butterfly, metamorphosing inside an empty tangerine

Rina Olsen, Guam

“Absence is presence,” the Chinese vendor tells me when I pull out a brown paper bag. My hand slithers inside, presses the bottom flat and the sides open. She carefully places the tangerines inside. “And presence is absence.” She wipes her hands on her dark green apron. “When you never strive you can never go wrong.”

I fold the top of the bag over and step back from the cashier. I run my eyes along the newsstand. The air inside the grocery store is inflated with the smell of licorice and air freshener. We are the only ones inside the shop and it is silent, except for the hushed roar of the black mini fan sitting next to the plastic cash register. I feel the indistinct forms of the tangerines against my chest, little lumps pressing through the paper. I pull out a copy of today’s New York Times.

She rings it up. “Lao Tzu. You know?”

I shrug, nod. We have a copy of The Four Chinese Classics at home, which I flick through from time to time. It’s never managed to hold my attention for long.

She beams approvingly and hands me the newspaper. “Come again,” she says cheerily with a bright wave. I nod my head in the ghost of a bow and slip outside, the bright sunlight drenching my arms in warmth, making the tangerines seem to melt in their own rinds.

I take the train to my piano lesson. The paper bag of tangerines sit on my lap, gently rubbing against the denim jeans in time to the rocking of the train. The newspaper is spread open between me and the bag, sweaty wrinkles forming where my hands grip the edges. I lick my finger, turn the page. The faint scent of citrus tints the train car that’s dyed with the scent of sweat and salted peanuts. Behind me, someone is typing away on their computer. A few rows back, someone is snoring. I can see the head of the person sitting in front of me, bent over a paperback book with the pages looking creamy-yellow in the sunlight. I return to my paper, flick to the horoscope. My eyes automatically jump to Capricorn: you can feel a sense of accomplishment or hopefulness in business and a stronger feeling of connectedness in your personal life. Nurturing your needs for peace, quiet, and familiarity is quite natural and beneficial at the moment.

Bull, I think, and close the paper.

When I reach my piano teacher’s house I immediately sit down at the bench and play. There’s no time to lose, according to my teacher. There’s only three days left until the recital and this is the last time we’ll meet before it.

“More volume,” she says over the noise. “More, more!”

I stab the keys with my fingers and the noise balloons. I run up a scale and a cage of butterflies is released from a dusty attic. The cage door clangs rustily, bringing all noise to a halt. Not even the butterfly’s wings flutter, they are frozen, waiting for me to find my place in the music and resume.

The silence spills over the keys. The butterflies dissipate.

“You haven’t finished.” She points to the particular measure on the sheet music.

It is finished, I think. If the pianist’s interpretation is that the rest of the notes be left silent, isn’t it finished? If a composer isn’t there to say it is unfinished, is it still unfinished? How liberally can a musician treat a composer’s work? When does a composer’s music become a musician’s music, if it ever does at all?

My fingers find the keys, homing pigeons returning to roost. The music resumes, but the butterflies have long metamorphosed back into their chrysalises.

On the train back home I eat my tangerines. My knuckles are sore, my finger pads tender. I make an indent at the top of the fruit with my fingernail, then wiggle my finger into the space and pinch. It peels back with a ripping noise that’s thicker than when one tears paper. White ligaments cling to the flesh from the fruit within. They tear and hang like limp streamers when I pluck a slice and let it burst like a cool rain cloud in my mouth.

“I told you so.” I look to my left and see a little girl sitting in the seat next to me, flicking to the comics section of the newspaper I’d placed on that seat so no one would sit there. Her legs swing, her tarnished overall buttons glint. She looks up at me, and her short dark hair bobs. “Didn’t I?”

“Didn’t you…?”

The sunlight withdraws from the car with a snap as the train barrels through a tunnel. In the shade I realize I’ve mistaken the Chinese vendor for a little girl. She crosses her legs and flips the page. “I told you, when you never strain you can never go wrong.”

“I thought you said ‘strive’ instead of ‘strain’.”

“Did I?” She waves a large, cushiony hand. “Same thing.”

“Is it, though?”

She turns another page and lets her eyes wander over the strange frontier. “You strain in music, don’t you?”

I look down at my tangerine. My fingers work to separate another slice from the cluster. “It’s because I can’t make mistakes.”

The train emerges from the tunnel and I automatically squint as sudden sunlight stabs through the window. Out of the corner of my eye I see her hairpin flash as she turns her head to look at me. “Do you make mistakes at home?”

I slide the slice into my mouth and shake my head. “There’s room for error at home.”

“Ah, see! You don’t strain at home because there’s room for error, so you make no mistakes. But when there’s no room for error you strain, and so you snap!” She snapped her fingers to illustrate.

I swallow the fruit. “So what do you expect me to do? I’m only human, and it’s human to err. It’s difficult to be human and play the piano.”

“But how do you know it’s not the piano playing the human?”

The next tangerine slice stops halfway to my mouth. I glance at her curiously. She’s found the cartoons, and is intently studying each panel with knit brows. “I’m…sorry?”

She speaks without looking up or changing her expression. “A human puts their emotions into the piano to make music, but how do you know it isn’t the piano drawing those emotions from the human to make music?”

I dig my finger into the tender flesh, breaking it open. Juice trickles down my wrist. “I don’t understand. You seem to be implying that something with no soul can use someone that does for its own recreation.”

“Absence is presence, presence is absence.”

I push the slice into my mouth, chew, swallow. I turn away and lean my head against the window, closing my eyes against the sun. When I open them, she is gone. The newspaper lies folded on the chair next to me, untouched.

I consider the tangerine rind in my hand. It’s a little deflated, but if one overlooked the rips in it that split it open like a lotus, then it looks quite like it had never been peeled. Like the tangerine was still there, and yet it wasn’t.

Were we like tangerines? Peeled ones in sticky hands, the fresh ones in the supermarket, or the ones still hard and green on trees? Would we know when we were peeled and emptied, or would we go on forever thinking that we were still one and whole?

Long ago, Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly. When he awoke he wondered: was he a man dreaming of a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of a man? Who knows if it was Chuang Tzu dreaming of a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of Chuang Tzu? Chuang Tzu and butterfly: clearly there's a difference. This is called the transformation of things.

I close the book. I stand at the kitchen counter and munch on a tangerine. Outside I can see the neighbor’s kids jumping on their trampoline in their backyard. Faint shrieks puncture the noise of the living room air conditioning. Morning sunlight tracks along the countertop, making the checkered dishcloth look cleaner than it really is.

I sink my teeth into the slice and tear off half, leaving the other half to bleed a drop of juice onto the book’s cover. I watch it hit and expand, slowly, slowly, no bigger than a belly button or a mole on the tanned face of an aging bird watcher. It is there. It is present, and yet its presence supposedly makes it absent. Or does it? What exactly did Lao Tzu mean? Does it mean that the absence of one thing makes the presence of another, and vice versa? Or did he mean it literally? Does the drop that fell from between the tangerine and my lips and onto the book mean I have kissed his long-absent mind that is now present in my own? Does the drop now mark his thoughts that are absent from his skull yet present in this world? My eyes linger on the stain as I reach for the last unpeeled tangerine.

Push it into my mouth whole. Feel the hard, tasteless rind with my tongue, feel my cheeks and throat and digestive tract swell around its shape like a womb around a fetus. Feel its presence strike my stomach, its absence that lingers in a hollow, airy sensation in my mouth. Lick my lips, feel their wetness. Feel the tangerine become a part of me. Feel me become a part of the tangerine. Watch us become each other and neither of us at the same time, molding into each other until we have no choice but to become the seed which hovers in the air, cast from the farmer’s hands, caught in the arms of the sun, falling and falling just before it strikes the earth it was always meant to return to.

Rina Olsen is a Korean-American sophomore in high school. She is a general editor for Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Jellyfish Review, Mobius: A Journal of Social Change, Emerge Literary Journal, 101 Words, Unfortunately, Literary Magazine, Write the World Review, and elsewhere. Her first novel, Third Moon Passing, is forthcoming from Atmosphere Press in late 2023.