Serafine opened the trailer door and ashes spilled out onto the gravel.
“I am done,” she winked at Alex and blew Inez a kiss before walking back to wherever she had come from.
Inez stared at her in awe and then ran in to see how her sister was.
Melinda was on the floor on a blanket of ashes, covered from head to toe. She was unconscious and the previous feeling of urgency and weight was gone. She kissed her sister’s dirty head.

Melinda didn’t speak for three weeks. No words came from her mouth until she said, one day, “I was saved by a butterfly. Butterfly.”
She continued in silence, doing daily activities until she couldn’t any longer and one day, years later, she was alone and she wrote on a slip of paper, under her grocery list:
A butterfly came to save me, but I sent her away. I must go like this and I must go now. If I die it will because I have decided that my body is empty. My butterfly has flown away and I am an empty shell.
Sarah found her, hanging from a rope in her closet.
Hanging like a cocoon.