In the Time of the Butterflies

by Julia Alvarez

She picks up the fallen blossom and trims the stem, wincing. Perhaps this is the only way to grieve the big things—in snippets, pinches, little sips of sadness.

can’t be a modern woman and insist on the old sentimentalities.

she knows it is herself at that age she misses the most.

pinning her down with a handful of adjectives, the beautiful, intelligent, high-minded Minerva.

used to this fixed, monolithic language around interviewers

Work out the Christian math of how you give a little and you get it back a hundredfold.

caused by the cotton bandages I had started tying around my chest so my breasts wouldn’t grow. I wanted to be sure what had happened to Lina Lovatón would never happen to me.

No one had to tell me to believe in God or to love everything that lives. I did it automatically like a shoot inching its way towards the light.

I went over and over my life to this point, complicating the threads with my fingers, knotting everything.

But when I asked them, “What do you want?” they stood, mute, their mouths hanging open, not knowing where to start.

Right in front of me stands a set of scales like the kind Justice holds up, each small tray bearing a set of dice.

This was a kind of farming, too, he told me later, one that he could share with his Nelson. From those seeds of destruction, we would soon—very soon—harvest our freedom.

and for a moment, like his tilting prism, I saw an overgrown fat boy, ashamed of himself for kicking the cat and pulling the wings off butterflies.

At first, Minerva made excuses about how Dinorah learned bad civic habits from a corrupt system.

a certain slant of light would

But all this is a sign of my success, isn’t it? She’s not haunted and full of hate. She claims it, this beautiful country with its beautiful mountains and splendid beaches—all the copy we read in the tourist brochures.