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CHAPTER FOUR prim's purity
PRIMROSE BLANCHARD COLLECTED butterflies. It was her hobby, alongside dancing in the bathroom sporting a devilish red grin when she should be washing her troubles away, she collected butterflies. Upon her bedroom wall were framed species of every butterfly Prim could think of on the top of her head, their wings delicately pierced with a pin no thinner than a strand of hair, and no sharper than a slice of a blade. The wings of cobalt blue, plum purple and impossible pink decorated the otherwise minimalistic blandness of her room that she saw more like a prison. She would always tell Bernadette that her lucky one was a simple white one, though common, it was effortless. It flew in the wind like a soft petal, fluidly flying until it grounded itself upon a flower.
On the day of her last life, Primrose found a white butterfly. Accompanying the nascent sunlight that bled into her room, the sun acting as her own personal alarm clock, she peeled her bedroom curtains to reveal the white butterfly crash landed into the sill of her outside window. It had tucked itself under a clump of dust that had gathered from years of neglect, it's left wing twitching every now and then, whilst its right remained limp completely. She had scooped it up with trembling fingers, running towards a minuscule glass bowl on her desk that held her rings, and instantly whipped through the morning silence to her eldest sister's room. That was how Bernadette Blanchard awoke on the morning of October 15th, to Prim blubbering her eyes out about the broken butterfly she couldn't fix.
"Well, now you can put it up on your walls." Bernie had offered. Prim remained curled up in her lap, teardrops dribbling off the curve of her nose and onto Bernadette's leg. There was a tragedy about Prim, a certain extremity that no one knew how to deal with. When she was happy, she felt all the emotions ten times heavier than they had to be. She soared on the wings of phenomenal ecstasy, floating on euphoria as if she could skip on the clouds due to her ethereality. However, she she was upset, distraught wrapped around her skin like poisons snakes, poking their jagged bites into her skin as the virulent venom consumed her with nothing but unbearable hurt. "It can watch over you now."
"But it's going to die!" Prim had whimpered, stuffing her face further into her sister's legs. The satin sheets were no longer comfortable, and the other butterflies sprung back to life to glare at her evilly. "The ones I collect are already passed, this one is in my care and I can't do anything to save it."
Tire still poked at Bernadette's eyes, and her dreams and thoughts were a jumble of incoherent messes inside her mind, so all she continued to do was brush the chestnut hairs from her sister's soddened face and hummed at her to breathe properly. The golden light poured through the window that had been left open like glimmering water, soaking the walls up so a certain light struck the corners and mirrors, sending the framed butterflies to spark with psychedelic rainbow lights. A rod of kaleidoscopic luminance lay on Prim's bare skin, her tanned flesh alive with the colours of physics.
