Wandering the wind-whipped streets of Philadelphia, Joyce found a fluttering atop the fall leaves by her feet. She thought it was a butterfly. She hoped it was a butterfly. But a butterfly in October? No, wait — it was November, now. Maybe one of those butterflies escaped from the Academy of Natural Sciences. Maybe it was an endangered species. Maybe she could return it and there would be a reward and then she’d be on Action News and be named Philadelphia’s Official Butterfly Finder and then, then (maybe) she’d finally get Peter Gabriel’s attention. He would say, “Well done, Joyce,” and she could die happy.
      But the butterfly she’d pinned so much hope on was not a butterfly. It was merely a crinkled wallet-sized wedding photo.
      Oh, great — another reminder that everybody else in the world got what they wanted. Why did God make her hopelessly fall in love with a married singer who lived on another continent? And one who her average looks, thick glasses and lack of a job couldn’t make any impression upon. It was easier to hate God than Peter. Peter didn’t care enough to do practical jokes on her. God did.
      The groom in the photo held the white bouquet against his black tux. The white bride held his black arm. Wasn’t the bride supposed to hold the bouquet? Perhaps it was some sort of Zen tradition that Joyce would never be let in on, because she was merely Mongrel American instead of Asian American like the couple. They had traditions in marriages, while she only had the Mongrel tradition of wanting what was out of reach.
      Joyce, about to drop the photo back in the leaves and stomp home, instead tucked it in her pocket and then stomped home.
      She checked her answering machine. There was, of course, no message from Peter Gabriel. Just one from her social worker asking why she’d missed her appointment and another from the pharmacy saying her antidepressants couldn’t be filled until next week. The disappointment at not hearing the smooth, slightly stuttering English voice tasted like biting into a rotting hand of ginger.
      She tacked the photo on her fridge and complained to them because they weren’t butterflies. They didn’t argue. It felt damn good.

      Joyce had nobody else’s face in her Section Eight home, not even a mirror. She even took the Peter Gabriel posters down as they could be damaged by sunlight or the strain of being thumb tacked to a wall. Yet she kept the wedding photo up, moving it from room to room as if she made it follow her. They didn’t suggest any new forms to fill in or any medicines to take. She liked that. Her shrink kept telling her she should see new people —- she was sort of doing that by talking to the photo. She wrote a letter to her social worker with them looking over her shoulder, explaining how she hadn’t been able to find a job again. She didn’t add that getting a job was pointless, as there was no one at home to spend the money on. She resorted now to letters, for she had to sell her phone and answering machine to the neighbor down the hall(the same one that also bought the stereo and the TV), but she decided to leave that bit of information out of her letter, too.
      In the trash bins, benches and rest room stalls in Suburban Station, Joyce treasure hunted, scooping up what others cast off in the nets of her hands. Mostly she found magazines or books, sometimes coins, food or cassette tapes among the sticky stains on the station’s shadows. She often found lunch bags or wallets or clothes forgotten by the commuters in their mad dash from home hole to office hole. If she was patient and quiet, she never knew what gems those rushing idiots might place in her way.
      Three days after finding the wedding wallet photo, Joyce found a cast-off cassette of an opera called Madame Butterfly. She still had her Walkman. It was difficult music for her tastes, but she kept listening to it. She started to call the bride in the photo Madame Butterfly and the groom Pinkerton. She had to call them something, as they were living in her home.
Joyce always obediently watched every “Have You Seen This Person?” flyer or milk carton side as her personal service to mankind. In all of her photo-watching, she never recognized anyone and expected never to recognize anyone. Sometimes she wanted to send a photo of herself to these Missing Person places just to see if anyone would recognize her.
About a month after Madame Butterfly and Pinkerton moved in with Joyce, she saw Pinkerton’s photo in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
      She cleaned her glasses and looked again. No doubt about it —- that was Pinkerton. It was even the same photo, just now it was in black and white. He’d gone missing around the same time she found the photo. She wondered if the photo came from his own wallet the last time he was in the city.
      For all of two seconds, Joyce seriously considered calling the police, but stopped herself. What help could she honestly give them? She’d handled the photo so often that any prints that might’ve been on it were obliterated by now. She would’ve just made a fool of herself.
She wondered at how she had made a right decision for a change. Perhaps there was something to these new antidepressants after all.

      Joyce dreamt of the monarchs again.
      One late summer afternoon in Joyce’s childhood, the entire monarch migration flew threw the cocoon of her tiny tree lined back yard. They only did it that one year. No one ever knew why.
      In the dream, as on that day, Joyce danced and screamed in delight, reaching out to the sky to grass wall of orange black and white wings. They touched her hair, her clothes, but always deftly avoided her fingers. After an hour or so, they slid away into the sky like a forked tongue slipping back into a serpent’s mouth.
      The back yard seemed emptied of all of its treasures. She never wanted to play there again.
She loved the monarchs, anyway.

      Madame Butterfly cried softly on the bench, bent and shivering in the December cold. Joyce only saw her because she was the only person sitting. Joyce bought a hot tea, stuffed the pockets of her parka with sugar packets and cream tubs and then walked up to Madame Butterfly. She handed her the tea before she could stop herself.
      “For me? That’s very kind,” Madame Butterfly nodded in her heavily-accented English.
“I recognized you from the Inquirer…about…uh…your missing husband. If you don’t mind me asking, have you found him?”
      She shook her small head, her lower lip quivering.
Joyce sat down gingerly next to her. “What are you doing here? Hoping he’ll walk by, aren’t you?”
      “Someone has to keep looking.” Madame Butterfly insisted in a rush. “They say he tire of me, go on to new woman in new city. They wrong. I love him. He know that. I so happy we wed, I cannot hold my flowers. So he held them for me. That’s the man I married. I wait for him to come back.”
      Joyce wondered how long this woman had gone without sleep, how many boxes of tissues she’d cried out, how many doctors she was dragged to. “I know what you’re going through.”
      “Your man disappear?”
      Joyce was about to explain about Peter Gabriel never appearing and the monarchs never returning, but what would be the point? So she just nodded.
      “Did he ever come back?”
      Joyce thought of the monarchs. She said, “No.”
      Madame Butterfly gasped. She reached out a thin, cold hand and patted Joyce’s knee sympathetically, as if she had finally met someone more in need of sympathy than herself.
      Confused, Joyce stood up. “Have a Merry Christmas,” was all she could think of to say, and hurried off. She took one last peek over her shoulder at Madame Butterfly still hopefully, ridiculously searching the crowds from each train for the rider who she knew would never walk by.
      Joyce knew that was how she must look like, a bent flower in a rainstorm. She could hear the butterflies drinking up the pain.
      And she laughed out loud. “Damn the butterflies — full speed ahead!” She cried to no one in particular and skipped all the way home.
      It felt like summer.

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