Stealing Butterflies

Chapter Sixteen

Purple marker is poisonous.

Or, at least, I thought so when I was seven.

My cousin Brandon convinced me of this nonsensical fact on one of our Great Call Family Vacations. See, every couple years or so my mom decides she's had it with our little reservation. She always does about six days of moaning and groaning and whining about how terrible our life is, and how she should have been able to provide better for me, yada yada yada. And then, we go visit her folks.

I don't know why, because she doesn't really like them all that much. My granddad drools when he's awake (even though he's only in his fifties) and my grandmother always shoots these really degrading looks at me like I'm the one who royally screwed up her daughter's life.

But, whenever my mom decides to make this lovely seven-hour car drive up to Alaska, every one of our relations who can make it ends up getting to my grandparents' somehow. Aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole shebang. And that means we're stuck there even longer.

Brandon is my only cousin who's close to my age. He's a couple years under me, and he walks with a weird "swagger" to get attention, but I'd always liked him alright. Usually, he didn't want to be there, either, so we had some common ground.

And his mom, my Aunt Carol, was really nice.

She made sugar cookies.

So anyway, Brandon and I spent our long hours of family "bonding" in the backyard pretending to be groundhogs. Or monsters. Or hunters. Or whatever our little kid brains could come up with.

I was the older one, but, for some reason, Brandon could always convince me of some really crazy stuff that usually ended up pissing off my mom somewhere down the road of my life. Anyway, we had been doing our usual deal in the back, and this time we had taken on the persona of elves.

The badass ones in Lord of the Rings, not the sissies that build toys in Santa's workshop.

Brandon had a purple sharpie and was wielding it around like it was a weapon while we ran around through the forest looking for some sort of magical herb or something like that. He was wearing gloves, too, because, as he said, "this is dangerous business."

I kept saying the only line I knew from the movie over and over.

"You have my sword. And you have my bow. And my axe."

For each sentence, I changed my voice into different, strange pitches so they were distinguishable as separate characters. Which, I'm sure Brandon appreciated. Meanwhile, he was picking up a bunch of leaves and smelling them to test and see if they were the right one for our potion.

After about twenty repeats of my dialogue, he finally found "the (supposed) one," and tore it into little shreds. He then sprinkled the bits and pieces over the dark point of the pen.

"This is a Dirfsminker," he told me, raising that menacing, dark purple point up into the sunlight.

"A what?" I said, for the first time breaking away from my very short, remembered movie script.

"Dirfsminker," he repeated, very intensely, with some sort of scary dark accent.

"What does it do?" I asked, reaching forward as if I were in some sort of a trance. But, to be honest, it was a lot more like a kitty cat following a red dot on a sheetrock wall.

"It kills anyone who touches it, you idiot," he hollered, whipping the evil device out of my reach. I'd always found his slang to be pretty impressive, though I don't think I even knew what "idiot" meant, at this point in my life.