Collection

By the time I was old enough to find it, the wooden box with the hinged glass lid was stored away in the dank underneath-the-front-porch room, in the basement. The contents were still intact and brilliant, and I thought I’d found treasure, jewels gleaming in the dim mouldering. I brought this precious find upstairs and asked questions. The answers flew off the cuff, like this was something ordinary: oh, yeah, I paid a boy in Ceylon to catch butterflies for me and pin them in this box. And this shiny black exoskeleton? A centipede, ominous. My dad never talked about the War much. He piloted a Lancaster, a monster of a bomber, said he only bombed bridges, not people. The sepia photos show him smart, cocky even, in his air force uniform, standing on a blazing hot, wavering, smouldering tarmac, in front of the ready beast. I imagined a brown-skinned boy in dirty linen, bringing him pieces for his collection. I wonder how he decided what to bring home, after four years gone. And how this choice, this treasure, came to be abandoned in the basement - something once a pleasure, now devoid of meaning, other than for me. I remember blues and violets, amber and gold. I remember one huge swallowtailed beauty. They crumbled, though, bit by bit, small chips of wing fell onto the black velvet and disintegrated. Eventually all that was left was the giant centipede, as if it had devoured all the rest.