Amid the great inconvenience of it all, it was impossible to tell if this event was supposed to be a curse or tragedy or what. There was nothing to make head or tail of. All that remained was a shimmering expanse of organic compounds, the looming dread of Kingston city morning traffic and the fact that they were now running behind if they wanted to beat the long line to get inside.
Joseline was standing before the sink, peeling green figs. No one could kalé fig like Joseline. She held the fig and sliced its green jacket, wedging her thumb into the slit and sliding it around until the skin detached from the starchy white crescent. Clean and flayed, she plopped it into a pan of water.
Since their days in Paris, Jack and Lola had settled for corporate roles that afforded them all the hallmarks of millennial success. The freehold in Zone Two that they’d upgrade when her inheritance came in; the luxury of planning for children without worrying about the cost of a nanny.
A kind of arrogance to think you should be remembered in the first place. Most people who ever been on this planet lived and was folded back into the ground, and the world move right on without needing a name. You cant expect eternity. The future never owe us nothin.
Joey popping up in Portland was kinda crazy. It was about three years ago that she met him at Trinidad carnival, her in her elaborate wings and he in his shirt from his friend’s brand. He was a fisherman by trade, and the dexterity of his fingers translated beyond tying line, she remembered that much.
She imagined the countless deyas conjuring others into life around the planet as it spun into darkness, wrapped in coils of these little beads of light. She thought of the first Indians brought here almost two hundred years ago, lighting their deyas — in those days not so different from the lamps their colonial masters used — under strange skies.
Celeste’s mother had been deployed to Iraq. It was her first tour outside of the US, so Celeste was sent to stay with her Aunt until…
The girl was used to moving around as a child. Since she was three, she had rarely lived in one place for over a year. And until today, she had never known that it was an option to carry one’s house along when one moved.
I would have loved other names, but my parents chose to name me Kael; Kael Prospere in full. I am writing this from a shipping container in Rotterdam, six thousand miles from the place I was born. The container has been converted into housing. They call it “transitional accommodation.”
Sometimes when you meet up people from back in the day, it doesn’t have nothing you could talk to them about. People who gone and they whole life change so much, they doesn’t really have nothing in common with you again but the old days. And plenty people don’t like to talk about back in the day. I could understand that.
A typical day is the twenty-minute walk to school because the money she saves on transport is money she can put toward the chalk she buys herself because the ministry allocation ran out in October. A typical day is thirty-eight children in a room built for twenty-five, and the heat, and Widline in the front row who is ten and reads at a level that would embarrass children in Lyon, who reads with her whole body tilted toward the page as if leaning into a wind.
A news bulletin plays on the TV. Another action by the big navy that has been patrolling the waters of the Caribbean. Grainy black-and-white images, a boat in the water, crosshairs superimposed, a flash that suddenly lights up the screen.
As the nighttime sighed, Mr. and Mrs. Caridad drifted into the same dream.
They lay face down on the ocean, floating along its silky surface, naked, and draped in moonlight’s velvety glow. The water was red, and it was white, and it was blue, all at the same time. Schools of silver-scaled fish, sparkling like jewels, swam eagerly into the open hands of the couple. Each fish multiplied, over and over, until the red-white-blue ocean was nothing but silver flesh and scale.
