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.

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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.

•••

90% from tongues of the ocean on Vimeo.

•••

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.

•••

"Jezebel" by Lavar Munroe

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so many silences about the ocean
connecting Haitians and Bahamians

so many silences to the cutting of life water
who gets to stay and who gets t’row away

so many silences rising upon salty weathered bodies
we want your labor, but yunna chirrin’ no

so many silences to teeth-sucking moans
“da Bahamas too small, cyan help erryone”

but we is dem, dem is us
t’rough blood, ancestors, many stories

so many silences to sip sip and talk
sinking Haitian sloops, shark infested seas, missing bodies

so many silences about all dese tings, holes in we history,
the middle passage, 60 million or more, nefarious thoughts,
oceans mixed in spirit and sweat, the weight of resistance

so easily forgotten under colonial eyes and books
dis-remembering roots, language and culture,
long time, water crossings in love and faith

so we must fill the silences with real talk, honest and dirty,
uncovering secrets, from Inagua to Grand Bahama
“all a we is one family, all a we is one”

so we must fill the silences with songs, stitching holes,
filling gaps, replacing fractures, no more blows
“you muh brother, you muh sister, all a we is one”

between us and them
between you and me
“all a we is one”

•••

•••

“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.

•••

"Mortal Coil" by Susan Moir-Mackay

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