Tea Time
TRACI-ANN WINT I wanted to talk to you about the evolution of mankind, but you, you have...
Category: Fiction 9
The Sacrifice
“Animal sacrifice is for protection. Or like in your case to ketch somebody heart. And when you do it, you does do it once and done. Human sacrifice is when you want money and power. That does summon thing you eh want in your life. But you does have to pay a price. If you do it once, every year you does have to make another sacrifice to please the spirit. It doh ever stop. Not until you dead.”
The Light of the World
Boundaries were blurred so that Christmas was no longer the only festivity — now prasad was parceled out for Divali and ladles of sawine for Eid-ul-Fitr. All Trinidadian cultures were now represented. And though the cane-fields had been replaced by housing settlements, coffee shops, gourmet stores and delicatessens that sold imported cheeses, the name Bush Convent had never left, as if the miasma of rotting bagasse had settled permanently within its walls.
Reborn
After breakfast, we gather in the same circle. Father Longley asks us to open our hearts to God. I close my eyes and imagine his God coming down from a cloudless sky with a scalpel and a dummy swiped from hell for demonstration purposes. Longley’s God would slam the demon onto the floor and our bodies would follow in sync, making the room vibrate.
TONGUES
Mamie does practice she tongues until the night does come, and Daddy does walk in speaking his own tongues too. I does hear them converge, like the way the riptides at Mayaro does hook onto yuh foot and tug you beneath the sand, and suddenly you are locked somewhere in between sky and ocean and blackness and the silky floor of the sea.
The Exorcism
Then we became fulla the spirit. Something awoke inside us. I never see a girl with such fire like Dreenie! We became temples rocking with Kodesh fire. Singing, clapping, dipping the hems of our abayas in blood. It felt like Yom Teruah, it felt like a day of shouting and blowing! She kept coming at me, doing a wild dance, and I doing me own outta control dancing, the two of us giddy, and we realized instinctively that we just set ourselves free and nobody could take it away from us.
