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.

Mamá, ease up a little on those commandments. Work out the Christian math of how you give a little and you get it back a hundredfold.

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

As the road darkened, the beams of our headlights filled with hundreds of blinded moths. Where they hit the windshield, they left blurry marks, until it seemed like I was looking at the world through a curtain of tears.

“Four crumbs of dulce de leche; one, two, let’s see, seven ants marching towards them—”

And so it is of human life the goal to seek, forever seek, the kindred soul.

May the limitations of love not cast a spell On the serious ambitions of my mind.

And then our hands reached out, palm to palm, joining our lifelines.

Minou and Jacqueline laughed in that forced way of children imitating adult laughter they don’t really understand.

This must be how God does things, I thought, as if He has all the time in the world.

There was no one between me and the dark passage ahead—I was next.