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"Let’s get off and walk froo on foot She wanted to watch his upturned face Despite the wet hair stuck to his forehead and raindrops stippling his wire-fra-Billy, there-goes-King-Billy!" he cried again and again, rolling the sentence out in the rapid-fire"Five-four-three-two-one-blastoff!" prior to launching flying objects Soon there were too et his own announcement, but Preston’s mouth stillaround as before Not a river ofdown the trail, they looked a little drunk or crazed, sory too," Preston said "What do they eat?"

"I have no idea," she confessed He was right, they would surely need to eat, after hunkering in the rain for days without cease She was e questions that had not occurred to her But she refused to be first in the long line of people ould shrug him off "We’ll have to look that up"

"Look it up where?"

"Google it, I guess"

"Okay," he said

Googling a butterfly It sounded co a catfish, but she kneouldn’t sound that way to Preston He would clamber up to the co what he needed in there Having children was not like people said Forget training the ring and found the Internet, you were useless as a source of anything but shoes and a winter coat But Preston still asked her questions That touched her, that they were a teahtly, as if crossing a street, as they approached the trees where the butterflies hung in their droves Wings littered the ground "Look up," she said, pointing at the brown clusters drooping from the branches These trees were completely filled now Even the tree trunks wore butterfly pelts, all the way up, like the bristling hairy legs of giants It was a whole butterfly forest,as witchy tresses or dead foliage She only knehat they really were because her eyes had learned the secret Preston’s had not It all waited for him, perfectly still and alive She watched his dark pupils dart up and around, puzzling this out, looking without yet seeing Mine, ours, her heartbeat thu promises from the inside This was better than Christht

"What is it?" he asked

"That’s the King Billies too I know it looks weird, how they’re all hanging down But the whole thing is butterflies"

"Gaaa!" he cried, breaking free of her grip He ran toward a round fro a tiny boy Before she could warn hiainst it, he reached up to stroke it with his hand, causing it to writhe and awaken Wings opened and jockeyed within the clu dropped off, landing with a plop on the ground In slow , dispersing

Preston looked back at her, expecting a reprientle, I guess"

She walked closer so she could see this as her son was seeing it She hadn’t exae, and even noas hard to understand how they were constructed The butterflies didn’t sees of other butterflies, not like a hundred-car pileup, it was nothing so si on by their needle-thin front legs to some part of the tree itself, bark or branch or needle, out to the very tips The tree’s basic shape was still visible underneath, the column of trunk and brooerated by the hangers-on Only at the ends of the dangling clusters did butterflies sees of other butterflies The insecure and the desperate, she thought No world can be without them