Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: Childhood (09/03/09)
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TITLE: An Unlikely Meet | Previous Challenge Entry
By Cecile Hurst
09/07/09 -
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Sophy’s mother shook her head and smiled at the wanton conversation. She wore a new perfume that day she’d bought from a roadside seller. The roadside seller, a dark woman with thick sun-bleached brown hair, had borrowed a section of sidewalk downtown to display her self-made scented collection. To posh it up she’d offered coffee beans to clear the nose and thin white cardboard scent sticks for testing. Sophy’s mother had chosen a small bottle called Orange Heat via a few of those sticks – the price had been haggled from twenty-five to twenty. The dark woman with the thick sun-bleached brown hair had sold six other bottles just like it. She had made eighty-five dollars that day. She gave five dollars of this to her small daughter, Mali, who bought a pencil and a simple lined notepad and wrote this poem inside:
Once upon a time ago
A butterfly passed by my cracked window.
To see if he could enter in
And take my mind on a dreamful spin.
I told him to turn away in flight -
Leave me alone to grow up with might.
So this is how the story goes
Of a butterfly’s solution to my bare toes.
This was Mali’s childhood; a childhood where cares were shared with her mother and responsibility as a given. The poem itself was a true story of the delicate, newborn yellow butterfly that Mali had indeed seen pass by their cracked kitchen window.
This selfsame butterfly left Mali’s house at a quarter till two and arrived, carefree, at Sophy’s at half past three. It visited fourteen flowers along the way – its favorite of which had been a very red, red rose. When it came to Sophy’s garden party it was quickly captured in a long netted funnel clouds the likes of which it had never seen before. And it was startled, to say the least, that clouds were so scratchy and uncomfortable.
From the net it was guided, with a few pokes and prods, into a bit of air from which it could not escape. This was the butterfly’s childhood.
And death – almost. Almost because Sophy had an attack of conscience later that week and decided to let the poor, not-quite-so-fluttery-now, thing go. After releasing the butterfly from it’s clear prison, she followed it for a block and a half – something she wasn’t supposed to do, until it landed on a blade of grass about a meter from a skinny girl with almond eyes and a tall nose who, upon seeing the butterfly, said: “Persistent, aren't you?” and smiled.
“Where are you from?”
“Canada,” said the girl.
“But where were you born,” said Sophy.
“Canada,” stressed the child, indignant, with a raise of the aforementioned nose; but upon seeing little Sophy move a pebble with her pink shoe and turn to leave added, “my parents were born in Egypt though.”
“Cool. I saw the pyramids in a picture once… I’m Sophy,” said Sophy.
“I’m Mali,” said Mali, “And that yellow butterfly just doesn’t listen!”
“That yellow butterfly? That one right there?” dug Sophy, eyes wide.
“Yah… why?”
And that’s the story of an unlikely meet which turned into an unlikely friendship which, 20 years later, saw Sophy and Mali’s children carrying on the tradition of childhood together.
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