Before the sky tore open and the world ended, the suburbs were loud. Lawnmowers droned like angry hornets, dogs barked at fences, and parents screamed at children who didn't listen.
Elara listened. She just didn't care.
She was six years old, sitting on the pristine white tiles of the kitchen floor, bathed in the warm, golden light of a Saturday morning. To anyone looking through the window, she was a picture of innocence-a small girl with chaotic black hair and wide, grey eyes, playing quietly while her mother washed dishes.
But Elara wasn't playing. She was learning.
She held a large black carpenter ant between her thumb and forefinger. She liked the way its legs scrambled against the ridges of her fingerprint. It was frantic. It wanted to live. Elara was fascinated by the mechanics of that desire. With the precision of a watchmaker, she reached out with her other hand and plucked the back left leg.
Snick.
The ant faltered, its rhythm broken. Elara tilted her head. The struggle changed, becoming lopsided. She wondered if it needed balance.
Snick. She took the right leg.
"Look, Mommy," Elara said, her voice soft.
Her mother, humming a song from the radio, turned around, wiping suds from her hands. "What is it, sweetie? Did you draw a-"
The sentence died in her throat. Elara held up her palm. The ant was writhing, a limbless black torso spinning in circles on her lifeline.
"I made it stay," Elara explained, offering a small, hopeful smile. "It was running too fast. Now it stays."
Her mother didn't scream, not yet. She slapped Elara's hand. The ant fell to the tile, and her mother crushed it with a frantic stomp of her slipper, her face pale. "Filthy! Don't bring bugs in here, Elara! Go wash your hands! Now!"
Elara stared at the smear on the floor, then at her mother's heaving chest. She felt a dull thrum of confusion.
Her mother liked things that stayed still. She liked the ceramic dolls on the shelf. She liked the pictures in frames. Why was the ant different?
Maybe, Elara thought as she scrubbed her hands under the scalding water, she just didn't like ants.
Two weeks later, Elara tried again.
She found a moth on the screen door. It was a dusty, grey thing, trembling in the wind. Elara caught it in a jar and took it to her room. She spent an hour gently rubbing the dust from its wings until they were transparent, brittle membranes. She wanted to see the veins underneath. She wanted to see how it worked.
When she was done, the moth could no longer fly. It crawled pitifully across her duvet.
She scooped it up and walked into the living room. Her father was sitting in his recliner, watching a football game. He was cheering, his face flushed with the excitement of violence on the screen. Elara thought he would understand.
"Daddy," she said, climbing onto the armrest. "I fixed it."
She opened her hands. The moth, stripped of its grey camouflage, looked raw and naked. It twitched, dragging a broken wing.
Her father looked down. His cheer evaporated. He saw the moth, then he saw the grey dust coating Elara's fingertips. He understood instantly that the damage wasn't accidental.
"Did you pull the wings off?" he asked, his voice low.
"I took the dust off," Elara corrected him. "So we can see."
He grabbed her arm, hard. His fingers dug into her bicep, bruising the soft skin. "That's sick, Elara. Only sick people do that."
He dragged her to the bathroom and scrubbed her hands until they were red and raw, muttering about "normal girls" and "something wrong with her head." Elara didn't cry. She watched the water turn grey in the sink and thought, Moths are too fragile. He breaks things when he's mad. He hates things that break easily.
The third time, Elara decided to make something stronger.
She found a stag beetle in the garden. It was armored, hard, and defiant. It pinched her finger, drawing a drop of blood. Elara didn't flinch; she was delighted. This one was a fighter.
She sat on the back porch step. She didn't want to hurt it, exactly. She wanted to see if the armor could be rearranged. She used a pair of her mother's tweezers to pry the hard shell casing of the wings upward, bending them back until they snapped with a satisfying crack.
Now, the beetle looked like a little tank with its hatches open. The soft, pulsating body underneath was exposed.
"Elara!"
She looked up. Both parents were standing at the sliding glass door. They had been arguing about money, but now they were united in their disgust.
Elara held up the beetle. It was still marching, despite its broken shell. "It's strong," she told them, her eyes wide with genuine admiration. "Look. I opened the door, and it's still walking."
Her father didn't speak. He walked out, grabbed the beetle, and threw it into the grass. Then he grabbed Elara.
That was the first time he used the belt.
He hit her three times across the legs. "Stop it!" he shouted with every strike. "Stop hurting things! What is wrong with you?"
Elara stood there, taking the blows. She didn't scream. She didn't cry. She just analyzed the pain. Sharp. Burning. Temporary.
She looked at her father's red face. He was hurting her. He was hurting a living thing. Why was he allowed to do it, but she wasn't?
Oh, she realized. It's about size. He is big, so he wins. The beetle was small, so it lost. I just need to be bigger.
The fourth time was an experiment in art.
Elara was seven now. She had learned that her parents didn't like the "gifts." But she assumed they just didn't like the presentation. They liked things organized.
She caught four dragonflies near the creek. She didn't pull them apart this time. Instead, she used her mother's sewing needles. She pinned them to a piece of cardboard, arranged in a perfect circle, heads facing inward. They were still alive, their long tails thrashing against the cardboard, their wings buzzing uselessly against the pins.
It was symmetrical. It was a pattern. It was beautiful.
She left it on her mother's pillow as a surprise.
The scream that echoed through the house that night was primal. Her mother didn't just cry; she vomited. Her father dragged Elara out of bed by her hair.
"We take you to therapy!" he screamed, shaking her. "We buy you dolls! And you do this? Are you evil? Are you a demon?"
Elara looked at him, her head lolling from the shaking. "It was a circle," she whispered. "It was perfect."
They locked her in the basement that night. No lights. Just the damp smell of concrete and the scratching of mice in the walls. Elara didn't mind the dark. It was quiet. She sat on the cold floor and listened to the mice, wondering how fast they could run, and what their bones looked like under the fur.
School was a different kind of laboratory and the other children sensed the void in her. Kids are like animals; they can smell when one of the herd is different. They didn't know she dissected dragonflies, but they knew she didn't laugh at jokes, didn't cry when she scraped her knee, and stared a little too long.
It started near the swings. Three boys-older, louder, thicker-cornered her.
"Zombie girl," the leader, a boy named Marcus, sneered. He shoved her.
Elara stumbled back but didn't fall. She regained her balance and looked at him. She wasn't scared. She was measuring the distance between them.
"My mom says you're a freak," Marcus said. He shoved her again, harder. This time, Elara fell into the gravel. Her palm scraped against a sharp rock.
The boys laughed. It was a jagged, ugly sound. Marcus kicked dirt onto her shins. "Cry," he taunted. "Why don't you ever cry?"
Elara's hand closed around the rock that had cut her. It was jagged, the size of a tennis ball. Grey granite. Heavy.
He is big, she thought, remembering her father. But the rock is hard.
She stood up. Marcus was laughing, turning to his friends to high-five them. He had forgotten her because he thought she was prey.
Elara didn't shout. She didn't wind up. She simply snapped her arm forward with the same precision she used to pluck the legs off an ant.
The rock sailed through the air.
Thwack.
The sound was wet and solid. It hit Marcus directly on the back of the head.
He didn't scream. He just dropped. He folded like a puppet with cut strings, hitting the woodchips face-first. A second later, the blood started to pool, dark and glossy against his blonde hair.
The playground went silent. The other two boys stared at Marcus, then at Elara.
Then, Elara laughed.
It wasn't a witch's cackle. It was a genuine, bubbling giggle of discovery. Cause and effect, she thought. Trajectory and impact.
"He fell down," she said, giggling again.
The other boys screamed. They scrambled away, tripping over themselves, yelling for teachers, for mommies, for help. Parents who had been chatting on the benches rushed over. A woman saw Marcus bleeding and shrieked.
A man grabbed Elara by the shoulders. "What did you do? Stay right there!"
Elara stood amidst the chaos, the only calm point in a swirling storm of panic. She looked at the blood on the woodchips. It was redder than the beetle's insides. Brighter.
The police station was boring. It was beige and smelled like stale coffee.
Elara sat on a hard plastic chair, her legs swinging, not touching the floor. Across the room, her parents were talking to an officer and the weeping parents of Marcus.
Her mother was sobbing into a tissue, her shoulders shaking. Her father had his head in his hands, the posture of a defeated man.
"She shows no remorse," the officer was saying, glancing at Elara. "She nearly cracked his skull, and she was laughing."
"We've tried," her father whispered, his voice cracking. "God help us, we've tried everything."
Elara stopped listening. The drama of adults was repetitive.
Her attention drifted to a potted plant in the corner of the waiting area. There, resting on a broad green leaf, was a Monarch butterfly. It must have flown in when the doors opened. It was vibrant orange and black, pulsing slowly, confused by the fluorescent lights.
It was beautiful.
Elara hopped off the chair. No one noticed. They were too busy mourning the normalcy of their lives.
She walked over to the plant. She moved slowly, a predator in a floral dress. She reached out. The butterfly didn't fly away; it was tired.
She pinched its wings together.
She felt the delicate powder rub off against her skin. She felt the tiny, frantic vibration of its life.
She turned around. "Mommy."
The room went silent. Her mother looked up, eyes red and swollen. Her father lifted his head. The police officer stopped writing.
Elara held the butterfly up to the light. With a blank, serene expression, she squeezed her thumb and forefinger together.
Crunch.
The body burst. The wings crumpled. The vibrant orange turned into a smear of yellow fluid on her thumb.
She dropped the broken remains onto the linoleum floor and looked at her parents.
"It was trapped," Elara said simply.
Her mother put a hand over her mouth to stifle a sob of pure horror. Her father looked at her not with anger, but with a cold, dawn-breaking realization. He wasn't looking at a child anymore. He was looking at a creature wearing a child's skin.
Elara went back to her chair and sat down, swinging her legs again. She felt better. She didn't understand why they were so upset. The world was full of things that broke. She was just the one honest enough to break them.