Free The Butterfly Heart by Paula Leyden

do wrong to do right. That if something crosses our path and it is placing pain in the heart of a child, we must help that child. I will do that.

Winifred
    My ma doesn’t walk straight any more. Her back is bent and her eyes look at the floor. When she talks to me it’s as if she doesn’t want me to hear. It’s because of what’s happening, I know that. She doesn’t know how to tell my uncle to take this thing away, to chase the old man out of the house. To send him back to the tavern so he can drink till he is dead. That is what I want: I want him to die so he can’t look at me any more. I want him to disappear so I can be Winifred again. So I can go to school without feeling this big weight dragging behind me.
    Bul-Boo says they’ll help, but she does not know life like I know it. It all went wrong when Dad became sick. He died so slowly. Every day a little bit more of him went. I think it should be called the melting disease, because that’s what happened to him: he melted like a candle, a bit each day until there was nothing left. When he got too weak to stand he would lie in the bed looking at you with eyes that were too big for his head. I could see all the bones in his body. I hadn’t even known there were so many.
    My mother told me that maybe he would get better, but I knew he wouldn’t.
    Then he was gone and my uncle came. He didn’t come here when Dad was sick, but sometimes I saw him near the house. Waiting. He only came when there was death in our house and Ma was weak. He is loud and his voice is ugly. I know it’s wrong to say, but I do not mind if they both die, him and his friend. There will be no hole left in this earth when they go. But there is a hole left in my body without my dad. I don’t think it will ever be filled.
    I know that I cannot be married unless my mother’s brother permits it. But my mother has no brothers left now, she is alone. That is why my uncle thinks he can do this, he has no one to fear.
    I wish I could wake up tomorrow morning and know that all this has gone away. I want to feel free to go to school and laugh and play with Bul-Boo and Madillo, or walk with them and Fred, listening to Madillo and her funny counting. I want to be free from these thoughts of this old man, but I can’t. I want Sister Leonisa to look at me and ask me questions, but she doesn’t any more – even though I am the only one who knows all the answers. Bul-Boo knows most of them and Madillo does too – except that the answers she gives sometimes are wrong in a funny kind of way. Like when Sister asked why Zambia was called a landlocked country. Madillo told her that it wasn’t in fact landlocked because you could follow the Zambezi river all the way to the sea, and if you made a small boat out of tree bark and put it into the river, it would, one day, get to the sea. So that’s not locked at all. Which is true. But there is no part of Zambia that touches the sea.
    I wish that was all I had to think about right now.

Bul-Boo
    As we walked past Fred’s house on the way back from school today, I could feel someone watching us. There’s a line of bushes at the end of his garden that is very thick. If someone stands behind them, it’s hard to see who it is. (Unless it’s Fred’s dad, who is so big he could hardly hide anywhere.)
    Madillo was way behind me, so I couldn’t ask if she’d noticed, and as I couldn’t see anything I just carried on walking. Then I heard my name: “Bul-Boo, Bul-Boo, Bul-Boo.” A whispering voice. I looked and saw a very small hand waving through the bushes. It blended into the branches and looked as if it was growing. Only Fred’s great-granny has a hand that small. Even his little brother, the one Madillo thinks is a hermaphrodite, has bigger hands than she does.
    I felt a small lump of terror inside me as I remembered Fred’s words. I was not ready to experience life as a dung-beetle. Not even as a chameleon, although I love them and their funny dinosaur