The Last Monarch

NOTE:  The following short story is drawn from the as-yet-unpublished anthology of short stories entitled “Third Time Lucky”.

 

The Last Monarch

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 The last monarch perched on a solitary milkweed plant and laid a fresh batch of eggs.  The last monarch was confident this final act of hers would help perpetuate her species for time immemorial.  How naïve of her!

How perfectly stupid indeed!!

Little did the last monarch know the milkweed plant she currently rested upon would be mowed down in less than a week’s time by an obsessive/compulsive county employee, and that none of her eggs would ever hatch.

Not even one….. 

No, the last monarch was just relieved to have performed this instinctive duty in deference to the survival of her species, and had nary a clue that she was the last of her kind…..now and forever.

The last monarch launched herself from the milkweed plant and flew off in a southerly direction with no particular destination in mind.  She had done her part to honor nature’s undeviating call and perpetuate her kind; she could do whatever she pleased now.  There were no others of her species in the air as she aimlessly fluttered along, but she wasn’t especially troubled by this fact.  Truth is, she hadn’t seen any others of her ilk in the past few days….no, it was more like weeks if not months.  But the last monarch had grown somewhat used to this unrelenting solitude.  Didn’t like it, mind you, but she had begrudgingly grown accustomed to it.

The last monarch spied a rural farmstead in the distance and took aim for it.  She knew there always seemed to be more excitement anywhere human beings congregated, and she was a big fan of excitement.  The last monarch settled on an exposed leaf of a lilac bush—one of many planted in a neat, perfidiously straight row–and spread her wings to luxuriate in the warmth of a late afternoon sun.  She had nary a care in the world; her eggs had been laid, and the remainder of the time she had left to live was all hers.  The last monarch allowed herself time to doze for a few seconds, to relax and take a brief break away from her woefully short, predetermined butterfly life.  She switched off her vision momentarily and rested fitfully.

The next recollection the last monarch had was waking to the tumult of a young boy screaming with pleasure as she felt herself being rushed along.  The last monarch found herself painfully entrapped within a cloth mesh net, sans the ability to flap her wings or move about at all.  The aforementioned boy was racing along at breakneck speed and squealing with unrestrained glee, boisterously celebrating his conquest over another strain of animal.  The two of them were moving inexorably toward the entrance to one of those big buildings where human beings gather and make lots of noise.

Once inside, the last monarch found herself being transferred into an empty one-quart mayonnaise jar, and next its metal cover–which the boy took a few seconds to puncture several holes through with a claw hammer and rusty nail–was screwed tightly onto the small glass receptacle.  Finally, the boy hurried upstairs and deposited the jar containing the last monarch on top of a wooden dresser, far away from the lone window in his bedroom which of course was responsible for the preponderance of sunlight filtering in lazily through the rectangular opening at a steep, forty-five-degree angle.

And that is where the last monarch spent the remaining days of her life—trapped forlornly within a glass jar in a dark corner of a long forgotten boy’s bedroom, light years away from the wind and sunlight and roadside patches of milkweed that she so dearly loved.

The last monarch died shortly thereafter as a misbegotten trophy–as stark testimony to mankind’s unique crusade to exercise absolute control over his surrounding environment.  The jar she was imprisoned in was eventually tossed into a glass recycling bin with the body of the last monarch still lying motionless within it.  And that was it.  No one mourned her loss, few bothered to notice, and nobody even seemed to care.