Multiple autografts, and more to come until he’s ready for the pressure suit. A tracheotomy to help him breathe while inhalation burns heal. IV fluids, proteins through a naso-gastric tube, catheter. Pain that can scarcely be imagined, its constancy broken only by escalation when they scrub and dress the burn wounds. All of this he will awaken to. And to the grief of having to learn how to be Cooper again, or the new Cooper he must become.

And he will awaken to the questions.

Burning. She can smell it again.

So tired.

She looks at the envelope, unopened, on the table. It can wait. The past always waits.

~

The door creaks as she pushes it open, into the moist warmth of the shed. She loves being in here at night, the promise of metamorphosis by moonlight. A gentle anticipation bubbles along with the humidifier.

Crouching beside one of the metal tables, she watches the caterpillars, each suspended from a bud of silk. Not much movement yet. Too soon. Avril calls them worms, shudders at the sight, but Laura admires their brilliant tiger-striped bodies, smooth and soft and dry like the pads of a cat’s paws. Who would believe that a speck of flydirt on a leaf of milkweed could become this gaudy creature, still less that there are other, more spectacular transformations to come?

Laura needs to believe in transformations of all kinds. That human skin can be regrown, synapses re-fired; that the millions of minute fragments that make up what it is to be not just a person but that person can be gathered like stars from the sky and reconfigured into a constellation just as beautiful so that the world may go on, please, as it was before, please, and surely it can be again.

On a bay-leaf branch, one of the caterpillars quivers, the slightest frisson of movement, and then begins to swing. Laura settles back on her heels to watch, never tired of witnessing this miracle. First the split—yes, and here it comes, the surprising bulge of green beneath the yellow and black stripes, which begin to peel back and fall away as the pupa contracts, eases itself free. And now for the feat that is pure alchemy: the pupa—wet, green and vulnerable—grows a cocoon for itself, a chrysalis in the shape of a perfect jade pagoda, collared with tiny studs of gold. In this, beauty itself will be created.

Laura struggles to her feet, her calf muscles cramping. Etching the silence now are faint scuffings as twigs move, leaves scrape leaves. Everywhere caterpillars are twitching. Poetry.

All this incipient life pulsing in the muted glow from the heater’s light. It is soothing, like the snaking of narcotics through veins, an antidote to pain. Flushing sorrow away.

11

Avril