No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies

MY AUNT LOU told me once that it is easier for our people to believe in magic than it is for others.

As soon as she said it, I knew it was true.

I knew because that day she’d taken my sister and me, plus two of our cousins, to a beach on the northern coast of the island where the sand is shaped like stars.

We got lost in those stars.

We bent over their tiny bodies for hours, inspecting them as closely as we could without a magnifying glass, wishing we had one, even if only one, even if it meant we had to share.