I sat in the back row with Michael and Jeanne, a girl who came with us sometimes. They whispered to each other through the whole service. If the pastor had not spoken so loudly that week, and been given generally to rasping and wheezing and respiratory theatrics, I would not have heard him myself.

“The Lorddd-hha! Has-a never looked kindly on the ways of the HEATHEN!”

“Amen!”

“All right, now!” A few regulars added fuel to the flame.

“Now I know some a us know people, I’m not gonna say we do it ourselves, I’m not gonna give-A voice-A to such-A wickedness, but we all know people, don’t we?” He shifted from foot to foot, growing anxious.

“Speak, preacher.”

“Yes.”

“Mmmmhmmm.”

He wiped his forehead with a tissue. “We all know people who-A dabble in the Obeah, who-A deal in the Voodoo, as they call it in some places!”

The church murmured. He was working up to something.

“You know what God-A call it? You know what He calls it?”

Beside me, Michael had leaned over and scribbled something on the top of the paper Jeanne had balanced on top of her hymnal.

“He calls-A it The Devil!” His voice reached a new pitch.

There was a moment, just as Devil left his lips, just before the congregation was about to leap into amen-ing and that’s right-ing, when there was a small silence. Perhaps people were waiting. Perhaps they assumed he was taking a breath, that there was more to come. Perhaps everyone was simply preparing to agree at exactly the same moment. In any event, small silence; no one gave a retort, no one clapped, no small children squeaked or complained about being kept indoors so long in lace clothing or tight shoes on a hot day. It was silent. And in that silence, Jeanne had glanced at whatever Michael wrote on her paper, rolled her eyes, and sucked her teeth.

It was a long, juicy suck-teeth. She must have had a mint in her mouth earlier, for there was plenty of spit around her teeth and tongue to stretch the tschuups into a great mutated single syllable that extended across ten or twelve seconds. Jeanne realized both her volume and her unfortunate timing when it was too late; the suck-teeth could not be halted, it had to run its course. It did; the noise elongated, sprung back on itself, and bounced off the backs of pews and sides of walls, and off the dark rafters above. Mr. Adams, who sat in front of us, his dust-grey head bobbing in gentle repose, snapped up to attention. A fuller, new silence followed the end of it, and this was broken quickly, when her uncle, an usher fortuitously standing in the aisle nearby, leaned across three people and smacked her firmly in the back of the head. At the front of the church I could see the back of Mummy’s head, under her blue-netted hat, firm and front-facing.

“I can-A SEE,” the pastor began again, “that some amongst us disagree!”

“No, no, no!”

“Keep going, pastor!” The crowd was with him again, awake with indignation.

“But I TELL you, this is a problem that is amongst us, that even within our midst, there are Obeah men, there are Obeah women, there are practitioners of the Voodoo. I know what you say; not in my Bahamas, not in my Christian nation, not with all these churches we have!”

“That’s right, brother.” The woman at the end of our row, a younger woman, maybe not that much older than Michael, shouted it out, so her voice carried up through the building. She shot a withering look down the pew; it was directed towards Jeanne, I’m sure, but it seemed to land only as far as me. I looked away.

“But you can’t tell me that with all the immigrants, with all these illegal immigrants we have, that there is no Voodoo in the Bahamas!”

“Speak it, brother.”

“That’s right!”

“And I can-a tell you, when the Israelites got mixed up with those other nations, with the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Amalekites and the this-ites and the that-ites, they got TURNED AWAY from their God—”

—at this point the first woman left through a side door, which creaked both on opening and closing—

“—and they got led into the worshipping of idols and the leading away from the goodness of the glory of their God—”

—a second left now, this time through the heavy doors at the back—

“—and the sleeping with the enemy, and the sparing of the lives of those they were told to slaughter, and the point is they were not following the WORD of GOD!”

The largest group yet, an entire pew in the centre of the church, rose up. Their high heeled shoes should have echoed down the hardwood floor, but the red plush carpet down the aisles ate up the noise. Still, they made quite a ruckus. “Mummy, he ain finish talk yet,” a little girl complained in her best Talk Quiet In Church whisper. Her mother used a free hand to speed up the girl’s progress for the door. They were mostly quite fat, the women. The church, again, was quiet, limelighting the rustle of stiff-starched fabrics, stockinged thigh against thigh.

“I’m running people outta the church today. You see that? You see that, flock?”

The flock saw.

“But I’m just getting warmed up!” he rasped, stepping out from behind the podium as the doors slammed shut. “Whooo, can you all feel it getting hot here in the Lord’s house? The words are hot, but you know what? The truth keepeth me cool.”

It was getting hot. In theory, the room was air conditioned, so the windows were kept firmly shut, but it seemed like midday was kicking in, even though we were only 45 minutes into the 10 a.m. service. The room was seeming to spin. I could feel it expanding, contracting, contracting. I reached for Michael’s bulletin, which dangled from his fingers, and used it to try to move the air around my face. The Spiderman he had doodled around one edge wiggled slightly in front of my eyes. I leaned back into the pew. At the end of the row, the young woman shifted in disapproval. Up front, the pastor still spoke. People murmured and spoke their agreement. I looked up at the fan, spinning, spinning. I closed my eyes.

.

“That was some service, eh?” Mummy said over dinner later that afternoon. “Pastor lit the church right up.

“Mmph,” Daddy said, even though he had, as was usual, come in for the opening prayer, sung the first three hymns, then disappeared until some time after church let out, when he was found in the car with the windows down, napping.

“What did you learn this week, Michael?” Mummy helped our father to some more peas and rice, although his plate was still half full. Michael muttered something or other to the bones in front of him, pushed off to one side. Mummy picked up the rice spoon again and ladled more onto his plate, too. “Nothing? You wasn’t listening, eh? Too busy disrupting the service. Eh?”

“No, Ma’am,” he murmured into his refurbished dish.

“I don’t think Jeanne will be riding with us again,” she said to Daddy. To me she said “How about you?”

“It was interesting.” The heat had gotten the better of me. I hadn’t heard the last hour of his sermon, and I hoped she wouldn’t ask for a summary. “Could you pass the rice?”

“Hmph,” Mummy said, putting down the spoon.

.

That Tuesday afternoon, the earth moved. It was too far away for us to feel it, though the news brought warnings. For hours, hushed tones, fearful words. Tsunami? Tidal wave?

When nothing happened, when the world ceased to cave in and wash over and wash us away, we settled back into business as usual. Daddy went back out under the hood of the car. Michael, under his earphones, started on his homework. Mummy got up from in front of the television and went back into the kitchen to make us a late dinner. “Thank God for sparing us,” she said on the phone to somebody, as she rinsed vegetables to steam. “To God be the glory, He truly looks after His children. My, my, it’s sad, though.”

.

Later that night, I tiptoed out into the living room. I could hear both our parents snoring, each in their own tone and pitch. I couldn’t sleep.

The television lit Michael’s face up in starts and stops. It was a rerun, a movie on the women’s channel, something hectic. A young girl was cowering in terror while someone much larger loomed in the foreground, only their shadow visible. He stared at the television as though he did not realize I was there.

“Michael?” I said, sitting down on the armrest.

“Hmm?” He barely turned.

“What this is?”

“Some movie.” He stirred on the sofa. There was an ad on now. Exuberant women celebrating the effectiveness of air-sanitizing spray. I stood up, and wondered if I felt the carpet shift beneath me. Nothing seemed certain. I lifted myself up, one foot, one foot, to go back to bed.

.

Mummy came back from Wednesday night Bible study with the news that the church was having a donations drive. Sheets, towels, money, clothes. She began gathering things together right away. The days stretched forward. On Sunday, the pastor spoke about the importance of compassion, mercy, love. He spoke with his usual passion, but less dancing. The church was full. I tried to recognize the seven ladies who had walked out the previous week, but I could not pick them out from all the mothers in straight skirts and stockings and stiff-starched clothing.

.

That afternoon the heat in the house was thick. We ate without enthusiasm. Daddy went to lay down in two chairs on the front porch. It was Michael’s week to wash dishes. He made an enthusiastic start while Mummy wrapped up the food, then retreated to the TV when she disappeared into her room for a bath. I lay down in front of the glass door. Heat seemed to filter in right through the screen. Michael flicked past channels, lingering on a news special on the earthquake. Then Mummy screamed.

Michael and I both shot up; we ran for the room, and I banged on bathroom door. I could hear her inside; she was making a low, moaning noise as though she was hurt. “Mummy, you alright?” I rattled the knob. It wouldn’t turn.

“You fall? You okay?” Michael was calling from behind me. “Mummy, open the door, you okay?” More words than space in the sentence. I banged on the door. Inside, I could hear her moving around.

“It’s alright,” she said in a voice that was not. The knob clicked open.

“You go,” Michael said. I let myself in.

She was at the sink. Behind us, I could hear the tub filling, water splashing into water. She had started to undress already; her shirt was on the counter. I had never seen my mother in only her bra before. For a moment, I forgot fear, and was embarrassed.

“What happen?”

She pointed at the toilet. I didn’t understand. It was filled with blood. I said “Are you dying?” It was a stupid thing to say.

She pointed at the bathtub. I turned to look at it.

It was full of red, too. The tap, still on, gushed red. Red rushed into the tub and splashed up onto the lower tiles. This was not from my mother, this red, this—blood. I looked at her; she was shaking. I looked up at the ceiling, its ordinary white.

It was not only in the bathroom that this was happening. In the kitchen, our father, who had been unaware of the commotion, was bent over the sink, retching. Beside him was a glass half full of what could have been juice, if we had kept juice in the house. The 5 gallon bottle by the fridge was stained the same way. I ran outside and turned on the hose. It stuttered, then gushed; it was as if an enormous vein had been slashed, spraying life into the afternoon.

.

And it was not only our home or our yard; the news told us that. We went to school and work Monday, and everyone was quiet, keeping fuzzy teeth and night breath private, faces unwashed, underarms sprayed with deodorant but underneath, ripe.

It did not go away. The rain fell clear and pooled crimson. Clothing was either worn and worn until it stank, or emerged from the washer stained bright.

The red itself did not smell, the way blood would. Michael said it wasn’t blood, it couldn’t be because it didn’t taste like blood, didn’t taste at all. It was simply red, and thicker than water; something like Poinciana petals steeped in milk.

The same could not be said of our food, which we now ate off dishes wiped down with rubbing alcohol, and, when that ran out, with Dettol. Even the best meal of macaroni and chicken and broccoli and beets becomes bitter when it smells like a nursing home.

New water shipped in from Andros began to tinge as it drew near Nassau. The barges stopped coming the second week. The price of juice and soda, which remained untinged, shot up to $6 a can, then $8. Those who could fled for family islands; the problem had not spread to them, it seemed. In Nassau, even private wells and unopened bottles had been stained the same strange hue.

.

On the third Sunday after the invasion, Daddy opted to stay home. “I ain goin in that place to go sit up with all them sweaty armpits in polyester suits,” he declared over breakfast. Mummy said nothing.

Michael drove us back on the way home. “Let’s stop by the beach,” I said on a whim, because the ocean water was still clear, although undrinkable. He swung down onto Prince Charles, and we followed it to its end. He parked right at the edge of the sea wall.

“I ain getting out,” Mummy said, cracking her door open. She had eased off her shoes, and reclined her seat. Michael rolled his window down.

I opened my door and got out. I shed my shoes, and my socks. Bunched up, the lace part was not visible, only the grey-stained toe.

“Don’ get them dirty,” Mummy said, listlessly. I tossed them into the back seat.

I walked away from the car, around a few other vehicles parked out there, also early from church, or people who hadn’t gone. I walked down the steps. The concrete was hot under my arches; the sand after offered welcome give.

Closer to the water, the sand grew firm too. I stepped in. The tide was neither high nor low, but seemed to be coming in. I could easily see through the few inches to the bottom. It looked good enough to drink, and it was cool.

There was a noise from above—a seagull or something, I’m not sure—and I looked up. I couldn’t see the bird. Behind me, a dog barked, and I could hear that Michael had put the radio on.

Out to sea, out at the horizon, the water was darker where it deepened and where the seaweed began. I walked a little further into the sea. The water lapped at my legs. I wiggled my toes, and looked down to see the sand kick up around them.

Around my legs, where my skin touched the water, redness was beginning to seep, to bleed into the clear. Later in life, I would come to see how much this was like getting your period in a pool in high school, seeing the red coming out of you, out of your actual self, and yet not wanting to believe, swimming away and finding, in horror, that it follows you. I did that then, I turned for the shore, which seemed much further away now.

I ran, but you know well how water, cooling, smoothing, soothing, slows you down. I ran and barely moved, and as I ran, the red was thickening, was following me. I screamed for my mother, and the shoreline seemed to be getting further and further away, and the red was getting thicker, and it was spreading wider, wider now, lapping up to touch where the waves and sand met, sinking, seeping into the grains. It was like that day at church; I was feeling hot, weak. I wanted to shout for my mother, or for Michael. I was sure they could see that I was struggling to reach the shore, and that the water all around me was like split tomatoes. I pushed and pushed for the shore, and it did not want to come. They were up there in the car. I could not see their faces through the glare of sun on the front glass.

•••

Her back is straight.  Like a tree, she tells herself.  Her spine is the trunk of a great and ancient redwood.  Her legs, folded on top of each other, are her roots.  She will sit here, like this, in this silent dark until she feels peace.

Take a deep breath.

She sucks the cool darkness into herself and holds it in her belly.

Release.

She allows the warmth to pass through her slightly parted lips.  The sound of it hangs in the air, around her ears.

In.

She breathes the quiet blackness again.  Her belly is perfectly round and taut.  She is pregnant with this black silence.

Out.

That’s it, she thinks, rhythmic and deep breathing; smooth and easy.  Then she allows herself no more thoughts.

Thoughts are made of words.  Words are but symbols of the external world.  The external world is an illusion.  What is real is the fullness of darkness, the wholeness of silence.  This is the purity before creation.  The perfection before separation.

In.

Out.

She does not think this.  Her body has taken responsibility of its own physical obligations.  There is no need for her mind to remain confined to its fleshy prison.  It is now free to frolic in the ether.

Here, in this black nothingness, is where God lives.  This wordless emptiness is God, and there is no separation between her and It.

This is why she has come here.   To find God.

But the Devil finds her first.

He slips into her, riding on the tide of her breath.  Her body sucks him in deeply.  Into her belly – round and taut.  She is pregnant with the Devil.  He follows the trail of chi through her heart, into her mind and leaks himself into the Ether.

He creeps into the black.  She is too enraptured, at first, to realise that he has come.  She has underestimated him, his ability to find her and the relentlessness of his pursuit.   She is relaxed and open.  The Devil grabs her by this serenity; takes a fistful of it into his clawed, scaly hands and ties it into knots and tangles.  The blackness becomes harsh and cold.  It is shadow and gloom.  The velvet becomes Velcro.  Rough and sticky.

The Devil is a million little hooks sunk into her soft peace and clarity.

.

Her body gasps and whimpers.  Her breath is short and shallow.  Fast and erratic.

This blackness is dirt.  It is grime and filth.  She sputters and chokes.  The air is like mire. She is at the centre of an opaque swamp.  The Devil is around her ankles, a concrete block.

He is guilt and fear.  She is guilty and afraid.

•••

Their street, like the island, had once had a name, but the sign had been torn loose in a quarrelsome hurricane and never again replaced. So when the queen and king wanted to direct people to their home, they always said, “Go past the fruit stand at the corner of the street next to the wide and tall Silk Cotton tree. You’ll come to a pink clap board house with purple trim. Keep going. You’ll come to a white church with a pointed wooden steeple, called “Church of the Great Redeemer”, keep going. You will soon see a blue shack and an old woman selling candy; take the first left there and come straight the way down, till you arrive at a cross roads. Go straight; ours is the purple house on the left just past the yellow house with orange trim and stone lion heads on either side of the gate. The purple house, with the tall Alexander fur that points to the sky and nearly touches it, is ours. You’ll know when you see it.”

Well it was the season of flowering trees on the island whose name no one remembered. And the queen found herself with child, which was odd, since the king drank heavily and was usually asleep by the time the queen had finished the daily chores of an ordinary woman’s day to day life. She was not at all happy about this revelation since she had always admired her regal figure and knew a child would fatten and distort it.

Trying to rid herself of the unborn one, she boiled dried chamomile flowers, a remedy passed on to her by Grandmother Brigitte, and drank the steaming yellow infusion from Brigitte’s best china. When that did not work, she paid a boy to buy a bottle of Guinness from a round-the-corner liquor store, for she had heard once that it too relieved women from what must not grow inside them. But the growing thing prevailed and the queen worried her lip staring out the window at the street and the neighbours’ houses beyond.

Nine months saw the flowers fly, the rains come falling, crabs go crawling and the season of fruit bearing trees to bear their fruit – sea grape and hog plum and mango; it saw bougainvillea blossom, hurricanes skirt the edges of the island and veer off to the north in exchange for cold spells and dry grass, till finally it was time for the child to be born.

On a cold day in December, at that hour before sun had risen and after night had moved on, the queen gave birth to the strangest child anyone on the island had ever seen.

This child had feet like a Gaulin, webbed, with talons that curled under spindle legs growing out of a pale brown torso, wrinkled and puckered like a plucked chicken. Its belly protruded and its face was gaunt and wizened. It was the ugliest child the queen had ever looked upon and when the king awoke he flew into a rage and cursed the queen, accusing her of lying with bush spirits when he had been sleeping. The queen wept. The child squawked and stretched out its spindle fingers. The queen turned her face to the wall. She thought of all her friends and all the people who knew them and was ashamed. She said to herself, “This is no child of mine. By night fall, it will be dead.”

The queen wrapped the child in a flowered cloth her maid used for cleaning windows and took her down into the basement of the house to a secret and hidden room. The queen set the swaddled child on a wooden table, drew a large knife and cut off its two webbed feet. Blood, rusty brown, oozed like sap from a tree onto the table and the wooden floor. The child screeched hideously in the shadows of the hidden room and the queen returned to the sunlight above.

While the queen was resting she heard a faint knock at her front door. Thinking it was the gardener come to collect his pay, she opened the door. Instead, she found there a small girl child and an old woman who stared past the queen with milky brown eyes.

The small girl asked the queen, “Have you anything to give the blind?”
The queen snorted, “I have nothing to spare. Go away!”

That night, the queen returned to the hidden room below the house, hoping to find the child dead. But to her astonishment, its feet had grown back, and small brown and red feathers were sprouting all over the child’s belly and spindle arms. It cooed and stretched its awkward hands towards the queen. “Agh!” cried the queen. And again she drew her knife and hacked off the Gaulin feet. Again, blood, rusty brown, dripped like sap onto the table and the wooden floor, and the queen hurried out of the hidden room, returning to the moonlight above.

The following morning, at dawn, again came the faint knocking at the front door. Thinking it was the maid come to do the weekly ironing, the queen drew on her robe, tightened her sash, and opened the door. Instead, there again was the little girl and the old woman with the milky brown eyes.

“Have you anything to give the blind?” asked the girl, her hand outstretched before her.
“I have nothing to give you, now go!” yelled the queen, slamming the door on the strangers.

The queen paced the living room biting her lip and wringing her two hands, anxious to see what remained of the child down below. Breathing in deeply and crossing herself, the queen retraced her steps of the day before to the hidden room. She listened at the closed door for signs of life. She heard nothing but her own heart beat. She cracked the door open, peering into the gloomy cavern. The table was bare. The blood, rusty brown, had vanished. The queen stepped inside and heard a scraping and a rustling and out of the shadows came a rush of air and gleaming brown wings outstretched. The queen had no time to scream or draw her knife, for the great bird lowered its beak towards her and in swift motion pecked out the queen’s startled eyes. The great bird flapped its wings once, twice and on the third flap sprang out of the hidden room through the open door and into dawn, carrying with it the queen’s eyes far into the changing blue yonder.

•••

“Why is it so bright in here?” You say. My fingers are cold around your waist. “And cold! How long do they expect me to wait here in this blue paper dress?”

The walls look away. The bulbs hang like dumb mutes, their eyes fixed on thick white space. Your thighs begin to sweat. I’m there between them where I like to hide when you get excited.

We’ve been looking at funeral homes lately, you and I. We imagine the people inside, condensation dripping from their foreheads like sweat. Lipstick and face powder painted on leather. They wear their favorite indigos and mustards like skin, as if they have all their organs intact underneath. They sleep in oak coffins for a century. People come to view them like art.

“I prefer to be cremated. I don’t want anyone getting confused thinking that they can hug me,” you said moments after we drove past the fifth one on Mackey Street.

You wondered if that was a very Christian thing to say and instantly marked the sign of the cross on your chest. Doing this made you take your right hand off of the steering wheel. I leapt into your abdomen, shot sugar juices into your limbs. You swerved a little off the road, and pulled back in as an old woman in a lilac wide-brimmed hat walked into your car. I pulsed in your feet. You barely missed hitting her. “Jesus, almighty. Protect me from Satin,” she yelled, and hit the hood with her lilac purse.

It was Sunday, and the lord was with you.

His voice is a warm cup of cream soup. I watch you watching his fingers touch your breast without gloves. He calls you “baby,” and your temperature boils as the room becomes crowded with movement. The ceiling light bulbs yawn and stretch their backs. I feel the heat of their glow throbbing on your forehead. The walls come closer to listen to the curious papers rustling on a clipboard as the man thumbs through. What does yellow mean? Do the pink papers signify cancer? The blue – death? If there are less papers, is the prognosis is better? His white coat waves me in to snuggle.

But I stay alert listening for signs of hesitance: Phlegm cleared from the throat. The avoidance of eye contact. A language helper. Umm. Uhh. Suddenly, I don’t want him rubbing your shoulders.

You want to leave the room. Burn pictures of him that you don’t have. You want to bathe in scalding hot water, prick your skin apart with safety pins to let the poison out.

He clears his throat, and looks at the wall behind you. The wall winks at him. He calls you Ms. Sweeting. It is hard to breathe. He takes a deep breath of your air.

Inside the ultrasound is a tiny creature clambering within the static weeds of the screen. The doctor compares it to a tangerine. But to me, it looks more like a baby troll screaming inside the womb of a banshee. It breathes as radiation filters through it. It is alive, unlike you.

“Why didn’t you come sooner?”

You’re 26. You’re a Christian. You don’t drink. You go to church.

“I don’t know. I didn’t really know what to look for.”

He sits on his chair. The wheels squeal against the hard white tile. It is a metallic sound like the smell of blood being squeezed from your breast and into a needle. I think of the dead people in funeral homes with their organs squeezed out.

“What do you think? Is it bad?”

He sighs. “I think we’re gonna have to do a biopsy. There are some spots here on the lump, so it’s definitely a tumor and not a cyst. And you know, you had it before in your family. But you’re a young lady, so I’m hoping that this is just a benign fibrosis.”

“Ok. So when do you need to do this?”

“As soon as possible.”

I cling a bit too tightly to your throat. You can barely breathe as you agree to a time for next week. I can hear the walls murmuring to the light bulbs in the ceiling, as they glare fluorescently at the wheels screeching beneath the doctor’s chair as he moves it back and forth. The room stares at you like the women in church do after you’ve missed a few Sundays. He hands you a pink slip and tells you to take it to the nurses’ office.

It surprises you how lightly he lets you go. No marmalade “baby” or cottony strokes to pad your release. There is no more contact besides the pink slip with his signature and office number and a date stamped on it.

You make your way outside gripping me near your heart where the blood slows to a trickle. Maybe we can choke the tumor this way, cutting off its blood supply. Your limbs are light. Your eyes become simple.

“So, how everything went?” A nurse you chatted with before, greets you in the lobby. You are supposed to know her from your childhood. A neighbor? A coworker of your mother’s? I cling to your throat. Your voice staggers out.

“I have to come back next week for a follow up.”

“Chile, you gone be alright. I just get mine check last month. They saw something, but they said it was just fluid. Chile, pray to God.”

Right. God.

“Oh. Take some of these mangoes I pick from my tree.” She goes behind the same nurses’ counter you had just been to, and takes two mangoes. She takes your hands and puts them in. Her hands are saccharine and slushy. You almost pull away from their gross moisture. “Chile, you aint suppose to refuse your blessing.”

“Alright. Thank you. I’ll see you.”

“Yeah. God spare life.” You suddenly notice how the pores in her corpulent nose are bursting with whiteheads all the way down to her mustached lips. You might want to vomit. Was your grandmother this angry when people reminded her of her death? Did she feel her breast crying against her chest like an open wound? Did it hurt to look at the world?

The quarterback security guard breathes in too much of your air as he opens the door. The woman being wheel-chaired to her car wears sickly circles beneath her eyes and a scowl. She wants more MS-Contin. The dreadlocked man walking by who yells, “Yessai, rasta princess,” sickens you with his gold-teeth smile.

Your hands are cold. I steadily pump myself into them as they clench the steering wheel. I force myself into the bulge of your calves, weighing them down against the gas pedal. The sedan howls as we jettison out of the parking lot, onto the highway, searching hard for beauty.

•••

Syria turns her head. She sees books. There are many of them. On a dark wood shelf, filled to its brim and leaning against the wall. A wall that her mother said she’d repaint: “I hate all this white.” At the foot of the wall is the umber carpet and from the carpet her mother cries. Bleating, arms extended (Syria thinks) to pull something in. Or maybe it is to push something back. And standing on the carpet is her father too. His breaths match her mother’s cries.

•

Before her mother cried into the night, it had been day, summer, and hot. Syria sat between her Mother’s legs, her hair being braided. She liked the way her Mother took her time mapping the landscape of her scalp: lines of latitude, then of longitude that overlapped each other, making strand on strand of winding road. Her mother—if in a good mood when she was asked—would destroy whole road works and intersections. Then she’d start again, building the roads wider, amused at Syria’s choice of route and direction.

•

Syria sees her mother’s face and neck. She sees her scarlet flesh. Sees the neck loll, sees her Mother slump.

Jude sees too and opens his mouth. It looks like a chasm and silence comes out. Jude squats down and reaches out; then pulls himself back; then out then back. Syria watches as Jude plays and replays, his hysteria mounting. She remembers last year when he had a ringed fungus on his arm that took forever to heal because he’d kept it covered. She’d sneak up to his room late at night and peep through the crack of his door. He’d just sit there, arm exposed, looking down in scorn. For some reason this thought makes her scared and angry, so she walks over and slaps him.

Now Jude is on the go. He’s tender with their mother and when Syria blinks he has her in the tub: there’s the tub’s faucet, there’s the running water, there is Jude’s hands cupped. And there is their mother; she is smoking from the inside out.

•

Before the summer day, before it had been hot; it was early morning. Syria was standing in water waiting to be drowned. At eleven, the youngest of the Church’s Easter group, Syria stood proud. Their junior pastor had told her, told them all that through water they’d be cleansed. What she heard was, one Syria would go under and another would come out.

She’d liked baptismal classes, believed in what they told her, believed in what she’d learned: That Jesus suffered for the sins of man—this was known as the cross; that the other way a person could be baptized was by burning fire; that man, born to original sin like Jesus had to suffer and carry his own cross.

As the sun began its walk across the water, Syria looked to shore at the congregation, where her parents stood, where the light seemed to have gathered. She also saw the cast of their long unmoving shadows that looked like different people and felt for a moment that she was their child. Maybe the shadows were her real parents and not the two people stitched to the light.

•

Before the baptism, before the morning, it had been night. Syria’s father sat on their porch, in his low pitch, talking. She noticed, startled, that winter had laid siege to his head and looked then to her mother who stood, hushed, across from him. Her hair was a curtain of color giraffing down her neck and Syria, bewildered; staring at them felt a sharp attrition: the swift shift of tectonic plates.

Syria knew it was not just his head captured by winter. His mind skidded too. On Sunday’s he struggled to hold the thread of his sermons, swinging, like the church incense—gentle to fervent; changing in pattern so suddenly that its seams would ruck and gather. No one objected; silence congregated in the crowd. And Sunday after Sunday they covered his transgressions like footprints in the snow.

•

Syria looks at her Father, on the floor now, next to the hot stain. She wonders if what’s happened has just happened to her; or, if it’s happened to another: Another someone who lives on a small island, in a small home, up a dirt road. To someone else who stands and looks in their Father’s eyes, to another someone who’s surprised that he looks just the same.

Syria thinks of Jude and of how he gave the end of year speech for his class. He’d talked about the start of the rest of their lives. When he’d ended Syria had felt a burning in her stomach and knew she was jealous of him. He’d made it sound like some path not for everyone, like he was going somewhere and she couldn’t come.

Syria has watched Jude all since his speech. She takes notes of what he does: June 27—Jude decides he won’t go to church. July 11—Jude gets a summer job. Aug 1—Jude comes home from dancing and sneaks back out to meet a girl from the club. She writes this down a day late when she hears Jude say to a friend that the girl polished his front with her back like an apple. At night she takes her notes out and memorizes them. When her time comes, Jude will be her map.

Syria does not take notes of this night or the nights after. Not about the way her mother later sleeps, body curled in forgetting like a sweet cashew. Not about the gummy feel of stripped flesh against gauze or how its smell—years and distances later—would still cling to her. Not about the acute embarrassment that was all she felt when her father, in tears, said he had not meant it. Not about how, as their father fled, no one but Jude noticed the rank fear that ran down their mother’s legs.

Instead she thinks of that someone—on that island, in that house, up that dusty road—and feels sorry for their family. Quartered and drawn, scattered to the wind, never to be summed. Instead she thinks of that someone and feeling nothing at all buries the seeds of this night.

•••

Originally featured in “A Sudden & Violent Change”, a cross-disciplinary exhibition at the Hub, March 12th-31st, as part of Transforming Spaces 2010 in Nassau, The Bahamas.

•••

I recognized the voice. It belonged to Miss Morris who lived just up the hill from us. She was an old woman; much older than my mother. Mr. Morris had been even older. As far I knew he’d always been old. Now, presumably, he was dead. I heard my mother scurrying about in the kitchen and then out the door. Standing on my bed, I looked through the open slat windows toward our gate. There was Miss Morris, wringing her hands in her apron, waiting as my mother hurried to her.

I couldn’t make out what was being said, but Miss Morris was pointing and gesturing and, it seemed to me, she was crying. Mama put an arm around the older woman’s shoulder and gave her a pat on the back. When Miss Morris turned to go back up the hill, Mama came back to the house. I watched the tiny old woman trudge back to her little cottage. Her reddish-brown skin clung tightly to her bones. Each step she took appeared to require great effort. She was so thin; a strong breeze might carry her off the mountain, sending her sailing across the valley below. Her wavy, greying hair was pulled back as it usually was, but this morning there seemed to be several strands sticking out in odd directions. Miss Morris normally looked a bit frail to me, but on that day she was almost feeble.

“David,” Mama called to me from the kitchen. “Come out here. I goin’ up Miss Morris house. Mr. Morris dead this mornin’ and she need me help.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, coming out of my bedroom.

There was no use telling my mother that I could hear perfectly well through the open windows when people were yelling things from the road. Grown people liked to pretend that they had more privacy than was actually the case. By now, all the neighbours surely knew that Mr. Morris had died. People liked to say that the “bush have ears”, explaining how gossip spread about. Even as a boy I knew that bush didn’t have ears. Voices carry on the mountain, especially with everyone living in their open-air houses and shouting in the road. There were few secrets in our neighbourhood.

“I’ll prob’ly be gone for a while, David. You stay out of trouble. When Daddy come home, you tell him ‘bout Mr. Morris. Yuh ‘ear me?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll tell him.”

When Mama went out the door, I stood in the kitchen and waited a few minutes. I gave her enough time to get out of sight before I ran out into the yard. Devon, my best friend from next door, was already waiting under our giant rubber tree, just as I’d expected. The rubber tree was our usual meeting spot. It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t already know about Mr. Morris and, of course, he did.

“Yuh ‘ear say Mistah Morris dead?” Devon asked, though he most certainly knew that I did.

“Yeah, mon. Mi know a’ready. Mama gone up dere fi see.”

Neither of us had to ask what we should do next. Instinctively, the way only young boys can do, we knew what the other was thinking. Without a word, we left the yard and darted across the road. Disappearing into the bush, we followed a path that would wind around to the back of the Morris’ little wooden cottage. When you’re going to sneak a look at a dead man, it would hardly do to announce yourself at the front gate. That sort of impertinence would get you little more than a box on the ears.

Down through the gully and up the hill, we made our way into Mr. Morris’ back garden. We’d snuck into his yard this way many times. At the back of his property were his prized coffee trees. The green coffee beans were the perfect ammunition for the homemade blowguns we made from plastic pipes. Mr. Morris was the only person in our area with coffee trees, so when the season came, we would creep up to grab as many handfuls as we could before he, inevitably, spied us. Each time it was the same. Shaking his machete in the air, he would rain down obscenities on us, careful to let us know in no uncertain terms what type of worthless children come and rob the fruits of another’s labours. Each time, we would panic and tear through the bush, making our get away down the gully side. Once in relative safety, we would laugh and congratulate ourselves, pretending that we’d never been scared. As furious as he would get, Mr. Morris never told our parents. Maybe he had been a young boy once, though it barely seemed possible.

When Devon and I reached Morris’ yard, we hesitated. Looking around, we almost expected the little white man to jump from behind a banana tree. Not this time, though. Mr. Morris was dead, a fact we intended to confirm with our own eyes. We stood idle for a few moments that seemed like hours. Naturally, we wanted to see the dead body. We’d never seen one before. Mustering our courage, however, required a bit of time. Devon picked a guava from a nearby tree, as we shuffled about the garden. Mr. Morris had every manner of fruit growing in his yard. After a life spent in agriculture, he had retired as a gardener. People said he could put rock stone in the earth and it would grow. That was a strange thing to say, I thought, but Mr. Morris was a strange kind of man.

While we loafed about, I remembered one particular day when I was walking home from school. I had passed by Mr. Morris sitting on a wall talking to Mr. Lewis from down the road. I was surprised to hear the men speaking to each other in what I thought sounded like Spanish. It was a peculiar scene, these two Jamaican men, one white and one black, talking in Spanish, as if it were a normal thing to be doing. It was peculiar enough that I reported it to Daddy as we ate supper that evening. According to Daddy, when Mr. Lewis and Mr. Morris were young men they had worked the cane fields in Cuba. That’s where they learned to speak Spanish. Even now, they spoke it to each other from time to time, especially when they didn’t want anyone to know what they were saying. Later, I’d told Devon that we should go cut cane in Cuba, so we could learn Spanish. Then we could talk all type of slackness and never get caught.

Devon was a year older than me, so he knew things that I didn’t know. He told me how no one goes to cut cane in Cuba anymore, but he did have an uncle that worked the cane fields in Florida. The problem was, most of the workers there were Jamaicans and Haitians, so there wasn’t much chance of learning Spanish. His uncle told him that the Jamaicans didn’t get along well with the Haitians and there was lots of quarrelling and fighting. Plus, cutting the sugar cane is hard, hard work. That didn’t sound like much fun after all, so we decided we wouldn’t go foreign to cut cane when we grew up. We’d have to find something else to do when we went to foreign.

After eating our fair share of guavas, we ran out of reasons to procrastinate further. If we were going to see a dead body, we’d have to get on with it. We moved slowly to the back of the plank board cottage, careful not to disturb the chickens pecking around the yard. This was the only wooden house in our neighbourhood. Most of us lived in stucco houses, built of concrete blocks. Farther down the hill, back off the road, some families lived in tiny shacks made of zinc, bamboo and whatever else they could find. Only the Morris’ lived in a proper wooden house, although the brightly painted colours had long since faded. Mr. Morris was too old to be out painting his house every time the sun bleached the colour. The last time he got a hole in his zinc roof, Daddy climbed up there to mend it for him. Mr. Morris was a proud man, though, so he didn’t make a habit of asking people to paint or fix his house. Mostly, it just deteriorated, much like he and Miss Morris.

On the back part of the house, there were small gaps in the boards that Devon and I thought we might be able to see through. In truth, though, we didn’t know what we would see. Neither of us had ever been inside the Morris’ house. I couldn’t recall anyone going inside the house, except for Miss Morris’ niece. She sometimes came to visit from Spanish Town, but not very often. Neighbours stopped by occasionally and talked outside and, of course, children would sneak around stealing coffee and fruit, but Mr. and Miss Morris were alone most of the time. We were about to find out what the inside looked like, though, as we crept right up to the back wall.

There wasn’t enough room for both of us to spy at once, so Devon went first. Squatting down on his knees, he turned his head sideways to squint through the crack in the wall. After only a few seconds, he jumped up, falling backwards over himself. I held my breath; looking into Devon’s wide eyes, sure that he’d given us away. We froze in place, waiting to see if we’d been detected. When no one came to chase us away, we scurried back into the garden.

“Mi see ‘im,” Devon burst out, barely able to maintain a whisper. “Mi see him ‘pon the bed, like say ‘im sleepin’. Bwoy, him look still and white like a duppy. Go look. Him dead fi true.”

“Wha’ Miss Morris and mi mother ah do? Yuh see dem?”

“Mi nah know. Dem jus’ a walk ‘round and ting. Mr. Morris ah lay down ‘pon the bed with him hand by him side, so. Him is a real, real dead man, David.”

Quietly, I crept over to look through the crack in the wall. The light inside was dim, so it took my eyes several seconds to adjust. There was my mother and Miss Morris leaning over the bed, blocking my view of everything but Mr. Morris’ legs. He was dressed in black trousers and what looked like his Sunday shoes, though I’d never seen him in church.

“You don’t have another one?” I heard my mother asking.

“No, is the only white one mi have,” Miss Morris answered. “It will have to do. Mek sure it tight.”

Mama seemed to be struggling with something, bent over Mr. Morris’ dead body there. I wished she would move so I could get a better look. In the meantime, I glanced around at what little I could see of the room. An old weathered bureau stood against one wall. On top were a few faded pictures in tarnished frames. One photo was a white man and woman, with a little baby. It couldn’t be Mr. Morris. The picture looked aged, but not old enough to be a young Mr. Morris. I was reminded of something I’d heard Mama and Daddy talking about once.

“What a shame,” my mother had said. “You know dat Mr. Morris have two children by him first wife? Both of them gone a foreign and nevah set foot back in Jamaica. Not once dem come look for dem father.”

That must be one of his children in the picture, I thought. When I grow up and move to foreign, I’ll come back and visit my parents, I told myself. I wondered if his children even knew he was dead. How could they? The Morris’ didn’t own a phone and he’d just died that morning. I guessed that they wouldn’t come, anyway. When you move to foreign you probably get too busy to think about your old father, sitting on wall down there in Jamaica talking Spanish with his old time friends. Maybe you forget what it’s like to walk up and down gully side, picking guava and stealing people’s coffee beans. Some people may just want to grow up and forget about all of that; just move to foreign where they don’t have to sleep in tin roof houses with faded paint on the walls. In America or England, I was sure; they wouldn’t put your old, dead daddy on the bed and tie handkerchief around his head to keep his mouth shut.

As it turned out, that’s what my mother had been doing. When she finally stood up straight and stepped away from the bed, she declared that it should be tight enough. I assumed she meant the handkerchief, tied under Mr. Morris’ chin and over his head top. Now that she was out of the way, I had my first good look at a dead man. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I couldn’t muster the same enthusiasm that Devon had shown. Maybe I’d been thinking too much about worthless children that move away and forget their parents. I don’t know, but looking at Miss Morris, sitting heavy in her chair, wringing her hands, it was hard to get excited about seeing a dead body.

“Miss Bailey,” the old woman was saying. “Yuh can stay here when mi go make funeral arrangement? Some a de people dem swear say Mr. Morris have nuff money hide ‘way here. I don’ waan nobody come in mi house, Miss Bailey. I don’ waan nobody come in and trouble mi tings dem.”

“Yes, yes, of course. I’ll stay right here. When Mr. Bailey come home, I’ll make him carry you go town in him van.”

Devon was poking me in the arm, demanding another turn to look. I kissed my teeth at him and motioned for him to move. “Cha, man,” I whispered. “Me nuh done yet. G’way nuh.”

I was looking at Mr. Morris, lying so still on his bed. He looked odd, but not just from having that handkerchief tied around his head. He was whiter than usual; a little blue here and there. Though Mr. Morris was, in fact, a white man, years of working in the sun had given his skin a tanned, weathered look. In death, his complexion was pale and ashy. It made me wonder what I’d look like when I died. I didn’t know how old Mr. Morris was, but he’d not been as frail as his wife. He was lean, with tough, sinewy arms. When he moved, you could see his veins and muscles rippling under his taut skin. Daddy once said that Mr. Morris was strong like an ox. It was only his old bones that kept him from moving around like a young man. Now he didn’t look so strong at all. He looked tired. I wasn’t sure how a dead man could look tired, but he did.

“Come nuh, David,” Devon was talking too loud. “Mek mi get a turn.”

Aggravated, I crawled out of the way so Devon could have another look. It wasn’t fair of me to take so long. I knew that, but there was no telling when I’d have another chance to see a dead body. We were too young to know that, over the years, we would see more than enough. Anyway, it was my mother in there with Miss Morris. Tonight, while in bed, I could eavesdrop on her and Daddy as they talked about everything that happened today. She might even say something about those worthless children that don’t give a damn how their daddy died in his little wood house with cracks round the back where little boys can peep through. As I let Devon take his turn spying through the slats, I felt even less excited than before. I wasn’t sure why, exactly, but I was feeling a little lonely.

Mr. Morris had never talked much to us neighbourhood children. Most of the time, he just yelled and shook his machete at us. Admittedly, that was only when we were thieving things from his yard. Still, something seemed wrong about taking this for a game, coming here to peep through wallboards at the dead man in his bed. Meanwhile, there was poor old Miss Morris sitting in that chair like she might never get up. I went and sat down under a mango tree, waiting for Devon. When he finally got an eye full, we walked toward the path that would lead back through the bush, through the gully and on to our houses. As we passed the coffee trees at the back of the garden, Devon looked at me with a mischievous grin.

“David,” he nodded toward the trees. “When coffee time come again, bwoy, we can get whole heap ah coffee beans fi we blow gun dem. Nobody ah go stop us now.”

“Yeah,” I answered. “We’ll see, but mi think say mi ah get too big fi dem tings, yuh know?”

He just shrugged at me and wrinkled his nose up. Devon was a year older than me, so sometimes he knew things that I didn’t know. Walking back down the gully path that day, leaving Mr. Morris’ little bleached out wooden cottage behind us; it occurred to me for the first time that sometimes, maybe, I knew things that Devon didn’t know.
.
•••

Now the next step is highly controversial. If you once wore ‘Earth’ shoes, utter the name ‘Greenpeace’ in the same breath as the ‘Beatitudes’, and believe that the movie ‘Free Willy’ is the most important statement of the 20th century, you will walk through the property tying red ribbons around the strongest and most beautiful of the native Bahamian trees. This tells the tractor operator what you want to leave standing.

If you are the other type of Bahamian to whom ostentation is most important, you will level the property to ensure maximum space for ‘concrete’ expansion. Whichever class of Bahamian you belong to, you will probably plant fruit trees extensively, and take your family to gaze fondly at your ‘piece of the rock’ each weekend from time of purchase straight through the construction process.

How should the ‘true-true’ Bahamian house look? Think about the Ford automobiles of the late fifties. The accent is on big and noticeable with plenty of glazing. Some of us would incorporate chrome into our exterior design, as well, if we could but find a way. Try, by all means, to afford hilltop property or large acreage, but don’t despair if you can’t. Squeezing a 4,000 square foot, two-storied, balconied house on a 50′ x 100′ lot will have much the same impact.

If your pocket dictates a small bungalow, painting the exterior in a rainbow colour will attract just as much notice. No need for timidity in the area of colour for a Bahamian house. Walls of Tyrian purple, and of no less bright Florida orange may be considered tasteless elsewhere, but are certainly not unknown here.

For increased presence, don’t neglect the advantage of having decorative finials for the pillars of the walls enclosing your property. The more discreet among us usually settle for the traditional pineapple ornament or a practical lamp. Those of more Napoleonic vision go in for winged victories and lions rampant. Those totally lacking in taste go so far as to gild them.

Most of the foregoing excesses are committed most often by the newly or unexpectedly rich. When the money has aged considerably, Bahamians like their houses to match. We therefore resort to beautiful Bahamian Georgian architecture either by imitation or by buying the homes of old colonial barons or winter residents who have moved to more secluded islands in the Bahamas chain or further south to islands too small to appear on standard maps.

•••

Excerpted from How to Be a True-True Bahamian, Guanima, 1994

•••

I moved into the painting and saw the hallway from the other end. I moved into the painting and stole the sunflowers there. I swear I can remember those petals on my shoulder. Velvet. Paint does not feel this way. Those sunflowers spoke in so many shades of yellow. I didn’t know if they did in real life or if Monet made them this fluent.

There are no sunflowers on the island where I grew up. The trees there speak the language of fire, of red. I would reach out and catch the petals falling. A tiny flame on the palm. A burning, I swear it. The trees there do not imitate what we think of the sun. They become it. They become it because some people make this happen.

Some researchers have found that people considered creative have little to no latent inhibition. That is, they simply and biologically cannot ignore unimportant stimuli. Whereas a person with high latent inhibition sees an object not important to them, such as a vase, they classify it and move on, the creative person cannot let go of the object in their mind.

For example, Monet had several paintings going at once in his small hotel room in Venice; the language of boar bristle brushes speaking to the light of day at every hour: would you yet leave me?

For example: those are not sheets drying in the evening. The sky is on fire there. The sheets lick the burnt edges of the clouds. The focal point becomes two bodies melting together, vermillion closing upon vermillion. This is the art of the mind.

My mother’s friend Maggie was an artist. I wanted to be an artist. I could not understand how people did not see the world as I did. So I showed them. Maggie gave me copies of her charcoal sketches of Bahamian clapboard houses. I knew her through her artwork. I imagined she lived in these houses, that the framed sinking boat at dock she blurred with watercolor was hers also. In the painting, I could never understand why the waves break in the distance rather than on shore. Later I found out about the coral reef just below sea level.

The world at times presents itself in a flurry of strokes in flame or submerged in water, depending on the light, or on the light of mind. When I think of home my memories come to me in neo-impressionist pieces, all bougainvillea, sailboats, and Junkanoo, framed.

My memory of the Poinciana comes half from my photographs of the flaming trees, half from Chan Pratt’s palette-knife description: umbrellas of crimson opening upon crimson. The trees cannot be captured but the fire remains year-round. It is always summer at home, inescapable.

My memory of Paris exists through Monet’s lilies: blues begin and begin and begin. Has any frame succeeded in containing them? There is my mother, sitting on the velvet bench in the middle of the room. Erase the other people. Erase the bench. Thumbelina born from a flower, her face close to the water: won’t you who have planted me claim me? Or are you not my mother?

The world in shades of blue: I fill with sand and I fall into the ocean I have created at my feet. The sunlight makes shifting nets of light over my green body. My eyelashes, too, become a net for tiny fish. From here, I watch the watery holes of stars beyond the veil, thread a rosary of conch pearls and cowry shells, wait until the memory of the landscape in my body can lay me out to dry.

People don’t understand. How could I have left paradise?

I had to exist somewhere with more than one season. I had to move away from the fire to crave it. I had to forget the image of these trees like explosions, erupting—summer days, over and over, after the long wet season—a fire never matched in my retinal memory.

I had to taste the salt mixed in a glass of water in the silence of winter, cold spoon against colder glass. How else could I know what is imitation—what is reality?

These researchers believe that because people considered creative have little to no latent inhibition, they often suffer from mental illness or distress due to constant stimulation. For example: Monet jumped into the Thames. For example: because his sunflowers were not enough, Van Gogh gave his ear. Not for example: the tumor that grew in Maggie’s brain.

My mother had a nervous breakdown in the kitchen. I pulled my brother into the sunflower painting. What my mother experienced was not an imitation of reality. Her friend was dying and she was old. I frame this in my mind. I hang it. I take it down.

The tumor destroyed the watercolor paintings, one by one. Maggie asked my mother, Did I paint that? She stirred a cup of water with a spoon, always. I’m trying to make it fit.

I imagine, over and over, her sinking boat painting. The coral that exists beneath the ocean does not have great regret for the ships it has ravaged. This is why we call it the Devil’s Backbone. This language is simply an imitation. This language is not real.

Researchers: explain how people can live with one breast, or one kidney, or one half of a brain forever. Explain what happens.

I understand the implications. The idea of vacancy. The need for filling. But I wonder how one talks to this emptiness, says: Explain blue. Explain why we haven’t figured out how to live with one half of a heart. Says: Why am I sad knowing that a shattered vase speaks to the absence of its solid form between two hands? Says, in the echoes of museum chatter mirroring murmurs of funerals: What are you doing? What are you leaving behind?

I have seen the original Garden at Ventheuil, the original Sunset in Venice. The worlds of these paintings exist. They exist because I have made them a part of myself to revisit in the dimmest moments of February, the dying light of winter: I am inescapable from all angles.

We all choose how to speak to emptiness, how to frame it in the mind. For example: the young girl unloved by her parents fits her life into a thumb-sized tale. For example: Monet’s cataracts affected his vision to the extent that he filled the world with reds. After his operation, Monet was able to see certain ultraviolet lengths of light not normally perceived by the lens. He repainted his lilies in new shades of blue. He removed the horizon between the light of the sky and the sea. And then the frame.

•••

He imagined going down, down to the sea bed, hooking a fine lobster, then kicking upward with it as he had thousands of times. He swigged his beer.

Vera. He’d offered to take her to the clinic, even to the hospital on Provo, but she shook her donkey locks and insisted that he visit Walker instead. Ask for snake stick. Snake stick! What was some vile bush tea against real medicine?

As if in answer, Vera appeared at the screen, still clutching her stomach. “Tell Walker it’s really bad, too. If he can get anything better, I’ll do what he says.”

Shark turned away from her to hide his sour look. Surely, after all these years, his wife knew how he felt about the bush healer, had finally heard from someone about Walker’s pathetic attempt to challenge him some 30 years ago, and how Shark had defended his right to Vera, the most beautiful girl on North Caicos.

He glanced back at her now, her curves turned by childbirth and time into a block beneath a tattered, flowered shift. But her eyes still shone and the quiet strength he’d admired in school remained … though lately it seemed to cross into this stubbornness.

Shark had to admit that time had been equally unkind to him. Years ago, when that writer from the American dive magazine described him as “a sleek black shark,” well, that was the top of it, really. The praise for his free diving had made him a star and opened opportunities that the other young island men—notably, Walker—lacked. And while he still enjoyed being better off than most of his crowd, he wished the word “sleek” had stuck to him as long as his nickname had. He patted his beach-ball gut, finished the beer responsible for it and sighed.

“You goin’?” Vera asked, and he jumped a little, having forgotten that she was still at the door. He turned, prepared to argue again, but caught the pain in her features.

“I’ll go.”

As his truck breezed down the road—once a rutted path, now paved and deadly—he remembered the Walker of school days, no rival when it came to Sports Day or the rough play of the neighborhood but annoying as a sand burr when mothers mentioned him. He had been the measure of manhood for the mammys: polite, serious, focused, a good boy. Everyone was surprised when “Young Paul” ignored his opportunities for college and began following his crazy uncle’s forays into the bush for roots and herbs. He learned bush medicine and became “Walker” from his refusal of rides while he searched the island for the old remedies. Now he lived alone in a spare concrete room in Kew, getting by on his garden, some sales to a holistic healing center on Provo and the gratefulness of those who still came to him to cure a boil, a sore throat, insomnia, a sour stomach.

Shark pulled up to Walker’s place, cut the engine and sat in the cab a few moments, knowing his visit would come as a surprise. They’d been civil all these years but far from friendly. Finally, Walker came out of his house and squatted on a log that served as a bench. Shark approached and sat beside him.

“It’s Vera,” he said.

Walker squinted at the sun. “I figured. What’s wrong?” He made Shark describe every symptom, every incident of nighttime moaning, every clutch at the middle. Shark kept his voice flat and neutral.

Walker stood. “There’s some snake stick in the house, but it won’t be good enough.” He disappeared briefly, then returned and gave Shark a bundle of twigs. “She knows what to do. Tell her to boil it strong. I’ll have something better for her tomorrow night.”

Shark handed over a bill and left wordlessly. No thank-yous.

Walker was right about the snake-stick tea; it wasn’t good enough. But he didn’t show up with something better the next day, and the day after that was when the island began to talk.

“Didn’t show up at prayer meeting, and you know he’s always there.”

“Went by his house, but it’s closed up.”

“Saw him walking through Bottle Creek.”

“Saw him down the road toting a sack.”

“Saw him headed to the Pine Yards.”

The women in his prayer group decided that something had happened to him in the Pine Yards and they put together a search group. One by one, women found their sturdy shoes and cut walking sticks. One by one, men found excuses and cut jokes.

“Maybe he finally found himself a wife out there.”

“Ah, he’d just be embarrassed if he’s lost. It’d be better for the women to find him.”

“Maybe he found the fountain of youth and a young’un will come out.”

“He knows his way around. He’ll be back.”

Vera, sick as she was, wanted to join the search party. “It’s my fault he’s out there. I owe it to him,” she said. She grunted a pair of Reeboks onto her feet and began making a pile of supplies: bottles of water, cans of Off!, sugar apples, a jar of her snake-stick tea.

Shark was appalled. “You’re sick!”

“Yeah. That’s why this is happening.” She slid smoothly by him to rummage in the closet. Shark noticed more life in her than he’d seen in weeks. She seemed less sick, almost happy. He watched as she removed his fins and snorkel from his gear bag and replaced them with her items, taking a sip of tea before adding the jar. She paused before pulling the zipper. “I wonder what he went after,” she said.

Her comment was not directed to him, but it set off Shark. “Vera, you’re not going out there,” he stated. “This search-party thing is ridiculous. He’ll come back on his own. Unless he’s dead.”

Vera reacted as if he’d struck her. Her face twisted in pain, and she flailed her arms at him. “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t!” she screamed, starting to cry. Shark, taken aback and puzzled by this sudden emotion, caught her and held her as she sobbed. He hated tears, but mixed with his disgust this time was an unsettled shakiness, the moment when he could see the skin of the water above him but weakly wondered if his thumping lungs could endure. He exhaled and gasped, remembering the delight of surfacing marred by self-disappointment. “Please don’t go,” he said.

She separated from him and searched his face with shining eyes. “I have to.”

After the other women came and swept Vera away with them, Shark got a beer and drank it on the porch, staring at the water again. At first he rejected the idea of joining the other men under the sapodilla tree, knowing that the talk would be about Walker and this foolish venture. But then, realizing that any news would arrive there first, he grabbed another beer and walked down the hill.

“They went in at the path by Fang’s broke ’dozer.”

“Carl said his wife had enough food to last four days.”

“My wife’s gonna starve. I know she’ll eat all that she took in ’bout an hour.”

Shark dozed in his broken plastic chair. He didn’t volunteer any information about Vera, but they talked about her anyway.

“He wouldna gone in there for anyone.”

“Yeah, Walker always had a thing for her.”

Shark opened an eye. “I’m right here, you know.”

“Ah, Shark, you know all about it.”

Well, Shark did know, but not really, not the “always” part. He grunted. He thought about Vera and how she was always there, cooking and taking care of his needs. He was sure of her. He dozed again.

Waking, he felt a bubble, just under his right breast. Not exactly something to think about, but there nonetheless. But he hadn’t been under water in years; it was nothing.

“They’re coming.”

He roused himself and saw the women marching toward them, triumphant. He searched for Vera’s face, but couldn’t make her out in the group.

The men moved to the upper road, where the women cackled and boasted of their adventure. Walker was in the middle of the noisy cluster, silent. Vera, next to him, simply smiled. Finally, one of the men called out, “So, what happened, Walker? You get lost?”

Everyone fell silent and turned to the bush healer. He looked around at them, lingering on Vera’s face, then said, with equal parts reluctance and truthfulness, “A spirit kept calling to me, and I was following her.” He paused and waited for their laughter.

“Was the spirit lost, too?”

“What kind of a spirit lives out there?”

“Maybe it promised him a wife.”

“Did you have enough water with you?”

“Yeah, spirits like it hot and dry.”

Walker shook his head. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me. But Vera saw her, too.”

Now all eyes turned to Vera. Shark took a step forward to protect her, but his other foot felt stuck, as if mired in a salt marsh. So he merely watched as his wife, surprisingly, glowed in the attention. She was 16 again, clasping her hands as she had making recitations at school.

“Yes, she was beautiful. The spirit was silver and sparkly, with long hair, pure white. She floated around and around Walker, then came to me when I saw her and did the same to me, circling, circling. Then she went up, up, until we couldn’t see her any more because of the sun.”

Shark felt a snort escape from him, and Vera now focused on her husband. “And I am healed,” she said. She walked past Shark, toward their home.

There it was again: that bubble. His breath growing shallower, Shark followed Vera, hearing as if from under water the whispers that would follow him forever and drown him.

•••

Eyes closed.

Darkness. Or something like darkness. Darkness pregnant with light. Darkness that stretches in a million directions, and sparkles with something quite like light. Tea radiates warmth in my belly. Breathe out. Breathe out and feel the tea on my tongue, and the coarse brown sugar caught in my throat.

Fly through time.

I’m rocking back and forth, and back and forth. Sipping, rocking, sipping, rocking. The chair is squeaking. Faintly squeaking. Only I can hear it. Maybe the cat can too. She sits on top of the piano, black as pitch with sickly yellow eyes. Purring. She always purrs when she’s in heat. The purring and the squeaking and the tick-tock of the grandfather clock keep time moving forward. Rusty kettle sits on top of a white, rusty stove. Rainy season. Kettle whistles in the kitchen. Grey clouds stir in the afternoon sky. The clock ticks and tocks and the clouds swell and turn black. Black like the cat. Tea is warm. The kettle whistles again, higher pitch. The air tightens. Faint footsteps thump down the corridor. The kettle whistles higher and higher, ready to spit. I listen. Footsteps thump louder, closer. Kettle screams. Too late. She empties herself like a pregnant balloon whose rubber has stretched thin and tight with air and been pricked with a pin.

“Shit. God damn it.”

Daddy’s voice,

“You mean you couldn’t have gotten…”

Thunder

“Look at you, just sitting there and drinking tea,”

Tightness

“You mean to tell me you couldn’t have gotten off your ass and turned off the God damn stove.”

Eyes open.

Tea is cold. Swirl the last drop and let it pick up the sugar that has stuck to the bottom of the cup. Drain it. Make a slurping noise. The cold tea is so sweet that it cuts my throat. Sweet, ice cold tea. Look at the desk. There is a black ball point pen that writes too thinly. Pick it up and roll it in my palm. Potential. Click it once. The tip sticks out. Like a snake’s tongue. No. Like the tip of a crab’s gundy, reaching out from it’s sandy hole, reaching for the sun. No. It sticks out like a pen. Draw a line on the page. Draw a circle. Draw a spiral. Wait. Nothing. Click it once more. The point slips back inside, tension gone. Click, click, click, click until I flick my wrist and send the pen flying across the desk. Daddy’s voice does not make the page.

Stand up. Stretch. Crack knuckles. The cracks echo and bounce across the quiet room. Three day old beard itches at the jaw line. Nagging itch. Peek through blinds. Orange sky dyed pink. Sickly pink. Pepto Bismal pink. Walk in a circle. Left, then right, then left, then right. Trance. I need a trance. Left, then right, then left, then right. Small circle. Dizzying circle. Left, right, left, right, left right left right left right left right. Stop. Sink into chair. Head still moving in a circle. Room moving in a circle. Stare at paper. Paper trembles. Pick up pen. Pen trembles. Maybe something. Wait. Maybe a line. One line. The first line. The first line has to be good. It’s all over without a good first line. Wait. Just wait.

Nothing

Eyes closed

Darkness. Darkness and light at the same time. This is how it must work. Shadows drift by. Fuzzy images. Time collides in the center. Time revolves around me. It all revolves around me. Memory. Yes. Big memories. The ones that stick. The ones that hurt. This is where it must begin.

On the plane. Window seat. Forehead pressed against cold glass. Vein thumping. Air hostess pours hot amber tea into a white plastic cup. Milk, my dear? Please. Sugar, my dear? Three. Salty, sticky tears mark cheeks like war paint. Phone calls that stick. Phone calls that change everything and force you to go on a plane.

“Come home.”

Mummy’s voice, trembling.

“Just come.”

That’s what she said.

Life changes in an instant. One fucked up instant. This will stick. Forehead is pressed against the cold glass and my stomach is churning violently inside of my belly. Grief is toxic and it in churns in your bowels, like poison. Everything all right, my dear? Yes. More tea, my dear? Yes, more tea. Plane cuts through a fat, white cloud and starts to tremble with turbulence.

Write it down.

“You have to come home.”

That was Mummy’s trembling voice and that is what she said.

Eyes open

Flat, blank pages scattered across the desk. Blank pages crumpled up into useless balls strewn across the room. Nothing makes it. The room fades to darkness as the pink sky slips behind the distant mountain. Peek through the blinds. The inky blackness of night, dotted with pale, distant stars spills over the curved sky. A chorus of squeaking frogs cuts through the quiet night and crescendos to a deafeningly high-pitched roar. The moon is hidden behind a veil of darkness, with only a slender crescent peeking out from behind the black sky.

Turn on light switch. Click. Room floods with unnatural florescent light. Blinding, sickly light. Fake light that belongs in a hospital ward. Click. Fade to darkness. A candle. That’s what I need. Open desk drawer and fumble in the darkness for a candle. Desk is filled with clutter. Empty notebooks with metallic spirals snaking through the spine, cool to the touch. Sharpened pencils whose tips press into the soft, spongy tips of my fingers. Rulers with sharp, silver edges. Bottles of sticky liquid paper. Candles. Short, bumpy candles whose wax has melted and cooled before. Blackened wicks which stand erect. Small, yellow box of matches. Shake it to make sure it’s not empty. Strike a match. Sulphur fills the room, for an instant. Flame burns tall, and shadowy shades of red and yellow begin to pulse over the desk. The pages glow in the candlelight and, for the first time, seem ready.

Words. Start with the words. Words that sting. Words that make you cringe. Say a word out loud enough and it no longer seems like a real word. Jesus. Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. No longer seems real. Nothing seems real. Blank. Blank, useless pages, White as the cold tiles which smell like bleach and make your eyes sting. Tension. Tension grips you by the neck. The words no longer seem real. Fading focus. Take glasses off and let the room go blurry.

Try a different approach. Put glasses back on. Start with something else.

Characters.

That’s what makes a story. Real flesh and bone characters. Characters that you can see, and hear, and smell. Sweaty, greasy, three-dimensional characters that belch, and fart, and swear. Call them out of the darkness.

Write

…Classroom. Filled with squeaky, squealing children. They have no names. They need no names. Children that are there to just squeak and squeal and fill the room with noise. Midday heat. Religion class…

Stare at the walls. Wait for more.

…Teacher walks in. A fat teacher. A fat priest. Father fatty. No. Father Harris. His skin is dark. Pitch lake dark. His bloated, sweat soaked body stinks of rum and curried fish. He waddles to the front of the class, a plastic smile etched into his dark, fat puffed cheeks. He swivels around, slowly, and pulls a stick of white chalk out from his chalk dusted khaki pants…

Take a breath. A deep, satisfying breath. Go with it.

…A zephyr, perfumed by the bay leaf trees, blows through the classroom, and a hush falls over the squealing children. Father Harris, with a ceremonial slowness, digs his chalk into the blackboard and in large, flowing letters writes,

IT IS ALL A LIE

The children yelp….

…Father Harris…

There is no Father Harris. There are no children. Nothing is there. Purple vein, cutting through the neck, starts thumping wildly. Tear up page. Tear it up until it looks like confetti. Throw it in the air and let it fall on the desk like warm snow.

Stand up. Pace wildly from one wall to another. One, two, three. Turn around. One, two, three. It’s a three step kind of room. Exhaustion, thick and heavy, descends on my body. Stumble over to the bed, wedged next to the mahogany desk, and collapse into a fitful, feverish sleep.

Dreams

Poisoned parade. Procession of a thousand characters with bodies, but no souls. I know these people. A little baby. She looks like a large white pea with a fitted purple bonnet and shuffles across the floor at a sickening pace. Her name is Ava and everyone is crying out “Catch Ava!” “You have to catch Ava!” Shaking. Prisoner trapper in a feverish coma. Ava is shuffling toward the window, her purple bonnet trembling and vibrating because of her speed. “Catch Ava!” they scream. Here come Mummy and Daddy walking in the parade. They are shadowy tonight. Eyes hollowed out and blank. Familiar yet fading. Where have they been? They don’t know me. They no longer know me.

————

Wake up with a start.

Room filled with blinding morning light. Paper. Oh Jesus, look at the paper. Stumble out of bed and trudge through a carpet of paper. Hand on the door handle. Cold, metallic door handle. Open the door and feel the sunlight burn my skin. Walk into the backyard.

Sit.

Look.

Listen.

Blackbirds sit on electric wires, and the distant mountains are dotted with bright pink and yellow Poui trees. The grass, wet with morning dew, is teeming with sugar ants and grasshoppers.

Yellow breasted Kiskadees sing out their morning salutations.

Kis-kee-dee, Kis-kee-dee, Kis-kee-dee,

The old folks say they sing in French.

Qu’est-ce qu’il dit? Qu’est-ce qu’il dit? Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?

In the distance, car horns signal the start of the city day.

Deep blue sky. Blushing clouds.

Look at the colours.

Oh Jesus, would you look at the colours.
.
•••