I always liked this idea:
how we’d walk to the end of the subway tunnel
and there’d be a door
where everyone was waiting on the other side
with all the things
we’d ever lost.

I always liked how
to die means to never lose anything again.
I want to remember the last time we watched the fireflies
and let the dusk light pour into our unhealed wounds.
You were so beautiful then
I couldn’t stop crying.

We raced our shadows home,
watching them spill into the night
neither of us ever quite reaching our destination—
Not everything needs to end
to stay beautiful.
I never told you
how my mom cries
when we buy my grandmother’s favorite flowers
how my dad tells me
time isn’t a wound
so there’s no way to fix it.

I didn’t know
that snow could outline a memory
and take it away with the spring melt.
Nature is full of shortcuts
and unfinished stories
how some butterflies never make it out of their cocoons
how sometimes we can hold a funeral
for something that hasn’t finished dying.

Tell me
there is meaning in the end.
Tell me the door opens
and it isn’t another wound.
Tell me we can be young again
where the flowers have no names yet.

Tell me we can take the bullet again
                                   and call it going home.

(Editors’ Note: “Butterfly Effect” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 72B.)

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© 2026 Angela Liu

Angela Liu is a Chinese-American writer/poet based in NYC and Tokyo. She is a three-time Nebula Award and 2025 Astounding Award Finalist. Her work has also been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, Ignyte, and Rhysling Awards. She previously researched mixed reality at Keio University in Japan with a focus on new narrative platforms. She now writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. Her stories and poems are published/forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed, among others. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram @liu_angela and on Bluesky @angelaliu.bsky.social.