lavender, Marigolds, and Salvia. Purples, pinks, reds, oranges, and yellows. All combining into a rich, floral bouquet that permeates the room. An automated drip system ensures each pot receives a precise amount of water. A whisper-quiet fan recirculates air from outside giving the space a gentle cross breeze. Your heart is laid bare here yet Valerie, unappreciative, skulks in the corner still mad at you. “In-a-gadda-da-vida, honey,” you sing as you gain the stairs and close the door behind you. “Don’t you know that I’m loving you?”

People ask you all the time what you do. The lazy icebreaker question right after the lazier comment about the weather. The answer you give, the one for normies, is that the company you work for is researching gene therapies to heal spinal cord injuries. If they don’t immediately give you the thousand-yard stare you continue. Go far enough back in time and we all share the same, primitive, single-celled ancestor. Every creature, insects and fish and mammals, all branched off, you explain using your splayed fingers as a visual aid, at different times in the past. Skinks can regrow their tails. Sea stars can regrow their arms. An axolotl can regrow its spinal cord. So, we just need to figure out how these creatures do it. Then, using CRISPR or mRNA or something new, we apply that therapy to humans. Reactivate that suppressed capability. And boom, you exclaim too loudly, that’s all there is to it. You haven’t succeeded yet, you confide in a whisper as if it was a secret, but science is full of what Bob Ross would call “Happy Accidents”. Fleming stumbled upon penicillin and Viagra wasn’t created for erections, you remind them, yet here we are today with life-saving antibiotics and geriatric boners.

Mail is scattered in the foyer behind the front door. How the mailman managed to shove Valerie’s thick Visa statement through the narrow mail slot is anybody’s guess. This Visa, Valerie’s seventh or eighth new credit card. Who can keep count? Beneath the Visa bill is a formal bank letter about the mortgage stamped ‘3rd Notice’ in off-axis red ink. Her dream to buy this home in the Country Club. Your dream to buy this home for her. Joining the Visa bill and the past due mortgage notice, a plain white envelope with no return address. You neatly dissect the mail with a letter opener and discard the split envelopes into the recycling bin. In with the empty cans of Coke and empty boxes of single-serving frozen meals. You file the new bills with the old bills and past due notices and the headaches and anxiety: The electric bill, and gas bill, and garbage bill, and her credit cards, and her department store cards, and the furniture payments, and her BMW X5 payments. You paid it all until you couldn’t. Once upon a time you had a credit score you were proud of. The last piece of mail, your paycheck stub. Direct deposit so there’s nothing left to do but wonder that the seemingly big number disappears so quickly.

A pewter framed photo of your wedding day sits proudly on the mantle. Just Valerie and you in the photo. No wedding party. No family. The best day of your life. That’s where she left the letter. The one where she told you she was leaving you. The one where she destroyed everything you had worked for. The place where you decided you weren’t going to let it happen.

You remember back to when you first saw her. Voluptuous Valerie, the high school hottie you never spoke a word to. Big tits. Small waist. Crop top. You saw her in the halls with the quarterback’s arm draped across her shoulders. Wished that could be your arm. Saw her in her cheer uniform at the pep rally. Short, pleated, skirt. Flash of bloomers when she kicked and jumped and tumbled and caused your insides to twist and your cock to swell. Wished you could be those bloomers. High School Valerie didn’t know you existed.

A graduate degree in Biology and two job promotions later, you run into Valerie. She’s the B-team weeknight bartender at the Ale House. You watched her flirt the circuit, working hard for those slow, weeknight tips. The low cut shirts. Her big tits from high school no longer defying gravity. Her flat stomach from high school now chubby, providing a shelf for her saggy tits to rest. Your high school dream to drape your arm across her shoulders seems suddenly possible. Viable Valerie.

You put your time in, saddling up to that bar every Tuesday night. The slowest night. Fewer customers. Less competition. You did the math. Valerie slung you a little extra attention. Flirted with you. Leaned deep into the coolers for you. Those low shirts gave you a pendulous show. Butterflies in your stomach. You easy mark. You big tipper. Her attention was the highlight of your every week. Valerie knew your name now. She talked to you. She knew you existed.

A birthday later you finally asked her out. You waited so patiently. Waited for your shot. You sniper. Waited for that perfect day when the mascara around her latest shiner ran. After her latest date with mifepristone and misoprostol. And she laughed it off when you asked her out. Thought it was a joke. With her foundation-covered shiner, and smudged mascara, and stomach cramps and teased hair. She felt sorry for herself. Sorry for you. She took your pity date. What could it hurt? Trying something new she guessed. Vulnerable Valerie.

Your Mom said Valerie was bad news. Too much makeup and too much white around her crazy eyes. Your Dad didn’t say anything. Never has. Your best friend from high school said Valerie was a smokeshow. You’d never held your chin so high. She completed your arc. Validating Valerie.

Frozen pot pies take thirty-four minutes in the oven. Marie Callender's makes the best pot pies. Better than Banquet and Stouffer’s. As you wait for the timer, you flip through youTube on your phone in your quiet, empty house with the overdue mortgage and the absent spouse. The algorithm recommends a video called “Four Ways to Confront Your Cheating Wife Without Losing Her”. The algorithm doesn’t know you don’t need that anymore. You choose a woodworking video even though you don’t own a single woodworking tool. The first ad tries to sell you a “Be the Alpha Dog” course. You’ve seen it so many times you can repeat the ad copy like song lyrics.

The real honeymoon of a relationship isn’t after your wedding day. The real honeymoon is in the beginning, after the initial awkwardness wears off. After you stopped washing and vacuuming your Volvo before every date. After you stopped trying to impress her with flowers and expensive restaurants with intimate booths and dim lighting and sommeliers. The real honeymoon started the moment she put her head on your shoulder and fell asleep after sex instead of bolting out the door. The intoxicating high of waking up next to her. Her skin smelling of warm vanilla. Seeing her without makeup. That first morning sex. Her arched back and messy hair. That first breakfast better than any fancy dinner. She was, at long last and despite all odds, finally yours. High school you would give you an over-enthusiastic high five if he could.

You stare at your alarm clock from your side of the bed. The blue nine rolls over and the music clicks on playing “Unconscious Power”. Softly at first. Increasing slowly in volume. Valerie’s side of the bed is empty, comforter still tucked high.

The news had been all over the lab. All of you crowded around the clear acrylic mouse trays. Your lab mice are all identical. White fur and whiskers. Red eyes. Pink noses, ears, and tails. Genetically engineered for lab study. All the mice pull themselves around using only their front legs, their rear legs rendered useless. The mice tested with different dose strengths and dose schedules. A few had showed signs of improvement. Renewed mobility. And then the study got real weird.

Valerie came home that evening. You didn’t say anything about her absence the night before. You acted like it was you who had done something wrong. Big bouquet of Dahlias on the table. Her favorite. You have reservations for dinner you told her. At Papilio you name dropped. She squealed in excitement and skittered off to shower and change.

You let the sommelier sell you on the Château Lafite Rothschild 2016 Pauillac. You ordered the pork finocchiona agnolotti. Valerie ordered the squab breast. Big plates with tiny portions. Five courses later you departed with half empty stomachs.

Back home she disappeared for a quick change, and then reemerged wearing her sexiest lingerie. Violet, lace bra. Matching panties and thigh highs. She hadn’t slept with you in a month. The finer things, you knew, her reliable aphrodisiac. She fucks you like she likes you. The smell of her warm, vanilla skin. Her hair enveloping you. Finished, she collapses beside you. Breathing heavy. She cradles up and rests her head in the crook of your shoulder, your arm draped around her. A perfect evening. A perfect ending.

The Valerie-sized bundle was heavy and awkward. You took such care of her in this delicate state. Wrapping her in layers of bubble wrap and blankets. The whole bundle awkward to maneuver. You engineered a system of ropes, pulleys, anchor points, and a sled to lower her gently down the steps into the basement. There you unwrapped her. Removed the blankets and the bubble wrap. Set her amongst the flowers, beneath the grow lights. Her opaque green shell at home in this basement greenhouse.

And you waited.

The mouse in that final cage. The one that had caused the commotion. The one that the lab had crowded around for a peek. They found the cage empty save for a mouse-sized chrysalis. In time, what used to be a mouse emerged with wings and legs and a thorax and an abdomen. A butterfly. White wings with red spots. And all its legs worked. All eight of them. In a weird twist, the therapy technically worked. In reality, the therapy was a disaster and immediately terminated.

At worked you checked your phone neurotically. Keeping an eye on Valerie through a camera. Waiting. You brought dinner into the basement and ate beside her. You played her favorite Spotify playlist. The one with the eighties pop music you hate - Starship and Culture Club. You talked to her like a grieving spouse talks to a headstone. Revealing truths you dared not in life.

Eventually the chrysalis stirred. The opaque green shell turning partially transparent. The new Valerie, squished and folded. Squirming. The shell softening and starting to split. First along one seam. Then another. The sounds of cracking and sucking wet. The shell giving way. Valerie slowly emerges. All black legs at first, pulling free of the shell. Puffing up, taking in air. Her thick abdomen writhing, pulsing. Uncurling and inflating her wings. Scales of metallic purple and spots of white. She’s perfect. Here in the basement, in the forest of flowers, beneath the grow lights. Here she’ll be happy. With you.

“In-a-gadda-da-vida, honey,” you sing as you gain the stairs and close the door behind you. “Don’t you know that I’m loving you?”