In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

Sometimes, watching the rabbits in their pens, I’d think, I’m no different from you, poor things. One time, I opened a cage to set a half-grown doe free. I even gave her a slap to get her going. But she wouldn’t budge! She was used to her little pen.

In confidence, the old man tells me that he gave all thirteen sons the same name to try to outwit the regime. Whichever son is caught can swear he isn’t the brother they want!

I knew spirit was imminent, and that the churches were just glass houses, or way stations on our road through this rocky life. But His house was a mansion as big as the sky, and all you had to do was pelt His window with a pebble-cry, Open up! Help me, God! and He would let you inside.

The truth was the devil was the devil even in a halo. But I knew it was more complicated than that. He was both, angel and devil, like the rest of us.

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.

“I probably knew, but in prison, you can’t let yourself know what you know.”

It is the sweetness in them that makes them burn.