The Lepidopterist

A short story about collecting

According to my agent, my next novel is best described as The Biography of X meets The Blind Assassin. This is a lot to live up to, and because I don’t like failing, I’m making forays into short stories and metaphor during this stage of drafting. Some of these might appear here, as this one below has. They are paywalled because I will be using them elsewhere. So think of this as a chance to have early eyes on ideas.

Although the collector becomes famed for butterflies, he begins with stones.

He starts like this: a summer’s evening, a beach, the sun beginning to set. He does not recall the sunset or its length or hue or intensity; only the stones on the beach, the day’s heat they held secure in his hands when he picked them up. How warm they were, how smooth they were, how otherworldly, how he wanted to touch them, to caress their surfaces. Some were, to him, the wrong shape and colour and texture to be pleasing. These he would quickly discard but the ones that felt as if they had been shaped to his own hands held a certain appeal and fascination as did the ones reflecting the sea’s work, worn by waves and years. These he would put in his mother’s straw bag, weighing her down on the long walk back up the hill home, his calf muscles burning in the dying heat, each new day breaking decades long records for this time of year. It seemed to him, that evening, that suddenly he knew for the first time, what his hands were for.