The Turtle and the Butterfly

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A sneak preview of Rachel's short story featured in the League of Utah Writers Anthology: WE ARE DANGEROUS.

The Turtle and the Butterfly: A Fable
​By Rachel DeFriez
 
“Turtles,” Paul, the Peruvian jungle guide, pointed towards the shore. The clunky hum of the motor waned as they slowed to get a better look. “They’re cold-blooded. After rain, they move more sluggishly. They come to warm themselves in the sun.” 
Natalie pushed back the hood of her rain poncho and swiveled to see. A tattered tree trunk, gray with the wear of rain and sun, hovered a snout’s breadth above the river. Broken branches like flailing limbs protruded from the brown water. Natalie scanned the shore beyond. “Where?”
“On the log.” Paul pointed again. Natalie liked her guide because his English was excellent, considering he’d grown up a child of the Amazon. The occasional demise of an article, a forgotten tense, a lost “s” only added spice to his narration, and her Spanish was limited to the vegetarian items on the menu of her favorite Mexican restaurant. 
Squinting, Natalie followed his finger and spotted a rounded helmet squatting on the trunk. “Turtle!” she exclaimed, grinning. The warmth of her smile could melt the stone of a weathered gray statue.
Tall, svelte, elegant, Natalie’s natural, flamboyant beauty had allowed her to fund her education by dabbling in modeling. Beauty never lacks appreciation, but in her case, it camouflaged a sharp intellect with a quick grasp and a voracious appetite for knowledge. She graduated in marketing with such distinction that one of her professors recommended her for a coveted entry-level position in a local, well-established, highly successful investment firm. In one week, she taught herself financial modeling and outshone all the other plodding male finance majors to win the position. Setting her sights on a promotion to portfolio manager by thirty, she hovered easily above her male colleagues. Having fluttered up the ladder to an office with a window overlooking the asphalt and concrete of the city, she ventured out to the rivers and towering canopies of the Amazon to learn the ways of the jungle.
“Turtles.” Paul emphasized the “s.”  Another lumbered up the trunk. Two or three others reposed on smaller branches. 
Natalie leaned over the edge for a closer look. The boat rocked. “Butterflies!” she exclaimed. Above the wrinkled head of the turtle hovered a flickering trio of wings. Above all other living creatures, Natalie loved butterflies. The image of a neon symphony fluttering above the drab shell of the turtle triggered in her a rare moment of the sublime amidst the raw violence of the jungle. 
As one of only three women working at the small-cap investment firm, Natalie fancied herself a shimmering stained-glass window in the dingy gray architecture of a traditionally male-dominated profession. Naturally, she imagined the butterflies benevolent, bestowing their vivid charm upon the slow, wrinkled dullness of the turtles. Twisting the lens until the colors sharpened, she snapped a photo: blue, purple, and green iridescent wings perched upon the dull nose of the sluggish nomad—perfection in the balance of opposites. “How lovely,” she sighed, overwhelmed by a breath of romance.
“Not really,” Paul remarked. “Not when you know why the butterfly sit on turtle’s nose.”
 
***
 
WHY THE BUTTERFLY SITS ON THE TURTLE’S NOSE
The handsome ones never cry. 
Sylvia’s thick, black eyelashes fluttered as the strapping young male approached. Square jaw, lips round and thick, candy really—sweet, but offering no substance for survival. Arms cut and trim, legs tanned and sculpted, his tank and shorts were more of a social decorum, plumage to accentuate the desirability of the male. Three benches lined the path between him and Sylvia. The park’s pines, oaks, and maples cut a teeming green jungle through the heart of the concrete city. The tune of tropical colors in Sylvia’s silk dress lured the runner’s eye, but it was her symphony of auburn hair, green eyes, and lithe figure that trapped his gaze. 
A ray of evening sun sliced through the slate clouds of afternoon rain. A sheen of sweat glistened on the man’s flesh. Sylvia had survived on the salt of sweat before, but it was the salt of tears Sylvia craved—man tears.
Only tears could fill the empty well her father had left behind. His thirst for nectar unquenchable, he had flitted from blossom to bud and abandoned her, small and fragile, to the care of her wilted mother. Sylvia wanted an apology. But the apology never came—no tear-stained letter, no rainy night knock on the door, no haphazard meeting in the liquor aisle of the neighborhood grocer. She grew to crave the salt of tears he had denied her. With thin threads of anger, loneliness, and abandonment, she spun a cocoon around her deprived childhood. When she emerged as a woman, she found she had sprung stunning wings of vengeance and an insatiable thirst for tears. Wielding the tools with which nature had endowed her, she harvested those tears and poured them into an abyss she could never quite fill.
Lifting a cell phone to her ear, Sylvia extended a willowy finger. The very tip of her painted nail lightly grazed the male’s flesh as he passed. Their eyes met. Their scents mingled. Glancing over her shoulder, she luxuriated for a moment in the admiration he splashed over her in his wake.
Turning her face to the stream of light across the path, Sylvia laid her fingertip on her lip. The sweat of longing trickled across her tongue. 
Her nose crinkled.
No substance. Little flavor. 
Salt squeezed from hard labor and dedication could not hope to rival the luscious texture of salt stewing in the savory emotional soup of a tear.
At a bend in the path, the bars of the jungle gym rose out of a square of shimmering sand. Sylvia’s heart quivered. Children—such sweet tears so easily drawn. Like monkeys, they frolicked, squealing and chittering, rolling and racing, swinging and spinning. She was a favorite with children, but oh, the howling ruckus to be endured for provoking an easy sob! No, no, the trick with toddlers was perception. To comfort a howling child into gentle weeping was to sip with impunity the nectar of the jungle’s most tender buds. 
She slowed her step as a small boy clambered to the top of the slide. The retiring sun bounced off the tongue of blue plastic. The boy maneuvered his stubby legs beneath him. He teetered. The luck of the jungle was with Sylvia. She was passing just at the moment of his very first try! There would, most assuredly, be boy tears.
The child lost his balance, plopped onto his rear, and careened down the slide, flailing like an upturned ladybug on his back. Taking flight at the end, he crash-landed in the sand. More astonished than hurt, he stared momentarily into the clouds before releasing a heart-wrenching howl.
Sylvia had timed her approach to perfection. Her lip curled in anticipation. The electric blue stiletto of her sandal veered from the path and sank into the sand. Cooing sympathetically, she bent and brushed the child’s hair from his eyes. “Poor baby,” she murmured, the jubilant colors of her silky sleeve caressing his chin, “weren’t you so brave?” Perfectly calculated, her words quieted the howling into weeping. “That’s right, sweet boy, cry a bit and you’ll feel much better.”
Nectar welled about the edges of his irises, and a juicy, round drop hovered at the corner. She reached a hand to gently lift his head. The drop dribbled onto his plump cheek.
By this time, the mother, hovering near a much smaller female, had spotted the accident and was charging, baby on hip, across the sand. Nature had endowed Sylvia’s face and form with grace to dispel all suspicion of malevolence. The face of a comforting angel fluttering above her son’s nose met the mother’s anxious exclamations. “Caleb, what happened, kidlet? Did you fall?”
Sylvia’s thumb brushed away the tears. “What a brave boy!” Careful not to disturb the tear glistening on her fingertip, she bundled the toddler into his mother’s empty arm, waving away her maternal gratitude, apologies, and self-recriminations. 
Back on the path, Sylvia fairly sucked at her thumb. Inhaling deeply, eyes shut, she captured for sublime seconds the savory sweetness that quenched her raging thirst for tear salt. Shivering to her bones, she exhaled deep satiation. 
Only the evening’s main course could hope to rival such an aperitif.  
 
***
 
Natalie poised the camera on the bench beside her. This time of year, the boats normally cruised full to the brim with tourists, but COVID had emptied them. “And?” she asked. “Why do the butterflies hover around the turtle?” ...

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