HIS FIRST MEMORY is of the butterfly room. His mother brought him there when he was too young to talk, to walk. Too young, she thought, to remember. Visiting the butterfly room was something she wanted for herself. His memory of it is more of a feeling, a sensation, than anything else. He remembers the light pouring in through glass windows. Other bodies moving around him. The sound of rushing water. The water was from man-made ponds and an artificial waterfall, but of course then he thought they were real, real as in natural. He remembers them as real. And the butterflies—bursts of blinking color around the room. Sometimes when he closes his eyes and sees bits of light flickering inside the dark, he thinks of the butterflies. But mostly, the butterfly room appears in his dreams. Sometimes it is raining outside. Sometimes inside. Sometimes he has lost someone inside the butterfly room. Sometimes the person he’s lost transforms into a butterfly and flies away from his view. He never sees the face of anyone he knows in the butterfly room. He can only guess who they might be by the way they look from behind, from the feeling the dream gives him while he’s inside of it. Sometimes he is locked outside the butterfly room. Sometimes he opens the door to leave and accidentally lets the butterflies escape. It is the feeling of this dream in particular that carries over into his waking life, that rouses him in a cold sweat, heart pounding, that gives him the feeling of falling and falling forever. His dreams of the butterfly room continue throughout his life. He transforms from a child into something else. He’ll see many other places, many remarkable places, that will transfix and capture him in their own distinct ways. But his dreams always bring him back to the first place he remembers, someplace that is and isn’t like the rest of the life that follows. Half a century after leaving that first place, he asks his mother over the phone about the butterfly room. Do you remember? he says. Yes, of course she does, she tells him. She didn’t think he did. She asks him if he would like to go back together someday. The two of them are not close. They do not see each other often. Her voice is hopeful. He can tell by the way it sounds across the line that she thinks visiting the butterfly room will maybe bring them back closer together, like they were the first time they were there. But even then, they had already begun drifting away from each other. They had drifted further and further until it was as if they did not inhabit the same world—that the world they had once shared had split into two, and they each occupied different shards. His world is no longer her world, and vice versa; the world she speaks of is not where he lives. No, he answers her, for fear of disrupting the careful architecture of the place his dreams have built. He remembers his mother’s silence after he tells her this, the sound of it. He remembers it much more clearly than he remembers the butterfly room, its precise contours and parameters, how exactly it encloses him. He has heard about the ruinous quality of memory. How recalling something from memory is an act of decay, as much or more than an act of preservation. But he does not think of the butterfly room—he dreams of it, where it only grows more and more alive, even as he grows less so. He dreams of it all the way through the end of his life. In his final days he is alone, but for a nun at his bedside. She tells him all about heaven. How it is being reunited with the people you lost in a place you loved, while embodying your most perfect form. But heaven is not the butterfly room. It is something else. It is somewhere else. A place he does not recognize. In heaven, he dreams of the butterfly room.

Nikki Barnhart is an MFA candidate in Fiction at The Ohio State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Post Road, Juked, Phoebe, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the AWP Intro Journals Prize.