Cally Highfield (346494)

Cally Highfield (346494)

Exploring Contemporary Arts MCAIW1020

Janette Stowell

Butterfly Girl

Her first kill was at age six, a cranefly. It had been so spindly looking, she couldn’t resist tearing away it’s limbs. It had been so easy! She had to do it again.

As her age increased, so did her morbid curiosity, her death count reaching the hundred mark with more insects and even a few goldfish. The goldfish had been so simple. Tip the bowl, watch them squirm for a while, and then? Nothing.

Soon, her games of murder grew tiresome. Squashing spiders underfoot and cutting worms in half became child’s play when she turned ten and turned on her first warm-blooded victim. The mouse had been stealing away bits of dropped foot in the pantry, and that had angered her. How dare it? So, first chance she got, she grabbed it, and, stealing the role of the house cat, began to play with it; tossing it up into the air and catching it again in her fat pink hands, before she finally crushed it’s skull between a thumb and forefinger.

A visit to the local museum inspired a new idea. She saw the stuffed creatures, the dinosaur bones and the samples of butterfly species, and a month or so later, she boasted a collection of her own of misshapen sparrows, kept in a shoebox, next to her flat hedgehog, and, one of her personal favourites, a baby bat she had found that had been partially mauled by her own pet spaniel.

Despite her growing collection of memories, her heart still ached for more, and her most desired object stood waiting every morning as she went to school, in a field, oblivious. She loathed that cow, the way it leered at her with a stupid face, and large, decorated brown eyes. One morning, she decided that enough was enough.

She took her father’s axe, and crept underneath the gate, tiptoeing towards Bessie with a ravenous smile. The cow turned and, deeply distressed at the sight of a little girl heading towards her, axe or no axe, bellowed loudly, and bolted towards the gate. Mistaking the sudden movement for an attack, the weapon was dropped and the girl ran for it, not noticing the rock ahead. She tumbled and fell with a splattering scream backwards onto the gate. The metal spikes ripped through her torso and, as she lay there, minutes before death, into her mind fluttered images of the museum butterflies, pinned down via their bodies, and she laughed bitterly to herself before closing her eyes.

For a while she lay there undisturbed, until, one by one, at half-hour intervals, the magpies came, to snatch a piece of her dress here, a lock of her hair there. As for the cow – she simply watched, with her sad brown eyes, and mooed quietly, still none the wiser as to what had gone on that day.