Butterflies

There was a time in life when beauty meant something special to Ntando Nkosi. Who was about six or seven years old, just several weeks or maybe a month before the orphanage turned him into an old man.

He would get up every morning at the orphanage, make his own bed just like the little soldier that he had become and then he would get into one of the two straight lines and march to breakfast with the other twenty or thirty boys who also lived in the same cottage with him.

On one Saturday morning after breakfast he returned to the cottage and saw the house parent chasing after the beautiful monarch butterflies who lived by the hundreds in the lotus bushes strewn around the orphanage.

He carefully watched as he caught these beautiful creatures, one after the other, and then took them from the net and then roughly stuck straight pins through their little heads and wings, pinning them onto a heavy cardboard sheet.

Ntando picked up the torn wing and the poor butterfly and then spat on its wing so that he could get it to stick back on so it could fly away and be free before the house parent came back. But it would not stay on him.

He had walked many times out into the bushes, all by himself, just so the butterflies could land on his head, face and hands so he could look at them up close.

Every year when the butterflies would return to the orphanage and try to land on Ntando, he would seemingly try and shoo them away because they did not know that the orphanage was a bad place to live and a very bad place to die… How cruel it was to kill something of such beauty.  

By: Mahlatse Masinamela