Radio Belly by Buffy Cram

burnt—its papery wings still smoking, its small black body crisp and hollow. You are just about to pick it up when another butterfly floats to the ground beside you, with one wing flaming blue. Soon they are landing— pat, pat, pat —all around. The sky is filled with them, burning butterflies tracing slow spirals through the air like maple keys. And then one is tilting toward you, still alive, burning and beating its wings. With each rush of air, the flames grow. Then, paralyzed, the butterfly coasts for a time, sinking lower and lower on shrinking wings. This struggle continues—the beating and the flaming, the coasting and the falling—until at last it hits dirt, wingless, with a body like a charred raisin. It is metamorphosis in reverse. And the smell is of burning shoes. And the silence is unbearable because this much death should make noise. In a moment it is you making the noise. You are shrieking, batting the air and running for the covered alley behind the market.
    And that’s when you see Nug, standing in the middle of the market, at the centre of a circle of men. You recognize some of them as the older brothers and young uncles of your students. Nug is looking up at the butterflies, hugging herself and whimpering, her face stretched into a silent scream. A butterfly flames past her nose and she wails and then the men close in on her. They push her back and forth, taunting, hissing, and their hands are all over her, on her breasts, her stomach, between her legs. They are raking at her clothes. Their fingers are on her face, in her mouth. And then her shirt is off and they are tossing it over her head, piggy-in-the-middle, and she is jumping, laughing with her sloppy, wide grin and the tears are fanning out across her cheeks. It is a game. She is laughing and crying, half-naked. And then they are pushing her to her knees, forcing her down.
    You step out of the alley, screeching, throwing rocks, old fruit, whatever you can find. The men scatter. They slip away through cracks in the market walls and then it is just you and Nug and a thousand burning butterflies—the ground has grown soft with them. She is shirtless and shaking so hard her head looks loose on her neck. All around you the hills are burning.
    AT SCHOOL, CLASSES have already started and Mr. Bruce is nowhere to be found. You get Nug settled in his office and then knock on Mrs. Diana’s door.
    â€œMr. Bruce gone,” she says.
    â€œGone where?” you demand. “What’s going on here?” You don’t mean to yell.
    She peers over her shoulder at her class, then steps a little farther into the hall, closing the door behind. “Trouble coming,” she says. “War coming.”
    You snort, more of a laugh really. You refuse to believe there could be a war approaching without your knowing anything about it!
    But she doesn’t laugh with you. Her eyes are deep and earnest, not black from this proximity but brown within brown within brown.
    You can’t, just now, remember home. You can’t remember being anywhere but here, in this hallway, smelling of burnt wings, talking about war, as if it’s a thing that can just sneak up on a person.
    Down the hall, Nug is lolling on Mr. Bruce’s desk, singing softly to herself.
    THE FIRST THING you do when you step back into the classroom is make a big show of putting your mask on. The second thing you do is tell your female students to do the same. Then you instruct them to take out pencils and paper. Today they will be taking notes, you tell them, lots of notes.
    You divide the board with two headings: Good and Bad and then you flip through the Speech book placing each topic on one side or the other. Bad = Poverty, Oppression, Childhood Obesity, Poor Credit Rating, Discrimination, Weapons of Mass Destruction. Good = Democracy, Education, Retirement Savings Plans, Freedom of Speech, Sunscreen, Mammograms. You dictate a short speech on each topic,