Hedgehogs Come Out at Night by Yordanka Beleva tr. Yana Ellis

A living shadow, her mother called her ‘little sunshine.’ We called her by name, Vanessa. When she walked along the streets, we constantly looked around to see whether her real body – the original one, the authentic carrier of life – was nearby. And when we couldn’t find it, we clung to the facsimile. We yearned to pinch her so she would bleed a little, to convince us that she wasn’t bloodless. When we pinched her hard, she made sounds. As if we were delivering her into the world – she would cry from the pain and begin to kick. It was mesmerising to bring her back to life and we would get carried away; she might be delivered several times a day. 

We really wanted her to be alive just as we were. We were jealous that she had the ability to perceive senses of another world and wouldn’t tell us what that world was like. We pursued her but her path was invisible. She remained inviolable until the end, however we tried to reach her. Her tiny, delicate steps were like embroidery – touching the ground as if sewing her to life. One day the thread snapped. 

It was during the summer. We were hunting butterflies one afternoon, pinning the captured creatures to a piece of foam before putting them into a wooden box with a glass lid. The first person to complete their collection would go to the library and, reading from a large encyclopaedia, spell out the Latin names of their trophies. We would copy the names onto special labels that we stuck beneath the insects’ tiny bodies. We had lots of small whites and large whites, red admirals and speckled woods, but we dreamed of a rare specimen. 

That afternoon someone caught a comma.

The news of the rare capture and the news of Vanessa’s death arrived at the same time. I remember the relief – finally, someone has caught them; and the worry – now who will we chase? I remember the silence of the days that followed. For a long time we looked for Vanessa on the town streets though we knew she had been buried. As though we needed to search for her, not to find her. We ransacked our childhood.

To this day her tiny body is before my eyes. In my memories she is like a painting: she unlocks the apartment and stands in the doorway for a few minutes. Not moving – she knows she’s being watched and doesn’t stir. Her gaze always pointing upwards, sometimes smiling at someone above. Like an open book which we tossed from hand to hand, from hatred to hatred, rather than reading it.

Vanessa died of some rare disease. A year after her death I caught a rare butterfly – a mourning cloak. I couldn’t enjoy it. When I opened the encyclopaedia, beneath the photograph of my butterfly, it said Vanessa antiopa.

Since then, I read obituaries as if they are perfect labels in a collection of captured butterflies, with the dates and times of their capture. I pin names and crosses to my memory. It has begun to resemble a hedgehog.