The Butterfly Child

Chapter One

There was always something about the way he stared at me; like I'd stabbed a dagger through his hairy chest and smeared the blood around him. I would never really understand why, but his eyes turned cold when they burnt into mine, and I would wither away in fear. There was a love he gave to my elder ones, a certain kind of love that he did not give to me. My father hated me. My name is Nella Asuquo and I was born on a chilly day - when the rain refused to stop and water flooded our house due to the leaking roof. I was born when the world was stiff, I was born when my father lost all his personal savings, and I was born in ice.

My grandmother used to tell me that the only light she saw on the day of my birth was the colorful butterflies that clung to the window of the room my mother conceived me. My grandma was a rather blunt woman. Very outspoken and tough. She had worked on the field since she was fifty, during which she also helped a lot of other women also working on the field give birth. She died not long after I clocked six, and it was then, as they lowered her dried body under the earth, that Amor came and sat on my shoulders, fluttering her bright yellow wings. I felt a slight chill in my bones when she first said 'hello'. Her voice was like a second inner conscience in my head. She fluttered her wings when I told her I was sad, and she spoke again. She said;

"You smile when it's hard. But life doesn't have to be hard, it is never easy either."

For a six-year-old, that may have been quite hard to comprehend. But for a fourteen-year-old, it wasn't so hard - I had come to understand. And even as she said those same words to my ears, after my father had spanked me black, blue and deep green, I felt comforted in a certain way. I laid under the sourwood tree at the center of the field, with my eye solely on the dancing butterflies above me. They fluttered their wings and I could hear them laugh, giggle and even sing. I could hear their tiny squeaky voice in my head and I'd giggle with them. They were singing and flying close to each other when a red leaf forced them to disband as it fell on my face. A smile graced my lips as the butterflies came back together and continued to fill my ears with their singing and my eyes with color.

'It's getting late.' Amor said. She flew down and perched on my nose. 'Go home Nella.'

I raised my right shoulder indignantly to show that staying here with them is a thousand times better than going home to face the angry storm in my father's eyes.

'Go home child. Go home.' The other butterflies flew down to join Amor in persuading me. I closed my eyes hard as I reminisced the painful feeling of my father's small but hard palm on my face, and I began to cry. The tears rolled down from the side of my eyes and meandered its way to my ear. I let myself fall into a pool of misery as I remembered his angry slaps during moments like when I'd mistakenly let his cup of cocoa tea spill on the floor.

'Go home...' Amor called softly, her voice dancing in my head like the soft wools from a thread. I came back to my reality and sat up immediately, dusted my dress of all the red flowers that had fallen from the tree. I stood up, and without a word or a wave at my butterfly friends, I began my miserable walk home. I strutted across the field, head held high and shoulders squared for whatever may await be behind the walls of my home.

'You must never let them break you, child.' Amor said before her voice fainted away into the breeze.

I stopped just before the green rope that separated the field from the rest of the clay floor. I turned back and waved at the butterflies that stood in a crooked line mid-air, their wings flapping against themselves.

The moon was almost up when I got home. The hut with the fallen roof was ours. After my father went broke years ago, he could not afford materials to fix the roof. At least he had fixed the hut when the storm caused some clay to fall off. I ducked under the dirty white rope that was used to separate our compound from Iya Fauza's compound. I walked on until I got to the entrance. I pushed open the door and stepped in. I was greeted with a loud bassy laughter that came from my right-hand side. I turned my gaze to them, my brothers. They all sat in a small circle, playing Ayo. A game of pebbles and illusional houses. I would never understand the game, never. Because they never play it with me, I thought.