Xerces Blue

She sits with the box as her only company for three full days.

It's edges pristinely wrapped, the brown paper pulled taught and intentional, smooth on every side. A measure of doubt sits tickling the back of her throat, vague and unthreatening but there nonetheless. There's something wrong with the package, something that refuses to make sense within the confines of her mind. It takes her three whole days to pinpoint the source of it as this: the man (just barely beyond boyhood at the time) she parted ways with was the human embodiment of dishevelled, incapable of producing these sharp corners with his fumbling hands. Yet this parcel sits before her now, silent in the shadow of the corner of her kitchen, and it has his fingerprints all over it.

Familiar handwriting scrawls her name across the top:

For Addison.

His fingerprints decorate some of the deepest parts of her, too. Two months spent with him as her only company three summers prior made sure of that. Two months, three summers prior, in a cabin where they wasted their days awaiting the arrival of fauna that never showed their faces.

It began as the summer of the Xerces blue, her notebooks littered with hopefulness and excitement over the opportunity to view the last of the species in their natural habitat. The hours proved long and the days even longer, and science turned to poetry beneath her palm. Infatuation for the boy she'd been paired with leaked from the margins toward the ruled spaces.

Sometimes she thinks back and wonders whether they missed the butterfly fluttering through the tall grass while they held one another's gaze and laughed.

It began as the summer of the Xerces blue, and ended with the departure of her first love. She has stacks of unsent letters that live in the bottom of her closet, written in the weeks that followed directly afterward:

For Thomas.

But there was nothing left to say, nothing they'd been careful enough to leave unsaid in the first place.

And now she sits with this box. It's been in her possession for three whole days, and somehow she's convinced herself that peeling back the paper will mar the memories of that summer. She worries that she'll lose track of important pieces, like a puzzle spread across a dining room table, incomplete and abandoned. To add anything else might take away from what already exists.

"He wanted you to have this," his sister said when she stopped in. The phrasing of it hasn't sat right with Addison since, something about the past tense of it turning her stomach.

There's a fire inside the box. The sort of flame that could burn her house down and cook her from the inside out. It's hot to the touch, and Addison refuses to believe it's the humidity in her home that's made it so. The problem with fire, though, is that it demands undivided attention.

At the close of every night, Thomas had always been insistent, "We wait until the coals run cold. Can't take any chances."

A spark can be everlasting, after all.

(And it never seemed to matter how long it took for the fire to calm and quiet. Long after its warmth faded, the young lovers kept talking.)

She bites the bullet, trepidation temporarily ignored with a reach for a bottle of red and - shit - it's not a twist-off. From a drawer overfilled with mostly-neglected utensils she pulls a double-hinged corkscrew. Struggles with the dull blade and the aluminium foil, but isn't fazed by the way it tears jagged when it's only meant to be discarded. She struggles with the cork itself next, her hands shaking by the time she's manoeuvred the pliable cork from its previous home.

A glass is foregone in favour of Malbec to mouth, a splash of red dribbles down to soak into the crisp cream colour of her shirt--and she doesn't mind.

The box is staring at her from the corner, the letters of her name like eyes boring and pleading. Addison isn't ready for her memory of Thomas the boy to transform into that of Thomas the man, isn't ready to replace the memory of the night they fell asleep in dew-dampened grass and awoke to chickadees chirping and sun peaking through the trees with whatever he's decided, after all this time, was important enough to send her way.

But the parcel arrived with a quiet plea, a request from her past that she open it. So she does, hands still shivering in the heat and the trepidation, and inside she finds a shadow box wrapped within a towel.

Within the frame, a Xerces blue, pinned and mounted on display.

There's a note, in his writing, that reads, "They went extinct."

Addison wishes she wouldn't have opened it. She wishes neither of them cared enough to know this truth.