Butterflies
                                                  Roger Dean Kiser

        There was a time in my life when beauty meant something special to me（美对我有特别的含义）. I guess that would have been when I was about six or seven years old, just several weeks or maybe a month before the orphanage turned me into an old man（这很有趣，孤儿院会让他变成老人）.

        I would get up every morning at the orphanage, make my bed just like the little soldier that I had become （可见孤儿院的生活纪律很严厉，没有多少儿童的乐趣） and then I would get into one of the two straight lines and march to breakfast with the other twenty or thirty boys who also lived in my dormitory（一间宿舍住二三十人，可见生活艰苦）.

        After breakfast one Saturday morning I returned to the dormitory and saw the house parent （负责看管这些小孩的大人）chasing the beautiful monarch butterflies who lived by the hundreds in the azalea bushes strewn around the orphanage（这个人追逐着这些美丽的蝴蝶，不知是为了什么）.

        I carefully watched as he caught these beautiful creatures, one after the other, and then took them from the net and then stuck straight pins through their head and wings, pinning them onto a heavy cardboard sheet（这个人太残酷了，居然将这些蝴蝶串起来）.

        How cruel it was to kill something of such beauty. I had walked many times out into the bushes, all by myself, just so the butterflies could land on my head, face and hands so I could look at them up close（作者一向很喜欢蝴蝶，所以这些蝴蝶的死给他产生巨大的心理创伤）.

        When the telephone rang the house parent laid the large cardboard paper down on the back cement step and went inside to answer the phone. I walked up to the cardboard and looked at the one butterfly who（作者将蝴蝶当人看待） he had just pinned to the large paper. It was still moving about so I reached down and touched it on the wing causing one of the pins to fall out. It started flying around and around trying to get away but it was still pinned by the one wing with the other straight pin. Finally it's wing broke off and the butterfly fell to the ground and just quivered（它断了一只翅膀，不能飞走，只能在地上颤抖）.

        I picked up the torn wing and the butterfly and I spat on its wing and tried to get it to stick back on so it could fly away （小孩天真地想把断了的翅膀接到蝴蝶身上，让它能够飞走）and be free before the house parent came back. But it would not stay on him.

        The next thing I knew the house parent came walking back out of the back door by the garbage room and started yelling at me（这个大人真凶，在他眼里，作者已经犯了大错）. I told him that I did not do anything but he did not believe me. He picked up the cardboard paper and started hitting me on the top of the head（真可恶）. There were all kinds of butterfly pieces going everywhere（. He threw the cardboard down on the ground and told me to pick it up and put it in the garbage can他不把蝴蝶当回事，一点也没有爱心，不能欣赏蝴蝶的美）inside the back room of the dormitory and then he left.

        I sat there in the dirt, by that big old tree, for the longest time trying to fit all the butterfly pieces back together so I could bury them whole（小孩与大人不同，可怜这些蝴蝶的悲惨命运）, but it was too hard to do. So I prayed for them and then I put them in an old torn up shoe box and I buried them in the bottom of the fort that I had built in the ground, out by the large bamboos, near the blackberry bushes.

        Every year when the butterflies would return to the orphanage and try to land on me I would 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.（从此，小孩再也不敢放他心爱的蝴蝶接近了，因为这个孤儿院太危险了。从此他失去了对美的欣赏，失去了纯真的童趣，这就是他说这里让他变成老人的原因。）