The butterfly in the cathedral

One day during the hiking week in the northern Czech Republic, I was walking with one of the boys behind our group. We were going through these big hills on the way back to our cabin, on a nonexistent trail far above the little town in the valley. Further up on the hill we were on, we saw a little chapel that looked about 100 years old, so we ran up to investigate. (Well, he ran. I followed at a more normal-person pace.) He called down to me that it was "a Catholic place for Mary", and as I was nearing the chapel, he turned away from it and walked down the hill a few yards, stopping there to wait for me. He had his back to the chapel.

"There's a butterfly," he said when I came back down. "It's trapped inside."
I told him that the butterfly would probably be alright - if it could get in, it could get out.
"No," he said, "The opening is too far away and small. It will not find it. It will die."

I'm not sure why this affected him so much, but it did. The way he said "it will die" was just so... sad. Like he felt that he had killed the butterfly himself, just by saying the words. I guess it's just that butterflies are so fragile, and we hate to see fragile things get broken. I can relate - last semester after a really hard day, I was walking up to Amelia's from school, and I saw a dead hummingbird on the sidewalk. For some reason it was one of the most depressing things I've ever seen.

Anyway. After that episode with the butterfly I realized that I should write a story called "The Butterfly in the Chapel" - except change 'chapel' to 'cathedral', because it sounds better and gives the butterfly a smaller, more delicate, more trapped feel. I just need to come up with an organized story for it. Fragile things make for good stories.