Hamish and the Butterfly

[Oceana Setaysha]

Hamish has a butterfly in a jar. The jar seems impossibly big in his small boy hands, with tiny knuckle wrinkles, and bitten fingernails soaked in dirt. Hamish keeps the jar and the butterfly by his bed, and when he can’t sleep for his parent’s yelling, he looks at its wings fluttering in the moonlight. The butterfly’s wings are blue, red and transparent, so that sometimes, when Hamish squints, he can see all the way through both wings, and into eternity. When Hamish has the butterfly next to his bed, he dreams of meadows in bloom and the far-blown fantasies of a five year old. When the butterfly’s wings cease to flutter, Hamish takes its tiny body to the hill in the meadow where he caught it, and watches the wind take it to a freedom he may never know.

[Michael Brown]

I need to know if the stopping of the butterflies wings means it has died, or if it just has cabin/jar fever. If Hamish is returning the butterfly to its rightful habitat, his action represents one type of melancholy longing that is correctable at some future point in time. If, however, he is letting the wind take away the butterfly's remains, his longing is a terribly sad burden for a child to bear in seeing no escape other than the final one from which there is no return.
I don't ask for clarification. The fact that I need to know makes me feel this is a great flash fiction that succeeds in expressing much beyond its words, and still leaves so much unexplained.
Excellent.