Assignment 1:5 – Evil

When I was younger, I thought evil was a person. You see, there was a woman, let’s call her Butterfly, who lived in the forest right around the corner from where I grew up. My sister once told me, ‘She’s a horrible witch who can turn you to stone with one look. She is pure evil.’

Believe it or not, that was one of the more flattering descriptions of Butterfly. You see, I grew up in a tiny town, about 2 hours outside of Vancouver. It was a place where everyone knew everyone else’s business, because they went out looking for it. And, if they couldn’t find it, they would simply make it up, which brings us back to Butterfly.

She was rarely seen around. You could only ever tell she was still alive, because she would leave old pots and water bottles at the forest’s entrance. She must have been nearly 70. Yet, growing up, we were scared of her. Walking to school, we used to run and scream past the entrance to the forest. As we aged, we would dare each other to run into the forest, trying to see who was tough enough to get the closet to Butterfly: the freaky tree lady.

A friend of mine once told me she saw Butterfly catch a squirrel and eat it alive. Another friend said he was out walking with his parents one night, and saw Butterfly cause a car accident. But these were all just stories.

When I went back to my hometown last year, I ran into a friend I went to school with. After discussing her fiancée, and our parents, I asked her about Butterfly. I wanted to know if she was still around.

‘No,’ she said. ‘She passed away last year. She was buried beside her husband. Apparently, she had been married years back, but went nuts after his death. Who knew!’

After turning away from my friend, I started to cry. All the mean stories we had told over the years began circling in my mind. Butterfly must have felt so alone. She must have had her own story, but we all gave her a false history.

Those rumours I had felt so harmless repeating as a child, mattered to me all of a sudden. Because the thing is, ‘once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world. So you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told.’ (King, 10).

Work Cited

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: House of           Anansi, 2003. Print.

I chose to take Leslie Silko’s story of evil, and really turn it into a new tale based on a woman who lived in my town growing up. I sent this story to my father, who still lives in our village, and he told me our ‘Butterfly’ now has a bench outside our town hall with her name on it. I found that quite touching.

While I wrote this story to have a similar morale to Leslie’s, I found that by the end I had a second morale as well: be nice to your neighbour. I think that second morale does fit into the first. We should be generous to those around us by listening to their stories, and by not sharing stories that are misleading or untruthful. As displayed in this week’s lesson, stories are very powerful, and we should use them wisely.