Seven Ways Home (If You’re Ever Lost)

Written by Maren Antinia Krizner

21 years old

Lemont Furnace, PA

Content Warning:

This story contains references to drugs and alcohol, along with some violent imagery

FIVE:

I should be glad the road is this empty when I’m drunk and pushing Hunter’s stupid green truck close to 70, but right now, I would bite off at least two of my fingers to pass another car. The entire world only stretches as far as the high beams—the dotted yellow line, a dead deer, rows of corn that seem endless until, suddenly, they’ve been replaced with rows of dead trees. Everything outside the light is just another place for her to hide. Three fingers.

I slow down a little bit as the coughing starts again, or at least I try. The fit builds, thrashing my lungs while dozens of little pin-prick legs tickle my ribs. The truck veers right, and I jerk it back onto course just as the coughing turns to retching and three (Jesus, three) monarch butterflies climb out from my mouth.

They dance through the air and around one another. They circle my head, like I’m a cartoon character who's just sustained minor brain damage. All the other butterflies I’ve coughed up have been dead or somewhere close. I don’t know what this means.

One of them lands on the rearview mirror, and my eyes follow before I can stop them. I look into it, but the miles I’ve gone are lost in all that rural darkness.

I force my focus back to the road in front of me, and I see Holly. She’s just sitting there, her legs stretched out in front of her, like I’ve kept her waiting. I want to drive right through her, let her explode into a red cloud of unidentifiable nothing—but my body is a startled animal, and it moves without me. My hands throw the wheel to the side. My foot slams the brake so hard I feel something crack, and I don’t know if it’s a piece of the car or a piece of me.

In the few seconds before impact, I think that, if I’m lucky, I’ll die before she can get to me.

Every year, four generations of monarch butterflies live and die. Monarchs from the first three generations typically only survive for 2-6 weeks, and will only migrate once.

ONE:

When I first catch sight of Amanda, my hands are just starting to go numb. She’s sitting in the bed of Hunter Dunbar’s stupid green truck and I’m downing a Coors Lite like someone’s got a gun to my mother’s head.

It was Erica’s idea to throw a “homecoming” party in the Wyatts’ field like we used to, even though we’re all far past the age of needing to be isolated from civilization in order to get wasted.

Greensdale isn’t even a town, it’s technically a borough. My graduating class had sixty-seven people in it, and forty-one of them applied to college out-of-state, myself included. There’s something about coming of age under a pile of dirt that leaves you washing your hands for the rest of your life. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the fact that Erica’s stuck in town until her father’s leg heals. When she suggested the party, I figured I could survive a night or two in my childhood bed for the sanity of an old friend.

The crowd is a lot harder to hide in than I remember it being. Probably because most of us grew up and moved away and never came back. Probably because Amanda’s here and she’s sitting in the bed of Hunter Dunbar’s stupid green truck.

There’s a fire in the middle of the field; it’s screaming and popping and taller than I am. My feet drag themselves to another truck that I’m pretty sure belongs to Jason. On the ground in front of it there are at least six coolers, each one with someone else’s last name scratched on it in faded sharpie.

A girl, I think her name is Holly, is sitting in the truck bed. She watches me as I open a cooler that’s marked with a semi-familiar bundle of consonants, and I say a quick prayer before plunging my hand into the awful ice water. I pull out a sugary, 5% drink that isn’t worth the three dollars someone probably spent on it.

“Do you need a bottle opener?” she asks, and her breath fogs in the air, obscuring her face for a second.

“I guess,” I say, and my breath does the same.

She pulls a bottle opener out of her pocket and tosses it to me. It’s one of those metal ones that doubles as a corkscrew for wine. I forget to give it back to her.

Monarch butterflies lay their eggs on the leaves of milkweed.

THREE:

It isn’t long before the alcohol comes back up with a vengeance. I double over as the warm, sharp vomit climbs up and spills out onto the dead leaves at my feet.

I can still hear Luke Bryan or one of his lab-grown clones blasting on someone’s bluetooth speaker, weaving over and under the sound of drunk twenty-somethings screaming along. I think southwest Pennsylvania should make it part of their marketing: “If you’re ever lost, follow the sound of the horrible pop-country song that you somehow know every word to until someone puts a drink in your hand.”

I don’t even feel that drunk. I’m sober enough to have felt my stomach start to turn over, sober enough to have slipped out into the woods to retch my guts out in relative peace. Apparently, it doesn’t matter that I’ve survived far fiercer spirits than a Mike’s Hard Watermelon Lemonade.

Maybe I could ask Holly to come back to Pittsburgh with me.

My stomach flutters again and I start to retch. Nothing comes out this time, but I can feel a lump of something at the base of my throat, waiting to be thrown up. Fuck this, I’m going home. I pull out my phone and shine the flashlight on the ground, just so I don’t step in anything. When the light hits the wet leaves, though, enough of them shine bright red that I don’t even think about that awful, chemical smell as I squat down to get a better look.

That lump in my chest suddenly feels alive. I try to take a breath, but it’s like someone’s stretched a veil over my airways.

I try to take another deep breath to steady myself and this time, I swear, the thing in my

throat moves.

I immediately start gagging as hard as I can, but it only moves the thing, making it harder to breathe. I reach my hands back into my throat and try the feel around for it. My fingers are so numb from the cold that they’re basically useless. After a few seconds of clawing around, my hand warms up enough that I can feel my index finger brush against something near the back roof of my mouth. It’s soft and thin, and for an awful second I think it’s a flap of tissue.

I drag it out of my mouth and throw it on the ground immediately; it’s bigger than I thought it would be.

The only sound left in the world is my pulse pounding in my temples. I shine my light on the thing I pulled out of myself.

The butterfly—a shriveled monarch—twitches twice, and then it dies.

Milkweed is extremely toxic to most creatures, including humans.

SIX:

The air is a cloud of brown dust. I didn’t think airbags gathered dust; it never occurred to me. There’s smoke, too. I pull my shirt up over my mouth and nose to keep from coughing anything else up.

Something is crawling on my temple. The butterfly moves before I can reach it, so I just end up touching my head. When I pull my hand away, it comes back red.

Adrenaline is, I’m quickly learning, an erratic narcotic.

The passenger side of the cab is wrapped around a tree. Above me, I hear the light rhythm of Holly, or whatever it is, tapping her nails on the roof of the truck. She’s just sitting up there, right over my head.

I still have her bottle opener in my pocket.

I close my eyes and allow myself one small moment of satisfaction in having absolutely destroyed Hunter’s stupid green truck.

I push open the door.

If a monarch remains inside a compromised chrysalis, its wings will not develop, and it will be rendered permanently flightless.

FOUR:

When I go back to rejoin the party or maybe call an ambulance, everyone is gone. It isn’t a joke, it isn’t a tragedy—it isn’t anything. They’re just gone.

All the cars are still parked in the angry red light of the massive bonfire. I try the door of someone’s SUV, and almost immediately the car alarm starts shrieking. The sound echoes through the empty field, like it’s the only sound in the world.

Then, just on the other side of the fire, I see Holly—or, something that looks, mostly, like Holly.

I run. I try every car, and, one by one, their alarms sound, filling the once-dead night with noise. Of course, Hunter’s stupid green truck is unlocked with the keys still in the ignition. I get in and start the car.

Holly comes up to my window and taps her fingernails, which seem so much longer now, against the glass. She gestures for me to come outside, which I vow to absolutely fucking not do under any circumstances. I meet her eyes and nearly pass out. They’re the beady, black eyes of the dead butterfly I left in the woods. They remain perfectly blank as she smiles, revealing a mountain range of splintered teeth.

Monarchs retain the toxins from the milkweed where they hatched, rendering them

poisonous. Their bright color is a warning.

TWO:

“The first time I ever came to one of these, I was sixteen. I had never drank anything besides my mom’s wine before, and so I got fucking trashed on, like, three Twisted Teas.”

“Three?” I say, and Holly nods. Her cheeks are bright pink, a little bit from the alcohol, a little bit from the cold, but mostly because she’s laughing so much.

“And then I tried,” she stops for a second to compose herself enough to finish the sentence. I’m laughing too, and I don’t even know what she’s going to say. “I tried to call my mom and apologize for sneaking out, and Becca Highland had to hold my phone for the night to stop me.”

“That’s not that bad,” I say. “Jesus, three?”

“It’s kind of bad. You can say it, I won’t be mad,” Holly assures me, and I cover up a smile by sipping my drink. “Okay, okay, your turn. Worst field party.”

Of course, the answer comes to mind immediately. Holly can see it on my face, so she

says,

“That bad?”

“I mean, it’s stupid now. It felt like the end of the world at the time, I don’t know,” I say.

“That’s okay. You know, your prefrontal cortex gets all elastic when you’re a teenager; it really fucks with your, uh, emotional regulation and shit. Dumb stuff feels like a big deal because, as far as your brain’s concerned, it is. One time, my friends locked me in the trunk of Erica’s Civic as a joke. I got really freaked out, like, everyone thought I was having a seizure or something because I was screaming so loud. I still get claustrophobic, just from that.” Holly is still giggling, and so I am too. I feel bad about it, though, so I put my hand over my mouth in an attempt to stop.

“Wait,” I say into my palm, “that’s actually kind of awful.”

“It wasn’t for a long time or anything, but I was pretty drunk,” Holly shrugs.

“Okay,” I confess, “when I was a junior, we were having a nice party, and I found the girl I was dating making out with Hunter Dunbar in his stupid green truck.”

Now Holly puts her hand over her mouth, eyes wide.

“What did you do?” she whispers.

“What did I do? I called my brother to pick me up, and then I sat in my room and cried all night.”

“Well, that’s emotionally responsible of you,” holly says very seriously, and I just laugh.

I can’t help it. The alcohol is warm and buzzing under my skin, and Holly’s hair is made of tight little ringlets that shoot out at every angle. It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen. I feel like I’m full of helium.

Holly starts to laugh too, which only makes me laugh harder.

Monarchs are are the only species of butterfly that migrate.

SEVEN:

The second I put weight on my foot I know I’m fucked. It buckles beneath me, and then the rest of me falls forward out of the truck. Little pieces of earth and glass lodge themselves deep into my palms as I catch myself, my face a millisecond away from crashing against the dirt. The pain pushes my breath towards hyperventilation, but I force myself to swallow it. I can’t start coughing.

Holly slides off the roof of the truck and approaches me with a meticulous curiosity, like a child examining a bruise. I take the bottle opener out of my pocket and point the sharp, metal end of the corkscrew toward her in a pathetic warning.

She kneels beside me and gingerly untangles my bloody fingers from the weapon. I let her take it.

I roll onto my back. The stars are spilt glitter on a black tablecloth, and they will die in the places they were born. We have that in common.

It’s not so bad.

I slip away from my body and become one of them for a moment, watching as an outsider while Holly, or what I now understand is certainly not Holly, raises the bottle opener and plunges the corkscrew into a spot just below my throat. By the light of the high beams, I see her use every muscle in her body to rip an opening clear down to my stomach.

I wait.

The sound of wings starts soft, but slowly builds to a waterfall crescendo as hundreds of monarch butterflies tear out of my body. The swarm engulfs my floating consciousness in an orange cloud. They dance through and around me, a chorus of tiny voices whispering home.

Then, like being thrown into a frozen lake, I return to my body. I watch the swarm as it disappears into the black countryside. They are, I imagine, heading South.

Holly is gone.

I raise a hand to my chest and nearly cry with relief when I find it completely intact.

I stay on the ground, watching the stars slowly disappear as the sky fills with light, until the adrenaline wears off and pain begins to creep back into my periphery. It’s then that a car, a silver Honda Civic, stops in the middle of the road beside me.

I manage, barely, to stumble to my feet and meet the driver’s eyes.

“Where’re you headed?” Holly asks. Her eyes are brown again, and her face is covered with dirt, sweat, and a streak of dried blood that I follow up to a cut on her temple. We have that in common.

I get in the car.

“Take me home,” I say.

The fourth generation migrates in the fall, but, unlike the others, returns home in the spring.

Monarchs from this generation survive significantly longer than all others.