Three Girls Who
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Three Girls Who
Jane was a spunky girl who did stuff. She didn’t just sit around waiting for some boy to do stuff for her. Only last week she gave a kick-ass presentation for the White Girls Matter Society. On the screen above her she put caricatures of the girls who were obsessed with their clothes and make-up. She threw the cutest little outfits onto the screen.
The girls in their cute little outfits were then knocked out by a spunky grrl-butterfly in shiny spandex with a glistening set of Spidergrrl knuckledusters on her outsized hands. The super-butterfly then painted spunky little butterflies all over their cute little bow ties and stupid little Pocahontas t-shirts. These butterflies weren’t ordinary butterflies that waited around for boy butterflies to do stuff for them. Instead, they laughed at the cocoons below them and lifted themselves up into the clear light of day.
Irene was also a spunky girl who did stuff and who was invited to give a presentation at the White Girls Matter Society. Yet Irene took Spanish classes and watched alot of documentaries about organized violence in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. As she listened to Jane’s presentation, she struggled to see a connection between the plight of a women in Ciudad Juárez or San Pedro Sula and the discomfort Jane felt at “being called a girl.” At being told her feelings “weren’t as important as the laws men created to keep us down.” Irene understood her need to “take back the word girl,” but wondered if she wasn’t belabouring the point. After Jane’s presentation, an audience member told Jane, I love you, you’re such a spunky girl!
Irene began her presentation by describing Dolores, who was also a spunky girl. But this was because her mouth was full of spunk. Her body was listless, having spent the last three months as an unpaid sex worker in a pleasure dungeon operated by Mexican drug lords. Her experience there inured her somewhat to the delicacies of the male genius. John Keats wasn’t an author she quoted much. The only thing that remotely resembled a Grecian urn was a bedpan in the corner of her windowless room.
No nightingales serenaded Dolores to an easeful death. The account of her brief life in Ciudad Juárez was written with a nail file in the dust beneath her bed. The account was of more interest to forensic investigators than literary agents.
As Irene finished her presentation, little blue and purple butterflies lifted upward from the body of Dolores, and a small cocoon appeared on the screen. Irene touched an icon on her iPad and the cocoon morphed into the swaddled baby of an Indian woman in Bolivia. The woman’s land had been polluted by a Canadian mining company and she was standing patiently in front of the parliament building in La Paz demanding her rights. From the white bundle on her back an enormous blue butterfly burst into the air.
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