Killing Beauty

by Megan Kitching

We discussed how to preserve the aesthetic value of the flyans. Their iridescent hide died and turned a moldy grey as soon as it was pierced. If suspended in alcohol for more than a day, the specimens looked as if they had been there a hundred years. We tried sealed glass tanks - "Call it art," Hal said - and injecting slow baths of gases, but the colors always disappeared.

"It's the only thing they're good for," Hal said, and we had to agree, watching a pair of the creatures flap about in their cage, mute, odorless, and gorgeous as paradise. They weren't a breeding pair. Teams in full body suits were out there right now trying to capture every last one of the species. We even had the army mobilized. We were preparing for genocide, but in the meantime our backers had decided that there might be profit in the flyans' beauty, their skins, wings and images. I just wanted them extinct.

Hal's wife Jo, the photographer, set up a white screen in the lab and took roll after roll of shots while our hapless assistants set the flyans in place, wearing masks, suits, and gloves against the deadly dust of their wings. Outside, people were breathing that in every day. Kids reached out their hands to pet them and died in agony. Arguing to conserve flyans was like arguing for the preservation of smallpox. I hear there were some people for that, as well.

"They're wild creatures, not a virus," Jo said.

She invited a film crew to record their flight patterns in an open room. A biologist boffin mapped them for us using a program developed for bats, and we saw their spirals and arabesques unfurl in slow motion on the screen. If we slowed down the film enough, we could see the shimmer of dust shed from their wings. In movement, the flyans were exquisite.

"You can't do it," the biologist concluded. He used the same argument that had been trotted out by the losing side for years. The things were just too dangerous. We'd gone into the rainforest looking for a cure for cancer and found them instead. As the forests shrank from logging, the flyans adapted themselves to encroach on our habitats, until it was their plague we couldn't cure. The biologist's teams were working frantically to breed nonpoisonous flyans in captivity, but eventually we would have to confiscate their specimens too.

On one of the rare nights we were alone in the lab, still trying to convince me, Jo set up her prints over a light box.

"Aren't they just the most beautiful things you've ever seen?" She was flushed just looking at them, and I put my arms around her.

"See?" she said. "No two alike. Like people."

She wanted images of every subtle variation, and the biologist was on her side. So we called the lab assistants and told them to round up any flyans they thought looked "freakier than usual," as Hal put it. As the specimens poured in, we experimented with ways to kill them and to preserve their wings and skins. The first presented little challenge. Flyans were herbivorous, lapping sap and sucking up fruit pulp. They only needed to be faster than a tree in the wind. Even if they were easy to kill, few predators survived the first bite.

Unfortunately, they were inedible for humans as well. If they had tasted as good as they looked, they might have had a chance. But they didn't, and so we suffocated them, drowned them, electrocuted them and gassed them - once Jo had taken their pictures. She backed up the film and photographs in the national vaults. It would be tragic to lose those as well.

"You're really going to wipe out a species."

"That's right," I told the biologist, and finished my beer. I put on a tough voice. "I got my orders."

The job wasn't as glamorous as that. It took years. By the end, I was dreaming the damned things. In the last days, the biologist came in to show me his data. Everything about flyans alive, dying or dead: their behaviors, their internal organs, their mating rituals, their excretions. Everything, except how to make them harmless to humans.

"They're pulling the funding," the biologist said. "We didn't get results."

The carpet in my office was one of the new designs: "flyan ocean." I hated it.

"But we got some nice pictures," I said. We looked at the last pair fluttering in their ventilated cage.

Jo stopped by later to see them off. Adam and Eve, we'd dubbed them. She'd come from the maternity clinic. The doctors had already warned her there was nothing to be excited about. The scans were showing abnormalities. Too many hours leaning close with the camera, coaxing the flyans, breathing.

"I've made the decision," she said, "But you should know."

"It's our bloody child, Jo."

"I didn't think you'd have a problem with it," she said, as if that was all I remained to her: the exterminator.

Before we turned off the ventilator, I gave her my only souvenir. A freak, an accident that there was no way to reproduce because I'd been alone and drunk in the lab that night. One perfect wing, sandwiched between perspex in a cocktail of gases. There was a note in her sigh I hadn't heard in a good while. We stood side by side and watched the colors change as the flyans suffocated. Then I took the cage outside and tossed the whole thing into the incinerator.

The biologist was packing boxes.

"Probably just as well," he said, as we locked up. "But Christ, a whole species gone for nothing."

"That's what we do," I said.

I snapped off the power and the sheen on the framed photographs left an echo on my eyes, like the final flare of a bright light.

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© Megan Kitching

Megan Kitching was born in New Zealand where she completed a BA in English and History. She currently lives and writes in Dublin, Ireland, a wonderful city for drunks, poets and many who are both. She has been wrestling with the English language for most of her life and hopes someday to subdue it.