Butterfly Time
- May 30, 2025
- 3 min read
by Sage Tyrtle
It’s a quiet time for the children, while the caterpillars are building their chrysalides, attached to the stomach walls. In the towns, in the cities, the children stop their running. Their yelling. They stop asking for food, for another drink of water, they stop asking and their parents lie down on the carpet like children themselves, relieved beyond measure.
As the caterpillars busy themselves inside the children’s stomachs, the children like to nap. It hurts, a little, even after orange flavoured Tylenol. They put their thumbs in their mouths, breathing sweet breath. Not asleep, but not awake either. Once the caterpillars have finished their chrysalides, the children go back to banging pots and pans, spilling their milk, throwing sand in other children’s faces, screaming for pizza that’s not gluten-free, that’s not covered in broccoli and kale. In seven days the butterflies emerge. They flutter around the children’s dark stomachs and the children say their tongues taste like paper. Now they pull the pots and pans out of the cupboards and stare in silence. Stroke their smooth surfaces, then stack them back inside.
It used to be called Breaking Children, like horses, but in this more enlightened era it is simply called Butterfly Time, the caterpillars in dissolvable tablets that can be mixed with vanilla or chocolate pudding. To ready the children for the peaceful calm of their butterflies, the parents read picture books illustrated in bright colors, page after page of happy children who walk and whisper and never want anything.
The book that sells the best, though, the book that in every house is tattered with ripped page corners because the children love it so much they nibble on it when no one’s looking, is The Girl Who Didn’t. The illustrations in this book are black and white. Stark. The Girl Who Didn’t doesn’t even have a face. Her head is a ferocious scribble. In the story, the Girl is often a blurry smear across the back of the living room as her older brothers do their homework. Clean their rooms. Go to bed at exactly eight p.m.
When it’s time for her chocolate pudding, the Girl waits until no one’s looking and feeds it to the dog. Having watched her brothers, she knows to pretend that the caterpillars are building inside her stomach. She dozes in her mother’s lap. Eyes half open. When the dog dies — of the caterpillars? Of the chocolate? It’s not clear — the Girl weeps so hard her scribble head turns to water. He parents think it’s because the chrysalides are finished. She has seven more days of asking why, of being loud, of saying no. But when the eighth day comes, she is still a ferocious blur. She cannot help it. She fails. On the last page, the Girl Who Didn’t eats her pudding, her disappointed family standing over her and watching every bite. Her scribble head is already fading.
But the children, the ones who are a year away from their own pudding, draw pictures of the Girl with their crayons on the flocked wallpaper. And she is running away from a giant butterfly. She is running across a field covered in dandelions. She is running toward wildness.
Sage Tyrtle’s unsettling words haunt The Offing and New Delta Review — yet NPR/CBC/PBS let them on air. They teach storytelling to suspiciously talented humans (Clarion, Second City). Work + craft rants: www.tyrtle.com.
