20.04.2026

In response to Melissa’s Fandango Flash Fiction Challenge
https://wp.me/pefeKf-4Du

Pinned Wings

They called it a collection.

Rows of butterflies, perfectly arranged—wings spread wide, colors preserved, time held still like something sacred.

But I was a child.

And I didn’t see beauty.

I saw silence.

I remember standing there, small hands clenched, staring at those wings that would never move again. They looked like they should be flying—mid-breath, mid-light, mid-life—but instead they were fixed, held in place by something I couldn’t understand.

“Look how beautiful,” they said.

But all I could think was—

they were alive once.

I didn’t have the words for it then. Only a tightness in my chest. Only the quiet anger of knowing something gentle had been taken and turned into something still.

My granddad saw patterns.

I saw loss.

Years later, I understand more. Preservation. Study. The human need to hold onto what fades.

But even now—

a part of me stays with that little girl, standing in front of a wall of wings, refusing to call it beauty without remembering the cost.

Because some things are meant to move.

To flutter. To escape the frame. To exist beyond our need to keep them.

And maybe that’s what they were trying to teach all along—

not how to admire them…

but how to let them go.

#FFFC

— Maggie
The Afterlove Voice 💫

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