Wet wings

I took my students outside this afternoon, and a few of them grouped around beneath a tree, looking at their phone screens in the shade of its leaves.

A brouhaha went up over the fall of a monarch butterfly from above, and it began crawling unevenly along the ground, moving slowly with they thought were broken wings. The girls were panicked, and called for a smaller boy with a stick to come over and smash it. Cartoon like, he was about to spear in the end of times for the butterfly when he saw my face and immediately apologized.

Its wings weren't broken, and while it had fallen out of a tree, it had made a misstep first on the struggle out of its cocoon. Its wings were as the wet curled paper of a book that's left in a wet backpack in the rain, but all of its limbs were working fine. Some of the kids wanted to end it's suffering, and others wanted to hold it, but they lost interest and fell away as it walked doggedly along my hands. It would probably still die, I thought to myself, but better to bring it somewhere peaceful, the monarch equivalent of a quilted queen bed with a cat on its lap instead of a ten car pileup.

Two of my favourite shadows followed me. An inseparable pair of bespectacled raccoons, I call them this because they can't be left alone with a stapler, let alone each other, without breaking something or making each other bleed. They fight furiously– constantly asking me to run interference when, miserable without the other, they find themselves sulking or threatening to tell each other's parents the other’s secrets. Of course, the next day, they're back in the same chair, sharing whichever of their phones hasn't been taken by an irritated mother, texting and laughing and swatting each other. They're sensitive and sweet, and once when I was talking down a large boy about to hit another, the smaller raccoon stood close to me, ready to throw himself to protect me. He told me later that he didn't want me to get hurt. He's become used to protecting his siblings in this way, at home.

The raccoons are vigilant surveyors of the alleyways around the school, and told me which were quieter, and which were reserved for vaping and petty crime. We found a path with a meticulously maintained crocus bed, and the kids and I stepped briefly off the school field through the chain link gate. One raccoon wanted to take the butterfly home to live in his butterfly box, but the other one told him that butterflies need to be free.

I found a large, pink crocus close to the wall of the home and held my hand perpendicular to the flower, so the butterfly could haul itself onto the petal that looked like a blushing calf’s tongue. The kids watched gently, hovering close and chattering as I told them we had to get back across the field, so that I could be close to the other kids and still pay my rent.

“Can't we stay and watch it, Ms. Tucker? There's only a few more minutes.”

I was worried about what they would do, they wanted so badly to touch it. I told them to go back when the bell rang, and halfway across the field, it did.

They turned back and ran through the open fence, crouching, standing around the flower, watching the butterfly dry in the sun.