“A giant butterfly is taking over the world,” exclaimed Doreen.

“Pardon?” I said.

“A giant butterfly.”

I gazed at her, my darling Doreen, a flaxen-coiffed Buddha ceaseless in scooping from her trough of illumination.

“We’re probably safe though,” she continued, snapping her gum, supplanting sea winds with a raspberry miasma, “because we’re on a cruise ship.”

A communiqué worth celebrating, I suppose, except that I’d resolved by then not to marry Doreen; I savored a certain amount of worldly unknowing; I had other things to do, like collect small toy replicas of famous buildings; I was, for all intents and purposes, a coward.

*

The cruise ship agenda specified a berth in Alexandria, and I strategized my vanishing act from that port of call—I, the coward. I dared not speculate what fate waited for Doreen. A plucky gal, but not without all the voguish inquietudes maintained by modern women, I hoped she might, in the very least, continue sightseeing aboard the ship.

“Ought we to do something?” Doreen said.

She had a propensity towards superfluous rhetorical inquiry, one of her inquietudes, really: one of innumerable fronts on her crusade for my illumination.

“Why should I be scared,” I asked, “of a giant butterfly?”

*

Estimated to be quarter mile across—fizzed the radio, later on that day—identified by several prominent lepidopterologists as a Tiger-Swallowtail Butterfly.

Thoughts of this beast did not unnerve me, though I remained otherwise a coward. While fellow cruise passengers moved in musing clusters about their cabins, I stayed seated in a deck chair, thumbing a miniature Taj Mahal until the sky released its diurnal grip on solar illumination.

“Apparently the force of the butterfly’s wing-flapping is flattening whole cities,” murmured my bride-to-be, my darling Doreen.

“Has it passed though Egypt?” I said.

She shook her flaxen head just as a monstrous wave slapped one side of the ship.

*

The Blissful Union, they called that ship. Its passengers—white-gloved or gold-cuffed or stowed-away in pickle barrels—they omenized that outsized wave as an advancing giant butterfly.

“Doreen, are you frightened?” I said. Before absconding, I needed to know she could confront the thing companionless, though I’d never considered her a coward.

She latched her arms around my waist, my darling sweet Doreen.

“You’re so close,” she whispered, nuzzling my coat’s breast pocket where—in Lilliputian measurements—I kept a silver Eiffel Tower, “you’ll see the light, you’ll find illumination.”

*

It seemed unwieldy and amebic, her assured illumination. But matrimony might have some perks, I reflected suddenly—my mind spotlighting monogrammed bathrobes, tea for two, an Opera balcony—the tune of life, I conjectured, could be improved accompanied, just as another wave, a foaming force, slugged the port side of the ship.

“Let’s get married today,” I cried, clasping close my darling, my dripping wet Doreen.

That’s when I saw it, that looming insect with its palpitating wings, antennae prodding the stars, a giant butterfly.

I had met my judgment, with nuptiality drawing nigh: what would make me husband or coward.

“Rendezvous at the ship’s chapel in ten,” I—trembling—said.

*

She still wonders, I am sure, if this was what I really said. She must still question if I neared that Grail, some lucidity of vision, her long pressed illumination. In honesty: I cannot begin to guess if she holds me more or less a coward. For, with the other passengers huddled below deck, and her trotting off to change, I dashed towards the plunging bow of that whiplashed nosing ship. I beheld the creature—molten eyed, a magnificent fluttering beast—that giant butterfly.

I said, “please take me from Doreen.”

*

It had come to the ship for me of course, that giant butterfly. What brighter beacon exists, I ask, than illumination flaring from an epiphanic coward? “Doreen,” I call, now wound tight in my cocoon, my rigid chrysalis—The Chrysler Building, The Parthenon, a bitty Guangzhou Tower all poking at my ribs—“Pardon. Pardon. Pardon.”