In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

Perhaps this is the only way to grieve the big things—in snippets, pinches, little sips of sadness.

Any Dominican of a certain generation would have jumped at that gunshot sound.

Words repeated, distorted, words recreated by those who might bear them a grudge, words stitched to words until they are the winding sheet the family will be buried in when their bodies are found dumped in a ditch, their tongues cut off for speaking too much.

The country people around the farm say that until the nail is hit, it doesn’t believe in the hammer.

Minerva says a soul is like a deep longing in you that you can never fill up, but you try. That is why there are stirring poems and brave heroes who die for what is right.

I asked Minerva why she was doing such a dangerous thing. And then, she said the strangest thing. She wanted me to grow up in a free country.

And suddenly, I was crying in her arms, because I could feel the waters breaking, the pearl of great price slipping out, and I realized I was giving birth to something dead I had been carrying inside me.

What she meant was she didn’t understand until that moment that they were really living—as Minerva liked to say—in a police state.

That room was silent with the fury of avenging angels sharpening their radiance before they strike.

Once the goat was a bad memory in our past, that would be the real revolution we would have to fight: forgiving each other for what we had all let come to pass.