A Butterfly in Flame by Nicholas Kilmer

hell. Peter, let’s move.”
    Peter stood, gathering up a knapsack and hoisting it to his shoulders.
    The foghorn had started again, moving so insidiously into the atmosphere that the beginning of the sound’s recurrence had not been noticeable. A thin rain, which might be no more than settling cloud, had obediently followed. Fred turned up the collar of his jacket.
    “You want the applicant tour?” Peter asked as they set off, heading toward a neighboring building that looked the same as Stillton Hall.
    “I will go crazy if you give me the applicant tour,” Fred assured him.
    “I thought so. We’ll get out of the rain. I’ll draw you a map, we can talk, I’ll maybe give you a line on what you want.”
    “You’ve spent time in the service,” Fred offered.
    “Marines.” Peter led the way around Stillton Hall and into the large shed Meg Harrison had indicated earlier. It gave the effect of a low barn in which a colony of nudists was engaged in hieratic contemplation of the ineffable.
    “Harrison’s work,” Peter explained. “Don’t touch anything.” Harrison’s figures, either life size or three-quarters, stood in frank and simple poses reminiscent of, perhaps, the archaic Greek. They were oddly symmetrical, especially for this day and age. If a right arm was raised, the left was raised also, in almost the same gesture. They were both male and female, adult or young adult. One, her arms bent upwards so that her elbows reached the level of the top of her head, could have been intended as a caryatid, holding a roof up. There must be a dozen figures, all apparently transfixed with expectation of the second coming; maybe the third.
    “How the devil does she move these things?” Fred asked.
    “Fork lift. And very carefully,” Peter said. Each figure stood on its own wooden skid. Though they differed markedly from one another in stance, body type, and features, and even in the way the surfaces were treated, they seemed kin. “She says, in here we are in Plato’s cave,” Peter explained, “which means something to her. Maybe to you.”
    “And she fires these? At this size?”
    “We could. The kiln’s big enough. But she mostly lets them dry out, makes molds from them, sends the molds to New York to be cast in epoxy or bronze or plaster or whatever. There, over there’s, the machine to grind clay, and all. But you don’t care about that. Let’s sit.”
    He led the way to a workbench and shoved tools and debris aside until there was space for him to lay out the drawing pad he pulled from his knapsack. They hoiked a couple of stools over and sat.
    “There are buildings here and there. Some you wouldn’t find, like printmaking. Photography we don’t have any more. I’ll be drawing the map while we talk,” Peter said. “In case someone wants to know what we’re doing. But, like I say, you don’t care about that.”
    “What
do
I care about, Fred asked.
    “Harmony knows shit about what she’s doing,” Peter said. “Tom and I, we put her on speaker half the time, if nobody’s around.”

Chapter Twenty
    “Problem is, most of the time I’m in class. Also she’s gone a lot. She goes to lunch. That’s what presidents do, she says, like she’s about to be crucified. Then comes back half in the bag. Or doesn’t come back, more like.”
    “I can’t quite see her at Bee’s Beehive,” Fred said.
    “Are you kidding? Mix with the natives? That would be unheard of, as she would say. She drives to meet friends in Salem or Marblehead or Beverly or one or two places in New Hampshire. Or Boston.”
    “She lives in Stillton?”
    Peter laughed. While he talked he had been drawing a map that seemed to include the entire peninsula. He was confident enough of his work that he drew with a pen. “That would also be unheard of. Nobody lives in Stillton.” Peter managed to sound like Liz Harmony when he said this: Liz Harmony confiding to friends, at a distance, after a bout of golf followed by a more