I awoke in Mag’s basement, in front of the same blank TV screen where I had been when the butterflies took me away. No time had passed on Earth, and the Butterfly Box had vanished.
Mag’s faintly breathing body lay on the floor next to me. The cuts and bruises on her face had not been transferred to our world, and she looked like herself again. However, she was unresponsive, as her soul was still trapped in the Abyss. But, if she was still alive here on Earth, then maybe she could be saved if there was a way to wake her up. I woke Colleen and Gloria and alerted them to Mag’s condition.
Mag was rushed to the emergency room and hooked up to some machines. When they let us in to see her, the doctor was eager to ask me if I had any information about how Mag had ended up in this state.
At first, I hesitated to tell Colleen, Gloria, and the doctor the truth. I didn’t think they would believe me, and that scared me. I was scared that Vulgra was right. That people weren’t innocent enough to believe the Butterfly Guild could exist. That we would never change. That we were dangerous. That I had made a fateful mistake.
But then I remembered my promise to Mag. I had given her my word—via a full sentence—that I would tell her moms everything we had learned. If she had faith in her moms to believe, then so did I. And so I told them everything.
I told them how hundreds of butterflies had emerged from the Butterfly Box and carried me away to a strange land filled with crying trees. I told them how Mag found me in Desolation Woods and how the soul of my deceased father, clad in knight’s armor, had rescued us from a gang of giant spiders. I told them how the three of us had fought sand ogres, truth skeletons, bully goblins, and tattered zombies and scarecrows as we collected three talismans. I told them we saw Archie, who was now a member of the Butterfly Guild. I explained how he had told us the talismans were needed to energize the Butterfly Rod so we could destroy Vulgra, who was the cause of all evil on Earth.
And, finally, I told them how I had killed Mag. I had put her in this state. It was my fault her soul now suffered in the Abyss, along with every last butterfly.
When I finished, the doctor said she would set me up an appointment with a psychiatrist. She then told Colleen and Gloria, “I think Emerson may have witnessed Mag undergo a traumatic event, which may have also been very traumatic for him, as you might imagine. If so, he has likely repressed his memories of the event and reframed them as this wacky story.”
She then turned back to me and said, “If you remember anything that actually happened, you need to tell me right away, okay?”
“But I do remember what happened!” I insisted, getting up from my chair. “I’m not repressing a damn thing. You just don’t want to believe me. You don’t want to believe anything!” I tried to calm myself, but I was agitated. “I guess Vulgra was right. People are always going to suck, aren’t they?”
“Emerson, we need your help right now,” Colleen said. “You need to calm down and try to remember what happened.”
My heart sank even further. I could understand not being believed by a stuffy doctor who I’d never met. And even though it was unreasonable to expect Mag’s moms to believe such a fantastic tale, it still hurt to hear Colleen say that.
I looked at Gloria. I was closer with her than with Colleen. If any phantom human was going to believe me, it was her. “You believe me, don’t you?” I asked. “At least a little part of you has to believe me.”
She tilted her head sympathetically. “Oh, sweetie, I think we’re all a little confused right now.”
I shook my head in disappointment. “Vulgra was right. You guys are hopeless. We all are.”
I stared at them, wishing Archie had told me something that only he would know. Something I could say that would convince Colleen and Gloria that I really had met him.
I could think of only one such thing. “Archie’s dream was to be a sandwich,” I said, but I didn’t get the reaction I was hoping for.
I stormed out of the room and went to the lobby. I sat next to the vending machine, as being near candy had always comforted me more than being near people. I’m not sure why; perhaps because it’s less judgmental.
I sat there for some time, contemplating my conversation with Vulgra, trying to remember why I had been so sure that humans were salvageable. Why was I so stupid? I concluded that I had gotten emotional because of what I had done to Mag, and my judgment had been clouded. I very well could have doomed thousands of beautiful worlds to save this stubborn, dismal one.
My thoughts were interrupted by a raspy but friendly voice. “Need a dollar for a snack?”
A janitor stood before me, his extended hand holding a dollar. He was round and plain-looking, with dark, messy, curly hair. He had a thick mustache on his chubby, little face. He was perhaps the least remarkable man in the world.
I thanked him as I accepted the dollar.
“You visiting someone?” he asked.
“My sister,” I said sadly. “Coma.”
“Her name is Coma? Or she’s in one?” the janitor said with a wry smile.
It was the stupidest joke I’d ever heard in my life in the most inappropriate situation imaginable. And in that moment, I sensed my dad’s soul in this man’s body.
I looked up and stared at this man. “Dad?” I said meekly, my eyes glistening.
He furrowed his brow and side-eyed me. “You sure you’re just visiting someone? Cuz if you escaped from the mental ward, you should probably be getting back.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I lost my dad a couple years ago, and sometimes I see him where he’s not.”
“Wow, that’s rough,” he said, and I could tell he meant it by the way he ran his hand through his hair. He then rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled-up bill, a twenty this time. “Well, hopefully your sister’ll have a quick recovery. But, just in case, snacks are on me.”
I refused the money. I don’t know whether it was the stains on his uniform or the holes in his Velcro shoes, but something told me that this twenty-dollar bill was this man’s life savings.
But he insisted. “You’re going through enough,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to worry about snacks.”
I accepted the money and thanked him again. Then he spotted some footprints a ways down the hall and said he better “get on that,” and so he did.
I got myself some Milk Duds and, feeling slightly better, returned to Mag’s room. The doctor was still talking with Colleen and Gloria, trying to confuse them with verbiage. “Unfortunately, at this time, I can’t say precisely what the complication is. It can be difficult to determine the cause of neurological events like the one your daughter has experienced when there are no signs of physical trauma. We’ll need to administer some tests before making any diagnoses or discussing any treatment options.”
I didn’t like how the doctor spoke. Once someone starts using words like “complication” and “administer,” I immediately become suspicious that they don’t know what they’re talking about and are trying to bury their ignorance with syllables.
As the doctor droned on, I resumed my ruminations about the thousand potential utopias that I may have put at risk. I wished there was someone who wouldn’t dismiss my story as a delusion. My only hope was for Mag to wake up. Surely, people would think it no mere coincidence that we both had the exact same trauma-induced hallucination. Then they’d have to believe in the Butterfly Guild, at least a little.
However, as the weeks went on, the doctors became increasingly baffled by Mag’s condition and less hopeful that she would ever recover. They eventually stopped asking me if I remembered anything.
One day, a specialist informed Colleen and Gloria that Mag was in a “hopelessly vegetative state” and that the only rational and humane thing to do was to take her off life support.
When Colleen and Gloria broke this news to me, I begged them not to let Mag die. I tried for the hundredth time to convince them that if she died, she’d be trapped in the Abyss forever, and all the butterflies along with her.
“I know it hurts to let her go,” Gloria said, “but it wouldn’t be fair to Mag to keep her alive like this. She could be suffering terribly, and her chances of recovering are astronomical. It would take a miracle to save her.”
“Then we hope for a miracle,” I said. “Miracles happen sometimes. If we can get enough people together and get them to hope for Mag to get better, she just might.”
They didn’t say anything. They only looked at me with pity, like there was something wrong with me.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it myself if I have to, but I’m not giving up on Mag. I know she’s fighting to come back to us. And I know she can make it if we hope hard enough.”
I went to Mag, held her hand, and closed my eyes. I hoped for her recovery with my whole heart. I prayed there was still a member of the Butterfly Guild floating around somewhere in the multiverse. Just one butterfly could do the trick.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
After a minute, Gloria took my free hand in hers. I opened my eyes, and Colleen was on the other side of Mag’s bed, holding hands with her wife and daughter.
“What do you need us to do?” Colleen asked.
“Close your eyes, find a part of you that hasn’t been crushed and still believes the world has magic in it, and pray for a butterfly to come to us and give its life force to Mag.”
We closed our eyes and prayed. At first, I thought they were going along with it to humor me, but I soon felt the same way I had when the Destruction Rod became the Butterfly Rod. The feeling wasn’t nearly as intense, but it was definitely the same. Hope was in the air and slowly filling the room.
It’s working, I thought. It’s actually working! Come on, Mag. Come back to us.
However, the moment was interrupted when the doctor rapped on the open door. She said she needed to speak with Colleen and Gloria in private. From the grim expressions on everyone’s faces and the funereal mood that had pervaded Room 330 in recent days, I knew they were going to officialize their decision to take Mag off life support.
I lamented like all hell. We had been so close to saving Mag, but now all hope was lost, not only for Mag but for everyone, for once she died, the butterflies would be trapped with her in the Abyss forever. There would be no one to protect us from another Deleter, who was probably already working against us. Our world would soon fall into chaos.
I stayed with Mag and observed her face, trying to memorize as many details as I could, knowing that soon she’d be nothing but memories, that I may never feel anything close to friendship, hope, or love again. I again cursed myself for refusing Vulgra’s offer. I could be in my afterlife by now with another version of Mag if I hadn’t been so foolish. I had given up eternal bliss, and for what? To watch the real Mag die and then be depressed for the rest of my life? I was consumed by grief.
Just then, from outside the room, a random voice called, “Hey, somebody wanna take care of this moth?” I looked up as the “moth” in question fluttered into the room. Its wings were ragged and black and ugly, so it wasn’t surprising that it had been misidentified. But this was no moth. It was a butterfly.
The hospital’s intercom issued a request for the sanitation staff to come to our floor. However, the transmission was cut off by static and replaced by “Wild Horses.”
This broken butterfly was my dad. But how? Had he avoided the Abyss and instead been granted butterfly status for his role in our fight against Vulgra? If so, and if his metamorphosis hadn’t occurred until just now, that’s why he hadn’t flown to Misery Peak with the others. That would also explain why he looked like a school project that had been forgotten about until the morning it was due. Whatever Creator created the butterflies had rushed my dad’s completion for this emergency, to save Mag and the butterflies from the Abyss. And he could save them all if he could wake Mag up.
I stared at the butterfly as it fluttered toward Mag and landed on the wall above her bed. But then the janitor—the same one who had given me money for snacks—burst into the room, and “Wild Horses” stopped playing at once.
The janitor whipped a fly swatter from his utility belt and swatted it in every which direction as he did some ungraceful spin moves. He stopped when he spotted the butterfly on the wall. He narrowed his eyes as he locked them on his target. “Ah, there’s the bastard,” he said with the determination of a war hero. He crept up to the butterfly, his swatter-wielding arm raised above his head.
I darted around the bed and dove at him. I hit the floor and wrapped my arms around his legs. “Don’t hurt it!” I pleaded, staring up at him.
The janitor stopped but didn’t lower his arm or divert his gaze from the butterfly. “Sorry, kid, but I gotta follow protocol. And protocol says no bugs in the hospital.”
I should have expected as much. That’s always been the way with humans: Rules and regulations always take priority over whimsy and wonderment. But I couldn’t give up. This wasn’t like at the arcade when it was five bucks on the line. This was for Mag’s life and humanity’s salvation. We had overcome too much only to be thwarted by a fat janitor blindly following a rule imposed on him by some guy in a suit somewhere.
“But it’s my dad!” I cried. The janitor now looked down at me, his expression an avalanche of pity. “He’s here to save my sister. Please, you have to believe me. You have to let him save her.”
The janitor hesitated, and I continued. “There has to be a part of you that believes me. Please, think back to your childhood, back to when you believed in everything. There must have been a time when you would have believed a butterfly could carry a human soul and restore a person’s life. And that part of you never goes away. It gets taken advantage of and abused and trampled on until you become a cold, sophisticated wisp of what you once were, but it never dies. I know it’s still in you somewhere, and I need you to find it. Find it, and hang on to it with everything you have.”
I feared I hadn’t been convincing enough, but I could think of nothing else to say. Whether Mag and the Butterfly Guild would be saved was up to this janitor now. It all came down to whether this nothing of an everyman could find that magical, innocent part of himself, if he even bothered to look for it.
The janitor continued staring at me. And then I saw it: an almost imperceptible glimmer in his eye, a glint of one of the impossible colors of the Butterfly Rod, a sign that he still believed in something. I don’t think he believed what I was saying specifically, but he hoped I could be right. He hoped there was more to the universe than what his five senses told him. He hoped there was more to life than following protocol, that it was wrong to stop miracles from happening simply because they don’t pay the mortgage. He hoped, desperately, that I was telling the truth.
He slowly lowered his arm to his side. He didn’t say anything. He only gave me a half-smile and a wink.
I acknowledged how fortunate it was that this man was nobody important. If he had been the owner of a large corporation, for example, Mag would have been a goner. He wouldn’t have cared about butterflies or that I believed one of them was my dad. He wouldn’t want the Butterfly Guild to exist because that would mean his efforts to “win” at life were frivolous, his empire trivial.
But this janitor wasn’t the owner of a corporation. He wasn’t even the owner of a decent pair of shoes. He hadn’t won at life, and he was never going to, not the way most people keep score. He knew he had been forced to play an impossible game and, therefore, had to hope there was more to life than he could ever know. And, because of this, he was able to allow a miracle to happen.
I let go of his legs, and he left the room.
The butterfly detached itself from the wall and floated onto Mag’s hand. I stood in silence and watched as it stilled its wings, shimmered, and disappeared.
A moment later, Mag opened her eyes.
“Mag!” I exclaimed as I threw my arms around her, though she was too disoriented to respond or hug me back. Unable to contain my jubilation, I rushed into the hallway and proclaimed, “She’s awake! She’s awake!”
A nearby nurse came and peeked into the room, a most perplexed expression on his face.
“There was one butterfly left!” I informed him. “It was my dad!”
But my words only further confused the nurse, so he called to his coworker. “Hey, I thought Room 330 was the unsavable girl.”
“It is. Why?” the other nurse said as she popped her head into the doorway. Her eyes went wide. “When did she wake up?”
“Just now, I think.”
“Where’s Dr. Yamakawa?”
The two nurses shared a quick glance and raced each other down the hall, as whoever broke the news would have played a larger role in Mag’s recovery for some reason.
I went back to Mag and held her hand.
“What happened to me?” she asked groggily.
“You mean you don’t remember?”
“I remember waking up in the middle of the night and feeling like time was standing still… I went downstairs, and you were sitting there, frozen...” She furrowed her brow, trying her best to push more memories forth. “...That’s the last thing I remember.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t need you to remember. I just need you.” And I hugged her again, as tightly as anyone could. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
She asked again what had happened to her, and I began telling her about the journey we had been on.
Sir hadn’t even entered the picture yet when I was interrupted by the sound of footsteps sprinting down the hallway. Colleen and Gloria flew into the room, ran to their daughter, and smothered her with hugs and kisses. There was a lot of crying and laughing and saying how much everyone loved Mag. And at least one of her moms was holding a hand to her cheek or stroking her hair at all times, as if she would fall apart if someone wasn’t touching her.
In the midst of all this, a look of remembering suddenly came upon Mag’s face.
“What is it?” Gloria asked.
“Archie’s okay,” Mag said. “I don’t know to explain it, but I... felt him somehow while I was out. He’s not in heaven, but he’s somewhere like that, and he’s happy. And he wanted me to tell you guys he’s okay.”
This made Colleen and Gloria cry some more, and I could tell they wholeheartedly believed Mag. And maybe they now believed my tale, too, if only with a sliver of their hearts.
Dr. Yamakawa entered the room, and she couldn’t believe what she saw. Mag was not only awake but was sitting up and chattering away with her moms.
Dr. Yamakawa called for another doctor immediately, and this doctor was so flabbergasted that he called for another one. And on this went until the room was filled with what seemed like every doctor in the hospital, creating a frenzy of inquiries and notepad-scribblings.
After days of questions, examinations, and blood samplings, Mag was found to be in perfect health. However, they kept her in the hospital for a while longer in case her condition worsened as suddenly and mysteriously as it had improved.
During this time, all kinds of doctors, many of whom had flown in from other countries, tried to discern what had caused Mag’s “impossible recovery,” as the newspapers called it. But none of them could explain it. A few of them threw the word “miracle” around, but you could tell they didn’t really know what it meant.
Of course, I could have explained Mag’s recovery to them. I could have told them everything I’ve just told you. But there was no point. Although they may have listened to my story, they never would have believed it. They already knew too much to believe anything other than facts, so I didn’t bother. Plus, I didn’t want to get that janitor fired for going against protocol.
Also during this interval, my mom quit drinking and started attending AA meetings. She never formally apologized for not being a better mom, nor did she instantly become an amazing one, but she was trying to do better. Every day, she’d ask if Mag was out of the hospital yet, as she wanted to meet her and have her start coming over to our house once in a while. She even played Mario Kart with me sometimes. She was terrible at it, though she insisted her losing streak was only because I never let her be “the frog with the big nose.”
Finally, the time came when Dr. Yamakawa announced Mag could go home. As I left the hospital with my family that night, the starry sky so beautiful it would make Einstein weep, I recalled the glimmer of hope that had flashed across the janitor’s eyes, the joyful expressions on Gloria’s and Colleen’s faces when they got their daughter back, the childlike wonder of the doctors who observed Mag, the feeling we all shared from knowing that miracles sometimes happen. Those things were as human as war and famine, and they reinforced my hope in all of us.
As I looked up at the stars, one of them blinked an impossible color. At that moment, I knew I had made the right decision by destroying Vulgra. Our world, though still far from perfect, had become a potential utopia. Or perhaps it had always been one, and I was just seeing it differently.