Two Butterflies in the Dust：A Work in Progress

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A former painter in his forties has erased his past.

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After destroying all of his artworks, he no longer identifies as an artist. Instead, he works as a “plant extinction inspector”—an unofficial, unmarked role that places him in quiet proximity to ecological surveillance and hidden forms of authority.

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He does not wear a uniform.

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But he carries the logic of one.

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Years ago, his wife died unexpectedly, possibly due to a severe mushroom-related allergy. Since then, his daughter has stopped speaking.

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That same year, he destroyed his paintings.

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Some losses are clean. Others reorganize everything that follows.

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Recently, he begins to notice something unsettling.

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His seventeen-year-old daughter and a neighbor’s boy are behaving in ways that feel secretive, coordinated, and intentionally hidden.

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Believing he is protecting her, he uses his position to access resources and begins quietly monitoring them.

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What he discovers is not criminal activity.

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It is something else entirely.

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The children are protecting life.

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A small mushroom.

Two caterpillars.

Fragile organisms they treat as if they matter more than anything else around them.

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And in doing so, they begin to sense that they themselves are being watched.

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A quiet game of observation begins.

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Father and children move around each other like opposing systems—each convinced of their moral position, each increasingly unable to see the other clearly.

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But this is not only a story of surveillance.

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It is a story of accumulated memory.

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The neighbor boy eventually confronts the father with an accusation rooted in the past—an event involving the forced replacement of an elderly woman’s flowers with artificial robotic plants, an act that may have contributed to her death.

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The daughter, who has been silent for years, suddenly speaks in fluent Quebec French.

She names him not as a father, but as something closer to a source of fear.

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A nightmare that has learned how to speak softly.

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She acknowledges the complexity of love, but also its distortion—how care can become control, and how protection can quietly replace freedom.

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As tension collapses into confrontation, the system between them breaks open.

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Not through violence.

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But through recognition.

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In the final moments, the children bury what remains of the spoiled mushrooms and the caterpillars that have already completed their transformation into butterflies before dying.

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Together, they place them into the ground and build a small handmade grave marker.

A quiet ritual of closure—part ecological awareness, part childhood logic, part something neither fully explainable nor fully symbolic.

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Just necessary.

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After they leave, the father remains.

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He walks through the disturbed soil, looking at what has been uncovered and what has been hidden.

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He slowly lifts a sapper’s shovel.

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Not as a tool of destruction alone, but as something heavier than that—an instrument of decision inside a world where understanding is no longer neutral.

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Notes on the Work (Work in Progress)

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Two Butterflies in the Dust is currently in development.

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The story is not complete. It is still being written, revised, and reshaped.

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It explores ecological responsibility, family memory, surveillance, and the blurred boundary between protection and harm.

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At its center is a simple but unresolved question:

What does it mean to act for someone’s good, when every act of protection also has the power to reshape what it claims to save?

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And what remains, when certainty is no longer available?​