Eurytides Marcellus
Category B: Second Place (2025) Monash Short Story Writing Competition
Author: Emily Zhang
It was always warm in the dome. A low, electric hum, coaxed from vents and hidden panels, from copper coils that thrummed behind the fibreglass skin. I wasn’t meant to be there alone. I used to slip inside anyway, crouching behind broad-leafed philodendrons, half-hidden in the undergrowth, watching her from the shade.
My aunt moved through the paths with slow precision, pausing only to name things with a soft authority. Glasswing. Zebra Longwing. Blue Tiger. Their names sounded as sharp as entomologist pins in her mouth, impaling the clammy air.
Sometimes, I crept closer, while she was somewhere deeper inside. Careful not to stray from the stepping stones, I trailed the damp outlines of her footprints in the soil. I kept silent, afraid the dome might somehow notice me, breathe me in, and never let me out again. Everything shimmered with nectar and rot, the breath of ripened fruit, split and weeping. A sweetness with teeth.
The back room repelled me. It reeked of spirits and cellulose, and always coated my tongue with muggy heaviness, as if the air itself were embalmed. Row upon row of drawers, their contents ordered and still. That’s where she kept the damaged, dead ones. The torn, the trampled, the wings bruised by curious fingers. “They’re still valuable,” she would say. “Still useful for education.”
At night, I imagined the dome sighing. The misting systems would shut off, fluorescents flicker low, and I imagined them - those creatures of breathless silence - folding themselves beneath bromeliads and banana leaves, wings pressed inwards like hands in prayer. In my mind they slept like memories, weightless, impossible, whole.
-
Years later, I returned. The conservatory had long since closed. A sun-bleached sign clung to the rusted gate: Permanently Closed for Renovation. I slipped through a gap in the side fence, snagging my sleeve on twisted wire, the fabric tearing like the past. The dome rose ahead - half-swallowed by ivy, its panes blurred with mildew and the haze of forgetting.
Inside, the air was different. Stale. Without her careful maintenance, the jungle had outgrown its container. Ferns sprawled across the paths, milkweed withered into pale husks. Chrysalises, long dead, hung brittle on fronds like relics of a bygone faith.
Now I stood at the threshold once more, the scent of old paper seeping through the cracks, as if the back room had been holding its breath all this time. The rusted door groaned as I pushed it open, metal dragging across concrete in a long, scraping wail. Her desk sat motionless, half-swallowed by shadow, the surface thick with dust. Beneath it, a warped box of display cards: Eurytides marcellus. Troides helena. Idea leuconoe. I could hear the names spoken in her soft voice, casted like spells.
Behind the filing cabinet, damp and swollen with mould, I found a folder. Inside: news clippings, school worksheets, hand-labelled maps. And at the very bottom, folded once, then again - a photograph.
Black and white. Blurred. A woman - not her, I think - standing in water up to her calves, holding a child. Behind them, a boat, dangerously crowded. At its edges, a blur - not quite visible - the shape of wings, or motion, or something escaping.
There was no caption.
I used to think she loved butterflies because they were beautiful. Because they transformed. But maybe she loved them because they vanished. Because they could.
She spoke sparingly about where she came from. Her accent curled under her vowels, folded itself into silence. Only when she was tired, or furious, did it slip free - sudden, sharp-edged, foreign even to her after years of separation.
She kept her past like she kept her specimens - archived, labelled, pressed flat between the pages of another life. The dome was her sanctuary, yes - but also her system. All enclosed, all contained.
But butterflies, even the rarest, don’t live long.
Outside, the air had thickened. The sky hung heavy with the scent of storm, intensified, like something about to break open. I stepped through the broken pane, glass crunching underfoot, and stood in the overgrown garden: lantana climbing over wire, morning glory curling like fists. The world buzzed - loud, lawless, alive.
And inside, the butterflies slept. Or they had flown. Or they had long since died.
Flutter, fissure, farewell.
–
I remember once - years ago - she let me stay after closing. The dome shimmered in the late light, in the space between dusk and twilight, when colours lost their edges and everything felt briefly suspended.
From a drawer, she lifted a butterfly with her forceps. “This one never emerged,” she said. “Some begin to change, then stop. That doesn’t make them unfinished.” She pressed it gently into place, aligned its wings with the others. “Transformation doesn’t always mean flight.”
She never spoke of faith, but her rituals were quiet and exacting. Each name she inked was an act of care, each label a way of holding the world still enough to learn its shape.
And in that room that I hated so much, she built something special. Not immortality, and not preservation either. But a way of seeing. A stillness that asked nothing but to be noticed, and named.