Turbulence was written for a Vignette Haibun contest - not a form I have written in previously.  A haibun is a precisely tailored piece of prose, and I write prose moderately well. It needs to be grammatically correct. Tick.  Each sentence should have no more than 5 concepts, preferably less. I can do that. And the vignette part - needs to be basically a single incident. So no stories that cover multiple times, other than possibly a brief set-up of the scene.

I ran a trial about the night Jessica died. No go, I’m told. The prose is fine, the story worthwhile, but two many places. It was not vignette haibun. Oh by the way - haibun end with a haiku, although you can have more. So I used haiku to separate the scenes. One wasn’t haiku, another was almost. a third was haiku, but not brilliant. Only 4 “passed the test. Go back to the drawing board, because that story needed to be told in some other form. All this advice was from Kirk a poet in Canada. As we talked, I mentioned in passing the incident in Turbulence. We both had a “Eureka!” moment and I was dispatched to write it. To be true, Juliet would  have to write it, in my opinion. Not so, said Kirk. You’re the poet, you can write anything you like. But the only way for me to do so faithfully was to take as much information I had, from Juliet’s diary, our mutual letters and my strong memories of the incident, the phone call and subsequent discussions. To that extent, it's her piece and I'm just the channel.

I don't have a photo of the butterfly as described, but attached is a model originlly in light and dark blue - and I've "coloured it in" (badly). I'll try to make a more accurate picture, but that little touch was not "true history", just embroidered from the fact that I folded many origami models for her, including butterflies. 

In the end I scored just uder 80% in the contest, reasonably well for a first a attempt. Up in the first paragraph I wrote: "It needs to be grammatically correct. Tick." - I was confident that at least for that part of the cotest I was fine. As it turned out, I was th eonly one who got 15/15 from all 4 judges in the marking of "Prose syntax, grammar, spelling, and punctuation". SO I know my strengths (and weaknesses, although my haiku got marks from 15 to 22 out of 25, better than I expected).