DEAD MONARCHS by Shannon Bowring
IT’S BUTTERFLY SEASON. The leaves have just begun to yellow; the crickets sing all day. At the library where I work, the Children’s Room staff have been busy tending to a plastic jar of milkweed and monarch caterpillars, recording the creatures’ evolution and posting it to our social media pages. This used to be witnessed in person. But of course the time for that has passed.
My procedure is scheduled for 8:00 on a Thursday morning. The past few days have been muggy, but today feels autumn-cool, that New England snap in the air that makes you think of sweaters and cinnamon and decaying Jack-o-Lanterns on front porches.
At the entrance to the medical building, I stop to cover my mouth and nose with a blue paper mask. A volunteer stands behind a podium behind a small table covered with more masks and an industrial-sized bottle of hand sanitizer.
“Here for an appointment?”
“Endoscopy.”
“And in the past fourteen days, have you experienced….”
This is the new How’re you doing? This is the new Good, and you? This is the new Let’s just please go over this worn-in script so we can hopefully never speak again.
“Have a nice day,” I tell the man.
The building is cleaner than usual, the fluorescent lights brighter than they ever used to be.
Every evening, T. and I go out to our yard for a flower walk. We tour first the front garden, where the daylilies are beginning to wither at the edges, the purple phlox petals dropping like tears to the rain-starved ground. Then we amble toward the side garden. The peonies died weeks ago. The giant crimson bee balm, which kept at least one hummingbird happy, is starting to wane, the red-tendril flames of its life collapsing down to memory.
But the butterfly weed continues to thrive even as its delicate orange flowers fade away. A type of milkweed, the bush is starting to grow fuzzy elongated pods that will one day split open and release their seeds into the air, to be carried by the wind all around this neighborhood, perhaps as far as the park, the river, the sidewalks downtown in front of cafés that now stand dark and empty.
During one of these flower walks, we see it. A hint of black, yellow, and white perched on one leaf of the butterfly weed. I recognize the pattern of the stripes, the black antennae, the suction-cup feet.
“A monarch,” I tell T., who’s busy frowning at the lawn, a sickly shade of beige despite his daily watering schedule.
“That’s nice.” He curls his toes in the crunchy grass. “Our water bill is going to be through the roof.”
The caterpillar makes his way around the perimeter of the leaf, chewing as he goes. The evening sky is watermelon-pink, and the air smells of dying earth. The crickets sing as though their lives depend on it.
I can never regulate my body temperature in doctors’ offices or hospitals, and today is no exception. My face is sticky-hot from the mask, my armpits rank with nervous sweat. My fingers and toes are so cold they ache.
The questions the nurse asks are the same ones I answered at last week’s CT scan, at both ERs I ended up in two weekends ago, at my primary care doctor’s office or over glitchy webcams for the past six months. I rattle off my symptoms. Dramatic, unintentional weight loss. Lack of appetite. Intestinal cramps different from and worse than the IBS cramps I’ve suffered for over a decade. Nausea. Esophageal spasms so painful that I’m sure, each time they occur, my heart is about to explode.
“And you should be aware that I have PTSD because of my medical history.”
Up until a couple years ago, no one had ever suggested that my chronic anxiety could be linked to the trauma my body has endured since the day I was born with two heart conditions, both of which required multiple surgeries, including two open-heart operations before I was six years old. The official PTSD diagnosis, handed down from an osteopath who magically makes my nerves and muscles stop shrieking at one another, came as a relief. Finally, a concrete explanation for the paralyzing fear I’ve felt all my life.
“Ah, so you get a little nervous.”
The nurse’s voice has changed. I am no longer a polite thirty-year-old woman but a Crazy-Patient-To-Watch-Out-For. Her tone is kind but condescending, and she holds eye contact with me a few seconds too long, as though she is observing a specimen through a thick wall of plexiglass.
We’ve been told repeatedly, by doctors and psychologists and talk show hosts and YouTube ads that interrupt our cat videos, that anxiety and depression are normal. That we shouldn’t feel ashamed. I also recognize that I can be cagey about the subject of mental health—I grew up in Northern Maine, where complex emotions are not discussed, and terms like mood stabilizers and inherited trauma are considered more problematic than racial slurs.
So in an attempt to Embrace My Mental Illness, I tell myself I’m reading too much into the nurse’s tone, that it’s unfair to assume she judges me as harshly as I judge myself. I take the plunge, admit the bigger truth.
“I actually have severe anxiety.”
“We’ll give you some meds to calm your nerves as part of the awake-sedation. You won’t feel or remember a thing.”
“Sometimes meds have the opposite effect on me.”
“Just don’t worry about it, hon.” A pause, and now her tone is softer, more careful. “You know, sometimes anxiety makes our GI system act up. Is there anything going on in your life right now that’s stressing you out more than usual?”
My mind fills with bleak images. Navy blue signs staked beside Confederate flags. Stormtroopers abducting peaceful protestors. Crimson numbers splashed on every news report, those numbers continually rising. Death toll yesterday, death toll today, death toll predicted tomorrow. Murder hornets. Wildfires. Drought. And all the flowers losing their color, the light disappearing earlier each evening in the toxic air.
“Life is great,” I tell the nurse.
“Don’t you worry, hon. It will be over before you know it.”
At the library, the monarch caterpillars have stopped eating. They cling unmoving to the milkweed leaves in the little plastic jar. The Children’s Room staff is thrilled.
“This means they’re getting ready for their transformation.”
The bottom of the jar is covered in brown caterpillar turds, each one about the size of a grain of couscous. Remarkable. All that waste out of something so small.
“How long until it starts?”
“Any day now.”
Back at home, I walk across the scorched lawn and kneel before our butterfly weed, where our lone monarch has stopped eating, too. He clings to the underside of a leaf, his body shaded from below and lit from above by the midday sun. I watch him for a long time. He doesn’t move at all.
There are two bathrooms in the gastro-intestinal suite, one situated on either end of the hallway, which is lined with doorless rooms that house patients who are waiting for their endoscopies and colonoscopies. I hear a lot of hurried footsteps, locks slammed into place, toilets flushing.
The prep for my procedure was meant to take twenty minutes. I’ve been here for over two hours. My veins are stiff, cold, stubborn. Over the past few weeks, the delicate skin has been prodded too many times. Bruises bloom across my arms, inner elbows, the back of my left hand.
“Looks like we’ll have to get the ultrasound machine and do it that way,” the nurses tell me. “It’ll be just a few more minutes.”
Just a few more minutes in the medical world, I have learned, means at least half an hour.
I forgot to bring a book with me, and my phone dies a slow but steady death as I tap brightly colored tiles on a mahjong game to try and keep calm. I haven’t eaten since last night. No water since 6:00 this morning. My eyes are gritty from lack of sleep, and the sweet-sour reek of my breath against my mask makes me feel disgusted and angry and convinced my organs are rotting like the flesh of the bloated moose that littered the back roads of the town where I grew up. I have no one to talk to. No Visitors Allowed these days.
Finally, a new nurse comes in with the ultrasound machine. The other nurses must have warned him about the Anxious Young Lady in Suite 11, because he speaks to me as though I’m still learning to ride without training wheels. He adjusts the IV. Swabs my skin with antibacterial wipes. Runs the plastic wand up and down my forearm until the machine glows and he sees the flow of my blood pumping steady in a wide, lovely vein.
“Little poke now,” he says, and I imagine it’s the same voice he’d use while telling his girlfriend or boyfriend that their new jeans don’t make them look fat. Not fat at all.
I feel the cold saline rush up my arm, into my chest and down along my sternum. The solution smells familiar, a smell I always forget until it hits me again—sweet plastic, hint of metallic alcohol, one of the first aromas of my childhood as I lay in OR hallways before each Big Cardiac Event.
“They’ll be in for you soon.” He tidies up so efficiently. He doesn’t look me in the eye. “Just a few more minutes.”
The caterpillars at the library have started hanging from their leaves. The Children’s Room staff say that when the monarchs are ready, they hook onto a leaf and curl upside down in the shape of the letter J. This is how they form their chrysalis, the protective barrier from the world that will allow them to transform.
T. crouches next to me. The grass beneath our feet is sun-crisped like straw.
“I named him Francis,” I say.
“Francis isn’t looking so good,” says T. “He hasn’t moved for days.”
“He’s just getting ready.”
Any day now.
A nurse wheels me down the hallway. It’s a smooth ride, the bed’s tires whispering against the white tile floor. She drapes another warm blanket over my body, a lousy attempt to make up for leaving me alone in a freezing room for several hours.
The procedure room is dimly lit and whirring with machines. The doctor, whom I’ve never met before, sits on a wheeled stool in the corner. He asks me the standard small-talk questions. Home, work, family, pets. I ask about the results from my CT scan, evidence of gastric diverticulum. I want to know what it means. It means nothing, he says; it’s a one-in-a-million chance it could mean anything.
“What are the chances I’d be born with two heart conditions?” I ask, and he makes a polite noise that lets me know he doesn’t care about any of that.
The nurses are flitting around me, busy hands that pass equipment back and forth. They scrape a numbing jelly-like substance onto my tongue that tastes like fake peppermint. It drips down the back of my throat, dissolves behind my teeth. Now one of the nurses is inserting a hollow plastic thing between my lips that reminds me of the poppers they put into pizza boxes to keep the cheese from melting onto the cardboard. I can’t speak, I can’t swallow.
“We’re giving you Benadryl,” the doctor says. “We find it helps young women like you who get a little nervous about these sorts of things.”
I’m rolled onto my left side. One nurse sits at my head while the other hovers around my IV.
And now something is happening. A dark bubble of horror is blossoming in my chest, expanding outward and upward into my throat, the corners of my mouth. My limbs are suffused with mercury. There’s an intense sensation of being pulled backward, that feeling when you’re half-awake and your dreams are trying to jerk you under the thick scum of sleep. My heart beats faster, harder, and tears pour down my face as I try to pull the plastic thing out of my mouth.
I can’t speak.
I can’t swallow.
I can’t move.
I can’t breathe.
They’re all staring at me, assuring me it’s just the drugs, that this is normal, but my body is screaming FUCK YOU THIS ISN’T FUCKING NORMAL, and my soul is shaking-shuddering because there’s a deeply familiar feeling here, that age-old certainty that this is what it feels like to die. To be pulled under. To be yanked away from the skeleton-house that moves my body through this world. To be released into the greater nothing.
They’re all staring at me, and I’m making desperate noises like a sheep being led to slaughter, and I can’t stop crying. The nurse at my head rubs my hair, makes soothing noises. Shh, shh, you’re doing great, you’re fine.
But nothing is great, and nothing is fine, and this is how I’m going to die, in this sterile room with people who don’t know me, and I should have kissed T. goodbye when he dropped me off here this morning.
And then one day I go outside and see that Francis has changed position on his leaf. His antennae wobble in the breeze, and his little feet work to find the right grip as his body drops down into a hook. This is it. The magic has begun.
Soon the rest of the drug cocktail kicks in and my body grows heavier. My eyes close. I continue to sense the nurse’s gentle hands in my hair, but I can no longer feel my body. I hear them working around me, the doctor’s commanding male voice loudest of all. There is a slight pressure when the scope is threaded down my throat. I hear suction, see dreams of orange wings pressed against a thin green membrane. Something white behind my eyes is glittering, little firework explosions that remind me of daisy petals as they reach toward the sun. Someone is calling my name, a voice I do not recognize. They say it again and again and again.
“You need to wake up.”
I can’t wake up. I don’t want to. The wings are about to emerge from the cocoon.
My name again, more urgent.
“Can you hear me? Wake up. You need to wake up now.”
Flight comes next.
“Wake up.”
Any moment now.
At the library, the first of the monarchs has emerged. The Children’s Room staff is planning a live release in the garden outside the brick building, an event to be recorded and shared throughout our community. An event to be celebrated. Little but necessary.
At home, I rush to see the progress Francis has made. Brown liquid seeps from his head, pools on the leaf below him. He doesn’t move at all.
After I wake up, a nurse assists me to the bathroom, helps me dress, hands me paperwork, calls T. to come pick me up.
“She did great,” I hear her assure him. “No problems at all.”
I can’t stop crying. Fat silent scalding tears leak from my eyes. I pull stale breath as deep into my lungs as possible. Pinch the bruised skin around my IV site. Bite my lip until I taste blood. Anything to convince myself I still exist.
As the sun sinks below the rooftop of our house, I bury Francis under last year’s dead brown leaves.
At the end, his tiny body curled up almost into nothing, all that yellow-black-white skin shriveled like an old condom. All that waste out of something so small.
They say the results from the procedure shouldn’t take long. If this is inconclusive, they tell me, we’ll try something else.
They say the rest of the library monarchs will break free soon, and we will be there to mark the occasion.
They say the world is bound to right itself, that the pendulum will swing back around to something different, better, brighter.
Just a few more minutes.
Any day now.
SHANNON L. BOWRING’S work has appeared or is scheduled to appear in numerous journals, including Allegory Ridge, The Seventh Wave, and Hawaii Pacific Review. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, a Best of the Net, and was recently selected for Best Small Fictions 2021. One of the unpublished stories in her collection-in-progress was selected as a Finalist for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance 2021 Maine Literary Awards. Shannon is pursuing her MFA at Stonecoast, where she currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for the Stonecoast Review. She lives in Maine and works for a public library.