Aphelion Issue 301, Volume 28
December 2024 / January 2025
 
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The Tornado in Texas

by Meghashri Dalvi


Jason watched the cocoon sway in the light Brazilian breeze. From a tiny opening at one end, something stirred.

The opening widened a little, the creature wriggled to make it bigger. Jason found a sharp twig and slowly cut open the cocoon. The dull butterfly inside moved a little. Jason waited, hoping that the butterfly would soon spread its wings and fly away.

But its body was not sufficiently developed to pump energy in those tiny lifeless wings.

When Jason left the garden to meet his friends for dinner, the butterfly was still struggling to get out.

And so it never got to flutter its wings. The air pressure around it never rose exponentially. And there was no chance for the effect to get further amplified. The upper atmospheric layers did not get the transferred swirls of the warm air. Nor did they propagate the atmospheric movement hundreds of kilometers around.

The Chaos Theory got its inverse case.

And the Tornado in Texas never happened.


© 2019 Meghashri Dalvi

Dr. Meghashri Dalvi consults in Technical Communication, when she is not writing science fiction or teaching Management. Her stories have appeared in Aphelion, Ascent Aspirations, Anotherealm, Quantummuse, 101Words, and Flash Fiction Press.

Find more by Meghashri Dalvi in the Author Index.

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