Unexpected Contact

Unexpected Contact

Note: It turns out I'm mistaken as to the exact nature of Ned's gift--his curse only activates on things already dead in the first place. In a mixture of overanalyzing and not analyzing enough, I came to the erroneous conclusion that his touching living things is deadly for them...

Unexpected Contact

At this moment, a rather beautiful but doomed butterfly is swooping and fluttering around a very oddly shaped building, with no idea that in a few brief minutes, its life will be snuffed out by circumstance. Despite every good intention on the part of its inadvertent killer, this delicate creature will, on a whim, land gently on a young man's exposed skin twice and shortly thereafter, drop dead of sheer bad luck.

The fact that the butterfly's life-span was reaching its apex will not prove to be much consolation to the insect once deceased, nor will it derive much comfort from being the subject of an argument between its accidental assassin and the woman he loves.

Blissfully ignorant of its fate, the butterfly floats elegantly downward, spying a particularly comfortable-looking perch not far from a very tasty-looking flower. It is five days, twenty-three minutes, and forty-six seconds old, and will grow no older.

=====

Burdened by a surprisingly heavy bouquet of wildflowers, the Pie Maker stood nervously outside his business and tried not to fidget. Not normally the type to resort to such mundane acts as buying a woman flowers, he'd rationalized his choice by reminding himself that there were far more dangerous gifts (anything smaller, for example, would have necessitated his wearing gloves, which would undoubtedly ruin the effect of a gift such as jewelry). Given Chuck's love of bees, a present of multi-colored wildflowers couldn't fail to be both thoughtful and affectionate, Ned thought proudly. The only obstacle now was the challenge of introducing his gift in a way that wasn't pushy--and didn't include the need of a box of tissues for his employee and neighbor. Olive was allergic to wildflowers, and as she already seemed a bit put out with him lately, that was a situation that he preferred not to inflame further.

"Oh, there you are!" Chuck said graciously, having spied him through the front window a few minutes ago and been completely unsuccessful in her attempts to beckon him inside. Ned smiled broadly at her and opened his mouth to tell her about his spur-of-the-moment decision to buy her flowers, but before he could vocalize anything, he felt the brush of something soft on his hand.

"Oh, a butterfly!" she said, leaning over to look at his hand more closely. Ned's hand twitched in surprise, dislodging his unexpected passenger, who unfortunately decided to reposition itself on his hand, fatally. He looked down to see a colorful bit of something tumbling end-over-end toward the ground, and assumed that the insect had flown away and that the fallen object was merely a flower petal. The Pie Maker looked back up at Chuck, smiling.

This was unfortunate, because Chuck's eyes had been caught by the butterfly before she'd seen his flowers, which made the event of the past minute much more traumatic for her than it probably should have been.

"How could you smile? You just killed a butterfly!" she exclaimed, falling to her knees to cradle the creature in complete disregard for both the hardness of the concrete sidewalk and the flimsiness of her dress bodice. The Pie Maker had to focus his attention with a severity of internal discipline to ensure that he didn't make the situation worse by staring.

"Well--" he began, frowning as he looked at the immobile insect nestled in her delicate hands. "I didn't mean to..."

"Well, touch it again!" Chuck demanded, getting to her feet and proffering the poor creature as though she expected him to have no problem in reanimating it. "You just about lured it to an untimely death, anyway," she added, nodding at the flowers he still held cradled in his arms.

Ned thought that this was a particularly frustrating turn of events, given the difficulty of procuring wildflowers in the city at this time of year. Looking up at the roof full of pigeons, the two squirrels chasing each other on the sidewalk nearby, and thinking about the wealth of wildlife just out of sight, Ned shook his head firmly at the woman in front of him.

"No way," he said, burying his hands in his sleeves and stepping back. "That one was an accident--this would be deliberate."

"Not malicious, though," Chuck said, though her voice held less enthusiasm than she'd spoken with at first. "This time, you'd just be fixing a--"

"Do you really want to complete that sentence?" he asked her, raising an eyebrow, though the look on his face was gentle.

"I kind of do, on principle--but, no, not really," she admitted, ducking her head to avoid his eyes as she brushed a fingertip against the unmoving wing of the butterfly in her hand.