The Monster and the Butterfly

Two - Clematis

You should follow in Gertrude's footsteps and marry a gentleman.

Madame's words haunt me, circulating throughout my brain and veins until they become nauseating. I know that at the very roots of such word, she meant nothing more than a simple jest, but I can't help but wonder if there is perhaps some truth there, too.

A husband can provide and protect. A husband can help me escape the confines of Whitechapel, sweeping me off my feet and taking me to Paris so that perhaps we can walk the streets Madame spoke so fondly of from her childhood. A husband can help me open a flower shop; a husband can make sure I never go hungry. But can a husband replace Papa? Can finding a husband fill that void in my heart that'd been carved away by my devotion to my father?

No. A husband cannot.

I've not the heart to abandon just abandon Papa, not when I know there's no one else that cares for him, still loves him for the memories of that jovial man from our childhood. Surely, he'd die of loneliness, perhaps even madness, just as how I'd die with shame.

Such thoughts continue to suck all life from my soul and bones, leaving me to do no more than passively advertise my flowers. All I've the spirit to do is meekly gaze onward, occasionally offering my blooms out with the hopes someone would at least feign enough interest to buy bouquet or two.

Yesterday's boisterous howls and wild prancing are replaced with demure, "A half-penny for a rose, my good lady? A shilling for a bouquet, sir?" and gentle gestures. Just ghosts of my usual sprightly actions.

Still, no one buys my rotting flowers. But right now, I've not the disposition to care.

Everything is hidden beneath the thick haze of late afternoon, though it's difficult to decipher is such haze is the smog belched forth from the bowels of the factories or an even fouler smog that creeps away from the River Thames, or even the invisible fog that clouds my mind and blinds my senses. Even right in front of me, people and vehicles pass by not in human shapes, but rather the indiscernible masses of dull, lifeless shades of browns, greys, ivories, and blacks. I'm consumed by the numbness of my own thoughts and made dumb by the haunting whispers of Madame's words until they become an ugly string of slurred syllables.

Follow Gertrude's footsteps... Marry a gentleman... Marry a gentlemanmarryagentlemanmarryagentlemanmarry—

"Sophie?"

Tearing through this fogged trance is a nasal voice, and then a single flash of greenish-teal pierces through my vision, soon followed by the emergence sallow-faced, golden-haired form from the smog.

"Sophie? Are you ill?" The man asks, his voice now sharper, and I feel the brief breeze of his hand wavering before my face.

When my vision clears, Thomas's form becomes recognizable, and his face is the same twisted expression of confused concern he bore last night when he saw my lack of hair, and just how little I received for it.

Unlike my own, Thomas's hair hangs in curled strands of yellow, a similar shade of yellow to the sawdust littering across the tattered lapel and patchwork shoulders of his coat, around a face made sallow and thin from many sleepless nights and the scratchy stubble marking his square chin and lip. His touch is cold against my cheek, a touch fully bringing me back to the present. It's not cold in gesture but rather in temperature, and with the calluses roughening his fingertips. Behind him, a butterfly flutters before settling on the cart, its teal wings gently quivering.

"I'm fine," I finally say and bat his hand away with a try at a smile. "Merely lost in thought, nothing else."

Over deeply set eyes that're dark brown like aged molasses, Thomas's brow wrinkles, but he nods, accepting my answer. He looks past me, at my wagon still overflowing with flowers and the company of a single butterfly. "No sales today," he assumes; his lips press together thinly, sympathetically.