The Count

Soren's grandmother had counted forty butterflies on this lot in one hour, once. She had written it on the back of a seed packet in nineteen ninety-eight, and the seed packet was taped to her refrigerator, and that was why Maya and Soren were standing in the weeds at eight in the morning with a phone and a paper notebook.

"How many so far," Maya asked.

"Three," Soren said.

"In an hour."

Maya walked a slow circle through the milkweed. The pods were splitting, spilling silk. She pressed one open and the seeds came apart in her fingers like something breathing out.

"Maybe we're bad at counting," she said.

"We're not bad at counting."

"Maybe they're somewhere else. Maybe this lot got boring and they went to a better lot."

Soren wrote the three down. "Grandma's number is on the fridge. She didn't go find a better lot to count. She counted here. Same weeds."

"Same weeds," Maya said, and stopped walking.

A monarch went past her ear, close, the sound of it almost nothing. She followed it with her eyes until it dropped onto a milkweed leaf and folded shut. Orange, then edge, then gone.

"Four," she said.

"Four."

They sat down in the dry grass. Maya pulled up the app, the one that put your count on a map with everybody else's counts, thousands of dots across the whole country, all the way down to Mexico.

"Look," she said. "You can watch them move. Like a wave. They come up from Mexico in spring, lay eggs, die. The babies keep going north. Those babies have babies. It takes like four generations to get all the way up here."

"So the one that flew past your ear."

"Never met its great-grandparent. And in fall the last generation flies all the way back to the exact same trees in Mexico. Trees they've never seen." Maya turned the phone sideways. "Nobody teaches them the way. It's in them."

Soren was quiet. He was looking at the seed packet number in his head, forty, and the number on his page, four.

"That's a tenth," he said.

"What is."

"Four is a tenth of forty. Same lot. Same weeds. Same hour. Twenty years apart."

Maya took the seed packet math and turned it over. "So if Grandma's kid counted, they'd have gotten twenty. And Grandma's grandkid, us, we get four. It's going down every time somebody's born."

"That's not how you're supposed to count a thing," Soren said. "You're supposed to count it and it stays roughly the same and that's how you know what it is. This one keeps getting smaller while we watch."

A breeze came through and the whole lot leaned. Silk lifted off the split pods and went up, catching light, hundreds of tiny parachutes with a seed hung under each one. Maya watched them rise.

"Here's the thing I can't hold," she said. "They eat this. The caterpillars only eat this one plant. Milkweed. If you mow the lot, no milkweed, no caterpillars, no butterflies."

"People mow lots."

"People mow everything. And they spray. And the plant comes up when it always came up, but the butterfly comes north on a different week now because it's warmer, so the butterfly gets here and the milkweed's already old, or it's not up yet." She snapped her fingers, off. "They miss each other. Two things that have shown up together for a million years, and now they arrive on different days."

Soren wrote that down. Two things arriving on different days. His hand stayed on the page a second after he finished.

"Okay but," he said. "They're just one butterfly. There's a lot of butterflies. Why does everybody care about this one."

Maya didn't answer with words. She reached into the milkweed and tipped a flower cluster toward him. It was crawling. A fat bee, two smaller ones, something with a metallic green body, a wasp that wasn't interested in them, a beetle.

"Count those," she said.

"Why."

"Because the monarch's not eating dinner here. It's carrying pollen from this lot to the next lot to the next lot, all the way up a whole country and back. Whatever it touches, it moves. Now take it out." She closed her hand over the flower, gently, hiding it. "Take out the thing that flies farther than almost anything and lands on everything. What happens to all these guys."

Soren looked at the covered flower, then at the split pods sending seed up into the wind, then back at his page. Four. A tenth.

"You can't take it out," he said slowly. "It's not sitting in the middle of everything. It's the thread going through everything. You pull a thread, you don't get a hole. You get." He stopped.

"You get a different sweater," Maya said.

"You get a different sweater."

They were quiet. The fourth butterfly, the one that had folded shut, opened again and lifted off its leaf and started climbing, not toward the next lot, but up, higher than seemed useful, into the moving column of silk.

"Where's it going," Soren said.

"South, eventually. That one might be the one that goes the whole way." Maya stood up to keep it in sight. "That little thing right there might fly to Mexico. To a tree it's never seen. On instructions nobody wrote down."

Soren stood too. He had the notebook open against his chest, forgotten, watching the butterfly get smaller against the white parachutes of seed, all of it going up together, the seed that would make next year's milkweed and the butterfly that needed next year's milkweed to exist, rising into the same wind, on their way to arriving, or missing each other.

"We should count again tomorrow," he said.

Maya nodded, eyes up. "And write it on the fridge. Under Grandma's."

The butterfly crossed above the rooftops and turned orange one last time in the sun, and then the wind took it past where they could tell it apart from anything else.