The Butterfly Enigma

Jannitta Yao

The doors of the ER were thrown open with a loud bang, exposing the patients in the room to the ambulance screaming in the summer heat. The murderer was wheeled in bloody and broken, his cot immediately surrounded by a swarm of medics throwing diagnostics around, their voices increasing in worry with every sentence.

“Three fractured ribs, punctured spleen, difficulty breathing!”

“Arm broken in three places!”

“Nasty cut on leg, may require stitches.”

“His heartbeat is slowing!”

“Quick, call the trauma surgeon!”

Daniel Tyler, the trauma surgeon in question, was currently standing in the hospital parking lot, peering in through the glass doors at the frantic scene inside. “He’s killed how many people?” he asked Jenny, the ambulance driver, unable to believe his ears.

“At least five, that we know of,” Jenny breathed. Her cheeks were flushed bright pink, her emerald eyes sparkling with excitement. To any bystander, she could have been talking to Daniel about her vacation plans, rather than the deaths of five innocent people. “Apparently, he got into a feud with this family, like, ages ago, so last night, he decided to break into their house, throw a lit gasoline barrel inside, and then barricade all the doors and windows so they couldn’t get out. Isn’t that just sick?”

Rather than appropriating her tone to reflect the serious topic of discussion, her voice rose in pitch, and she leaned in towards him as if revealing a great secret. “Then, his getaway car took a turn too fast, and he drove off a hill. Now here he is, lying in the hospital like any other patient. And you get to operate on him! When else do you get to operate on a murderer?”

Daniel nervously laughed, and opened his mouth to respond. Before he could say anything, the hospital doors were thrown open again, and the panicked voice of a medic calling for him drifted through the muggy air.

“Sorry, Jenny, I’ve got to go.” He brushed past her, feigning nonchalance he didn’t have. She was left standing alone in the lit parking lot, an unspoken goodbye still lingering on her lips.

With every step that he took towards the towering hospital, Daniel thought of Jenny’s words. That’s a once in a lifetime chance, Daniel! He should feel excited about this chance, he realized. To heal a murderer so that he could stand trial before the court of law, and own up to what he had done. However, every time Daniel thought of touching the murderer’s skin, he could only imagine five people, screaming for help, clawing at the barred doors until their fingers started bleeding, while flames licked at bare flesh and smoke choked their screams. How could he possibly voluntarily save the life of someone who had so little humanity in him that he would murder people in cold blood? Bodies wheeled out on stretchers, faces frozen in screams of terror, skin so charred it was unrecognizable.

He eased open the glass doors and abruptly stopped dead, a chilling thought occurring to him. What if the murderer was not convicted? What if he went through all that trouble of saving him just to have the murderer walk free?

Unless… I could kill him right now, he realized. I could kill him so easily, and no one would ever know. No one would care. Not. One. Bit.

His reverie was interrupted when the doors burst open and an middle-aged father crashed into him from behind, sending him sprawling on the ground. The man shot him a dirty look while growling unintelligibly under his breath. He then marched off, dragging his young daughter behind him. A sparkly butterfly clip holding her hair back caught Daniel’s eye.

Daniel pushed himself up to a standing position, straightened his white doctor’s coat, and ran a hand through his own messy brown hair, eyes still fixated on the butterfly clip.

He vividly remembered a day over thirty years ago, when he was in his garden, trying to catch butterflies with his sticky fingers. His eyes had spotted a butterfly with brown-speckled wings fluttering among the sea of yellow and orange monarchs. When he reached out and cupped it with his hands, he could feel the frantic beating of the butterfly’s wings against his palms, struggling to escape its prison. But if he let it go, it would tarnish the beautiful backdrop that the monarchs painted in his garden.

“I don’t like you,” he had proclaimed, “you’re different than the others.” With that, he had crushed his palms together, silencing the butterfly’s flapping forever.

He could do unto the murderer what he had done to the butterfly in an instant.

What sort of a man would that make him? Would he be able to go home and face his kids, knowing that he had willingly killed someone? His mind started chasing more terrifying thoughts. What if the murderer came for his family, and locked them all in a burning house? He could almost picture the satisfied sneer on the murderer’s face as he stood outside the barred windows, watching them scream.

The chatter of the patients in the room turned into the screams of his family, the summer heat into uncontrollable flames, eating away at him.

Daniel started breathing heavily in the middle of the cheery reception room. The white walls seemed to close in on him, and he fell heavily on one of the leather-backed chairs, clutching his receding hair with the force of a madman.

“Doctor!”, a medic snapped across the room, “We need you now!”

Daniel jolted in his chair. He pushed himself up with trembling arms, and staggered across the room into the surgery ward. The room was clinically white, the erratic beep of the heart monitor mingling with his own pulse. The murderer was spread open on a operating table, medics hovering over him like fruit flies. Suddenly, the actions of the medics intensified as the heart monitor began to slow down, each beat more sluggish than before.

Daniel snapped on his latex gloves, clenched his jaw, and then walked forward to pick up a scalpel.