A child takes the butterfly he caught and pins it on a board with a deft movement of the wrist. Taking extreme care not to disturb the scales, he spreads each wing by the vein at its edge to give a semblance of life as when he first saw it on a flower.
He hangs the board above his desk. Glancing at it from three, five, seven steps away, he lifts the bottom right corner a hair’s breadth.
After two weeks, the child scarcely notices his prize. He has looked at it so often that he has memorized its anatomy. The arcades of the veins no longer surprise his eye. The segments of the curled thorax, treasured by the child for they signified its prior form, seem a grotesque remnant of an incomplete metamorphosis.
Glancing up at the crucifixion, the child feels robbed of promise, but a certain satisfaction remains, and this we call power.