*This is a work of dark speculative fiction.
Content warning: childhood emotional neglect, psychological tension, themes of dissociation, gaslighting
The butterfly fluttered out of the TV and landed on my nose. I know it did, ‘cause I could taste the static on my tongue, and you can’t taste things that aren’t real. But Dad says I shouldn’t tell anyone—I’m too old to play pretend.
He’s afraid people will think I’m weird. But is it weird to tell the truth, even if no one believes you?
Something I’ve wondered since I turned eight. My parents threw me a big birthday party because we were moving that summer, and they wanted my last memory of my friends to be a good one.
We were playing hide-and-seek, and I snuck away from the bounce house to the skinny stepping stone path between the red brick wall covered in chalk flowers and the old wooden fence stained green from shady dampness.
Oh, Mom was so mad when I showed her my stuttered tulips and daisies. “It’ll never get out of the mortar,” she griped.
And so far, she was right. But that wasn’t the weird truth.
It was Mom, whose arms were draped over the shoulders of a clown in his baggy uniform. A glass of yellowish-orange bubbles dangling from her fingertips. Her smudged red lips were pressed against his white painted earlobe when I passed the row of metal trash cans.
I jerked back, nearly tripping over my own feet, grateful the growling AC was loud enough to cover my footsteps. They weren’t supposed to be there, and they were going to get me caught. Mom’s face flushed to match the clown’s face paint, now dotted with pink stains.
I never got a chance to hide. Mom crouched to my level and mumbled something I forgot, tears running down her face as the clown picked his red nose up off the ground. Our conversation ended with a question, another thing I forgot. I only remember nodding, so she would leave before the seeker was done counting. Then she offered me a crooked smile and pulled me in for a tight squeeze, muttering, “Happibirfday, girlie.”
Shortly after we moved, I got so angry with her over the color of my bedroom walls, or that the box with all of my notebooks was going to arrive late, that I told Dad about the clown.
He didn’t seem shocked at all. Rather, disappointed.
He frowned, shook his head, and gripped the oily folds on his forehead with his sausage fingers. His sigh went on so long it felt like he was deflating the room around him.
“Margie, you can’t just make up stuff like that. It’s dangerous. Someone could get hurt.”
I pleaded with him. Told him it wasn’t pretend, and I saw it with my own eyes. Even though I hadn’t seen them kiss on the lips, I told him they did. I don’t know why I did. Maybe I wanted it to sting more because he refused to believe me. Maybe I was tired of Mom always winning, always getting away with everything.
He didn’t like that one bit. He balled his meaty fist and slammed it against the table, tipping over his plastic cup of sweet tea.
“I said enough, Margie! Dammit…look what you’ve done.”
I tried to bring it up a few more times, but each time it ended the same way. The last time, Dad said it was strange how obsessed I’d become with the make-believe clown.
Strange.
I knew he’d be mad at first, but I thought he’d eventually be grateful. I was telling him the truth, after all. I didn’t even bring up the half-pretend kiss more than once or twice.
And never again after Mom left. She packed her entire life into a single suitcase, leaving behind the lie my father told himself.
I stopped talking about the clown. I could deal with the scars of his disbelief when it was just us two. Besides, Mom was gone. I didn’t need to win that battle anymore.
I could ignore the truth if it made Dad stop looking at me funny. I hated how he ducked out of rooms when I entered or that his jaw clenched with anticipation when I managed to trap him into a conversation.
But there were times we could be together—really together—and not say a word at all.
After she left, Dad and I watched a lot of TV together. Every evening, he and I sat wordless for hours, burning whatever nonsense he put on into our retinas. My favorite nights were the ones when he fell asleep, and I got to stay up extra late. Strange things came on late at night.
My favorite wasn’t a show at all. There weren’t any characters, or talking, or a story. Just static soundscapes and dream-like collages of colors, shapes, and moving pictures. Like I was the one being watched. Because it wasn’t just a show; it was a feeling. Like falling asleep and waking up inside a forgotten part of my brain. The one that remembered my old house and how the fence smelled when it rained.
When Dad stayed awake, I went to bed without that chaotic glow clinging to my skin—that the special show always left behind.
Of course, Dad didn’t believe me when I told him about it.
“I’m not gonna let you watch TV with me if you keep spouting nonsense like that. It’s melting your brain.”
The threat was enough for me to stop sharing. The last thing I wanted was to lose that magic. But it was too much to keep for myself.
I planned to wake Dad up the next time it came on and show him myself. But it took a long while. He didn’t fall asleep most nights, and when he did, he rarely fell asleep on the right channel. I was too afraid to pry the remote from his fingers.
But the next night, to the purr of his snore, I saw the butterfly. The night I tasted it.
It terrified me at first. I’d been an observer for so long, and now something inside was reaching out to me as if it’d been listening to my heart all along.
It fluttered around the room a few times, then back into the screen. It could have been a minute. It could have been an hour. It was too short either way.
I made the mistake of waking up Dad and telling him about it while he wiped the sleep from his eyes and the drool from his mouth. My lips were like a boat’s engine, whirring with excitement far faster than he could comprehend, even if fully awake.
And that was enough for him to make good on his threat. No more TV. Not for me, anyway.
That time with Dad—the sliver of hope that I might get sucked into a waking dream—was the only time I felt close to anyone anymore. And I’d thrown it away. I fluttered too close to the temperamental giant, and he crushed my wings.
Dad had been right all along. He tolerated my truths, but the kids at school thought I was a freak. They didn’t see the strange beauty of the carousel of dread and wonder. They didn’t care about going to bed with glowing skin that tingled. They laughed when I told them about my digital ghost.
They laughed.
“Weird,” they said. And maybe it was. But they hadn’t felt the glow or longed for it when it left.
Other kids, the normal ones, hadn’t stayed up for hours praying to wall outlets. They hadn’t begged for a color that made them feel seen.
Dad sent me to bed every night at eight, well before the TV would put him to sleep. I pleaded to the electricity surging through our wall and the circular plug next to my bed to be visited by that digital ghost in my dreams, but it never came.
Months passed, and even though Dad didn’t seem upset about the special show anymore, he still wouldn’t budge. Never invited me into the TV room. Reminded me frequently of the time. I should have stopped asking to join him. I already knew his response.
“No, Margie. It ain’t good for you. Kids your age don’t need to watch so much TV.”
He only ever got mad if I pressed. He’d bring out his meaty fist and beat the nearest flat surface to hammer in his point. Whatever he said was final, dammit.
The butterfly never visited me in my room, but ideas did. Plans for my subconscious to surf across the analog screen and lose myself to forbidden pixels.
And it was simple. I just had to outlast him. I had to keep myself awake, night after night, even when my eyes and brain and body screamed for sleep. I’d wait until the clock next to my bed showed eleven or later, then sneak into the TV room to see if he was asleep. And if he was, and if the special channel was on, then I’d creep into the room and steal a few moments of meditation.
But it didn’t happen. Weeks turned into months. Months to years. Each one slower than the last.
***
Nine years I waited for the memory of the butterfly to turn into something real.
It was my birthday again—seventeen—and Dad asked me what I wanted. I took some time to think, knowing full well what I wanted already, but it felt wrong to ask straight away. It might seem like TV was all I thought about if I did.
I thought of joking about a clown, just to break the ice. But the ice was thin, and I’d have to skate carefully if I wanted another chance with my grainy escape.
“It’s time to grow up, Margie. Girls your age want makeup or cell phones. Would it kill you to want something normal for a change?”
A change.
I almost said I wanted a cell phone, just to make him happy and end the conversation on a positive note. But that would have been a lie. Lies didn’t taste good. They didn’t taste like anything at all.
That night was the farthest I’d felt from normal. I wasn’t planning on staying awake. I wanted to sleep, to escape the ache of his words—another clip to my wings.
He’d asked. I answered. And now he sat alone in the TV room, drowning his regret in late-night programming.
Eleven. Then eleven thirty.
The pale blue glow slipped through the crack under my door like ghostly fingers, beckoning me to let them in. Then they were red, then yellow, magenta, and green.
And the noise…
My heart’s tattered wings beat to life inside my chest. It was my show.
I tiptoed down the hall and into the TV room, careful not to step on the floorboards that shrieked. The closer I got, the stronger the pull. Like gravity, forcing me into the middle of the room. I towered over the box. My skin itched for the glow.
A chrysalis dangled from a branch devoid of leaves. It wiggled in the wind, and for a moment, I knew the ghost would return.
The wind stopped, and the filament holding the cocoon to the tree snapped. I gasped as the pod tumbled to the forest floor, landing on a pile of decaying leaves inhabited by pill bugs and centipedes. My stomach churned as their segmented bodies brushed up against the fragile walls of the chrysalis.
A purple light pulsed through the crack in its shell. It was the butterfly, begging for help.
Its rhythm matched the drum inside me, mimicking how I felt most days—half-formed and waiting to be rescued from what, I didn’t know exactly. I waited for something to come and save the butterfly. It’d be here any moment, and then it’d come for me.
I gripped both sides of the television, my forehead less than an inch from the glass. The heat from the cathode rays singed my forehead.
“Come on,” I hissed. “You can do it.”
The light dimmed. The butterfly was dying. Panic set in.
It was instinct that compelled my hands to move through the screen to the cocoon. My fingers traced the crack until I found an opening large enough to slip through. When I pulled the walls apart, there was nothing inside.
The glow was gone, and a sense of relief washed over me. There was no butterfly inside. Not a live one or a dead one.
Dad stirred in his sleep behind me, mumbling the way he always did a minute or so before waking up. The relief disappeared. This was likely the last time this dream would visit me. The butterfly was gone—moved on. And I was left to retreat to my room.
But I didn’t. Its pull on me had waned, but my desire to be a part of it hadn’t. I didn’t want to just watch anymore or wait for it to take me.
I gripped the sides of the cocoon. Its walls flexed under my fingers, papery and warm, like a fading hug. I slipped inside—head, shoulders, torso, feet—drawn in by an inexplicable comfort. The husk welcomed me as if it had always been waiting. It smelled like fingernails after scraping my name into the old green fence.
Dad’s boulder of a fist ground the sleep from his eyes as I pulled the chrysalis shut. Inside, my skin lit up purple, and a tingle welled inside my body. It never faded. Not even when Dad shut the TV off with me inside.
Z. T. Fairfax (he/him) writes surreal horror that uses nostalgia and childlike wonder as a lens to view the human experience. He lives in Kentucky, where he builds “bugateriums” with his daughter.
Twitter: @ZTFairfax
Bluesky: @ztfairfax.bsky.social
Instagram: @ztfairfax
Website: ztfairfax.com