Flight Behavior

Some of the starlings let out a collective metal cry and flew off at low angles across the field. Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, she thought, words from the book of Job, made for a world unraveling into fire and flood. Among the dark birds were wavering flints of light, the same fire that had unsettled her so drastically on first sight. Now it was irresistible. She’d come out here to see the butterflies. Since yesterday she had watched them leave their clusters in the dead peach orchard and scatter downhill into cedars and tangled brush along the roadsides. Now they dotted every small muddy rise that was not yet swamped. Wherever she looked she saw their aggregations on the dwindling emergent places: forming bristling lines along tree branches and the topmost wire of the fence, clustered on driftwood, speckling even the distant, gleaming roof of her car. Orange clouds of the undecided hovered in the air space above them. The vivid blur of their reflections glowed on the rumpled surface of the water, not clearly defined as individual butterflies but as masses of pooled, streaky color, like the sheen of floating oil, only brighter, like a lava flow. That many.

She was wary of taking her eyes very far from her footing, but now she did that, lifted her sights straight up to watch them passing overhead. Not just a few, but throngs, an airborne zootic force flying out in formation, as if to war. In the middling distance and higher up they all flowed in the same direction, down-mountain, like the flood itself occurring on other levels. The highest ones were faint trails of specks, ellipses. Their numbers astonished her. Maybe a million. The shards of a wrecked generation had rested alive like a heartbeat in trees, snow-covered, charged with resistance. Now the sun blinked open on a long impossible time, and here was the exodus. They would gather on other fields and risk other odds, probably no better or worse than hers.

The sky was too bright and the ground so unreliable, she couldn’t look up for very long. Instead her eyes held steady on the fire bursts of wings reflected across water, a merging of flame and flood. Above the lake of the world, flanked by white mountains, they flew out to a new earth.