Deathwatch

Part 1

For a number of years, Norah's usual evening routine went more or less according to the following schedule: a quick shower after dinner, then a half-hour telephone conversation with her daughter, after which she would then spend the rest of the evening watching television or poring through old photo albums, or a combination of the two before settling into bed a little before midnight. That was the order she'd stuck to since the death of her husband, and it had gone relatively unchanged over time.

There was a certain significance to her going to sleep at that specific time every night, and this was in no small measure to do with the visitor she'd been getting ever since her life had lapsed into this extended passage of monotony. Without fail, each time she found herself under the covers and about to switch off the lamp on her nightstand, she'd see hovering above her a delicate butterfly, its wingspan not much larger than length of her thumb, from tip to knuckle.

Every night, it did its dainty little fluttering dance for Norah, shying in and out of the glare of the ceiling light, flashes of lemon-neon dabbing themselves onto the eyes of her faltering consciousness, ensuring their last-minute capture into an essence whose new ingredient all but guaranteed the most restful of slumbers. For whenever those eyes focused on that tiny flare of gold dust, the expanse of her room and its meagre contents: the creaky, leaning cupboard, the sole rattan chair set against a grimy dressing table filled with decades-old cosmetics, the azure-toned clock from Cairo that had been a wedding gift from her long-departed father... all magically melted away into those bare plaster walls, leaving only moments for a flick of that switch before an inviting plunge into somnolence.

Norah never really questioned why or how the butterfly entered her room, let alone the house, or how it was continuing to survive here, year on year, without any obvious sources of food. Maybe at one point early on, she'd assumed it had got in through an open window during a cleaning spree, and that it left the house at the next one, and so on and so forth at its own pleasure. A fair postulation, but one that doesn't hold up terribly well once one considers that she only did the cleaning once a week and never knowingly opened the windows outside of those occasions. True, there could have been other, unnoticed opportunities throughout the day, each day, for her little friend to enter and exit the house, but its inveterate occupation of that particular room, and constant appearance at exactly the same time and location going on for years on end couldn't possibly have been explained so easily, least of all when such species generally have a lifespan of weeks at the most.

It could then be considered that this friend of hers was in actual fact a number of friends, members of the same species breeding somewhere near a door or a window, who happened to be attracted to the ceiling light or some fragrance undetectable to the human sense of smell. A slightly more plausible explanation, but there was another consideration that played on Norah's mind from time to time: one of a supernatural kind.

Which, in a way, was why she never ever mentioned the butterfly to anybody, not even her daughter or her son-in-law. Perhaps fear is the best way to describe the reasoning behind this apprehension, though not fear of the butterfly itself; rather, a fear that, somehow, the very act of revealing its existence would 'break' the spell that had enchanted that part of her life for so long that it seemed almost painfully inevitable that it would have to be broken at some point, and by the most trivial of actions. Like a bowler blaming the end of an implausibly protracted sequence of strikes on something so incidental as an extra step or an unintended head-turn during a choreographed build-up that had otherwise been perfectly adhered to, maybe the act of confiding this secret, however indirect, would have wings that would stir up enough of a hurricane, sweeping away the real butterfly in the process.

The closest she ever came to divulging the story of her visitor to anybody was during a visit by her daughter and her daughter's family. The conversation over tea and banana fritters gradually drifted to memories of Norah's late husband, and her daughter then mentioned as an aside that she'd caught a glimpse of a butterfly hovering around his shroud at the funeral, and that it had been a reassuring presence for her, for she'd taken it to mean that his soul was on a path to becoming something infinitely more beautiful, having shed its mortal cocoon. Norah asked aloud if it could have been a mere coincidence, but her daughter was adamant that it had been a genuine heavensent sign, looking almost offended as she scrambled to collect the half-empty plates and cups and simultaneously scoop her own daughter from the floor, where she'd been spending the time toying away with a line of marching ants.

Of course, there was nothing Norah wanted more than to believe that what her daughter had described was a true representation of her husband's soul ascending into the afterlife, but the major problem here was that her daughter had described it as having blue wings and being about the size of a palm, quite unlike the description of her own nightly visitor. Did Norah believe that it was the yellow butterfly that was her husband instead, choosing to keep her company for years after his death?

Not quite either. As surprising it may seem, while Norah did occasionally wonder if it was of an unearthly origin, she never gave the question of its exact nature much more thought than that. In truth, she was not terribly concerned with what the definitive answer was, between which of the two butterflies had been her husband, or if he'd been in all of them. That it brought her some relief was enough for her to take it at face value and simply enjoy its company while it lasted. The caveat she'd added to her daughter's recollection had been more out of caution than disagreement, or a need to tell her about the other butterfly that had been keeping her company all this while.

One night, months later, as she lay on her back, staring at the fluttering form directly overhead, she smiled and wondered to herself properly for the first time, what was it about the butterfly that set her at ease? What was it about the visitor that held her back from alarm, or treating it like any of the other household vermin? What was it that was, possibly, preventing her from questioning what it was doing there in the first place? Why indeed was she not particularly bothered to know? She yawned and began to feel the world closing in. Maybe the reason was as mundane as her simply not being able to stay awake long enough to retain those threads of inquiry...