The Empty Map

Maya's grandmother kept a postcard from nineteen ninety-six taped inside the kitchen cabinet. It showed the back garden orange with butterflies, so thick on the fence you couldn't see the wood.

"They came through every September," Grandma said. "You couldn't hang laundry without one landing on you."

Maya looked out the window at the same fence. Gray wood. No orange anywhere. A single white moth bumping the screen.

"Where did they go?" Maya asked.

"South. Mexico. The same place they always went." Grandma pulled on her gardening gloves. "Help me clear the back lot. It's gone to weeds."

The back lot was a mess of tall stalks with fat seedpods splitting open, leaking white silk into the wind. Maya started yanking them up. They came out hard, with deep roots.

She stopped at the fourth one. There was a caterpillar on it. Striped yellow, black, and white, the boldest thing she had ever seen, fat as her thumb.

"Grandma. What's this plant?"

Grandma squinted. "Milkweed. A nuisance. It's choking the fence line."

Maya did not pull that one up. She crouched and watched the caterpillar chew. It ate the milkweed leaf and nothing else. It did not move to the grass or the dandelions. Only the milkweed.

"It's only eating this," Maya said.

"That's what they do." Grandma was already three stalks down the row, ripping.

Maya looked at the caterpillar. She looked at the postcard fence. She looked at the seedpods Grandma had thrown in a pile, the white silk blowing away across the lot and out toward the road.

Something did not fit, and she chased it.

"Grandma, wait." Maya stood up. "The butterflies. The orange ones. Were they monarchs?"

"That's right."

"And the caterpillars become the butterflies."

"Of course."

"So the orange butterflies on your fence," Maya said slowly, "started as these caterpillars. On this plant. The one we're pulling up."

Grandma stopped ripping. She stood with a milkweed stalk in her fist and looked at it like she had never seen it before.

"I've been pulling these out for twenty years," she said.

Maya walked the row, counting. There had been milkweed all along this fence once. She could see the old stumps, the cut places, the dead roots. Twenty years of clearing. Twenty years of a tidy lot.

"The caterpillar can't eat anything else," Maya said. "You said it yourself. That's what they do. So if there's no milkweed, there's no caterpillar."

"And no butterfly," Grandma said quietly.

Maya knelt by the one plant she had saved. The caterpillar was still eating, calm, certain, in a hurry the way a thing is in a hurry when it has a long way to go and not much time.

She thought about the long way. Mexico. Grandma had said it like it was nothing, but Maya turned it over now. This soft striped thing was going to become a butterfly that weighed less than a paperclip, and that butterfly was going to fly to Mexico. To a place it had never been. To the exact forest its great-great-grandparents left.

"How does it know the way?" Maya asked. "If the butterfly that flew north isn't the same one that flies back. If it's four generations later. How does the new one know where to go?"

Grandma opened her mouth. Then she closed it.

"I don't know," she said. "I never thought to ask."

Maya sat back on her heels. Nobody had told this caterpillar anything. Its parents were dead. Its grandparents were dead. It had hatched on a plant by a gray fence in a town it would leave forever, and somewhere folded inside it was a map of a country it had never seen, and a clock that told it when to go.

And the clock was the problem. "Grandma, what if the timing's off?"

"What timing?"

"The clock that tells it when to leave. It has to leave when the milkweed is up north so the babies can eat, and arrive in Mexico when it's cold enough but not too cold." Maya was talking fast now. "What if the seasons move? Warm springs, late frosts. The flowers bloom early, the cold comes late. The butterfly's clock says go, but the map's already changed underneath it."

Grandma lowered herself slowly onto an overturned bucket.

"You're saying it could do everything right," she said. "Leave on time. Fly the whole way. And still arrive at the wrong moment."

"Because the moment moved." Maya looked at the silk blowing across the empty lot, each seed a milkweed that wasn't going to be allowed to grow, on this lot or the next one or the hundred lots between here and Mexico. Thousands of tidy fences. Thousands of pulled stalks. A whole continent quietly weeded clean along the only road these butterflies knew.

She understood why the fence was gray.

"It wasn't one thing," Maya said. "It was everyone. A little bit. Everywhere. For twenty years."

Grandma was quiet for a long time. A car went by on the road. The white moth was gone.

"I pulled them because they were untidy," Grandma said. "I thought I was keeping the garden."

Maya stood up. She looked down the long fence line, at the dead stumps and the cut places and the one plant left with one caterpillar on it, eating in a hurry, carrying a map nobody gave it to a place it had never been.

She went to the pile of torn milkweed. The seedpods were still half full, the silk still packed inside, brown seeds tucked into the white.

Maya picked up a pod. She walked to the bare edge of the lot where the dirt was loosest, and she knelt, and she pushed her thumb into the ground.

"What are you doing?" Grandma asked.

"Putting the map back," Maya said.

She dropped a seed in the hole and pressed the dirt over it. Then she stood and opened her whole fist into the wind, and the silk lifted and scattered down the fence line and out across the lot and over the road toward the next gray fence, and the next, every seed a small white parachute carrying its brown weight somewhere it had never been.