“Miss, you have a extra pen?”
“Here.”
“I can’t find my copy book, Miss. You have a page to lend me?” He gave up the pretence of rummaging through the empty bag.
Ornella placed one hand on a hip and looked at the boy.
“Allyou jokey, yes.” She took two pages from a binder on her desk and thumped them down in front of the boy who was now fiddling with a mobile phone.
“Andrew!”
“Oh gosh Miss! Is mih modder who BBM-in’ mih about something important!”
“Put. Away. The phone.”
“Miss, this test is for course marks?”
Ornella looked at me, and I looked at her. She turned back to the boy. “Yes, Andrew. I told you that last week. And the week before. And…”
An uproar broke out from the direction of Block Y. Students began to stream past the doorway shouting, “Fight! Fight!”
I bent my head and focused on the unintelligible script, titled “S.A.”, in front of me. Andrew half rose from the chair. Ornella’s glare froze him.
“Sit!”
“Oh gosh, Miss! Is fight!”
He wilted and picked up the question paper but his attention was on the louvres, or rather, the commotion somewhere outside the thin grey metal slats. There were screams, and shouts. Shrill laughter. Mr. Mahabir, the biology teacher, rolled into the staff room, wiping perspiration from his face with a wrinkled kerchief. I glanced up just as he flopped down on the battered armchair, slipped a metal flask from his briefcase, took a sip, twisted the cover and put it away again. Coffee, he claimed. No one was fooled.
“I don’t know what the ass going on in this place. A student just run past my lab waving a Chinese chopper.” He slumped deeper into the faded cushions and closed his eyes. “Two more years,” he intoned to no one in particular. “Two more years!”
I did not look up this time. I was tackling the “S.A.” from the top again, my red pen poised in midair, tremulous, unsure where to begin its campaign on the incoherent scrawl on the page.
“That’s the third fight this week. Two yesterday. Like we going to break a record this term.” Ornella was looking through the louvres at the scene in the car park.
“I wasn’t here yesterday.”
“So you missed the blood-letting, then. A girl from Garment Construction stabbed a girl from Home Ec. With scissors.”
“Yes. I heard. I missed all the excitement. Lucky me.”
I put down the pen, placed the unmarked “S.A.” in a manila folder, stood and took my bag out of the rusted grey locker behind my chair. “I’m done for today. Enjoy your weekend, Ornie.”
Two deans passed the open door, each gripping a disheveled student; one boy scowled while tears stained the cheek of the other. I paused, letting them get clear, then walked out into the glare of the car park. I could feel the tension in the back of my neck and my shoulders. The headache was beginning to pound; I hoped it wouldn’t ruin my weekend as it had a habit of doing. Thank goodness my mother was taking the children from today—at least they wouldn’t have to whisper and tiptoe around the house while keeping me supplied with washcloths dipped in ice water to soothe my throbbing head. I smiled, as I always did when I thought about my two little sunbeams, and the tightness in my shoulder eased a little.
The sky was luminous without a cloud in sight and the air was crystalline after the morning rain. The poui trees, adorned in delicate nuances of lilac and pink, lined the driveway. A chicken hawk wheeled in the liquid air high above. The sunshine stung my arms as I made my way to the rusty little Mazda.
I focused on the hawk.
A dim streetlight appeared ahead, and I was, hallelujah, on the main road, the shop a mere two hundred yards away.
I joined the line strung out along the pavement in front of the shop. The queue inched forward. The man in front of me reached the cashier sitting behind the round window, opened his mouth to make his request and—the lights went out!
“Oh gawwwd!” A unanimous appeal to the mercies of Jesus, Allah, Krishna, Jah and the power company.
“They load-sheddin’ again,” muttered a voice on my left.
“A twenty-inch cable bust and they using a sixteen-inch, so is the whole country they sufferin’,” enlightened a man on my right.
“I best go home, oui? If the lights come back, then I go come back too.” Two women departed.
The small crowd around the hole in the wall trickled away and people on the street drifted off. Should I go home? I reflected on the long, dark, and now very lonely walk back and decided to stay put. I turned around and my eyes collided with the too-bright, too-bold stare of a dougla-rasta sitting on the railing near me. He continued to stare, unabashed. There was something deeply disquieting about that intense, enigmatic gaze. I looked away.
Jee-sus Christ. What am I doing here?
I stood. I waited. I ignored the profanity of the couple waiting near the railing. Whew! They were just having a normal conversation, no raised voices, no anger, just chitchat—but the language! My ears and sensitivities burned. A man shoved past me and the other stalwarts who had remained in the line.
“Allyuh hurry up and light them candle, nuh man. Ah want two brown bread.” A long pause. “Is two brown bread ah say ah want.”
“What yuh mean—yuh don’t want this bread? Ain’t this bread brown?” the young lady inside enquired.
“Ah say ah want brown bread! Call Chin in there and tell him to get two brown bread for meh!” I peered through the locked glass doors into the candle-lit interior, trying to figure out which of the people milling around inside the shop was Chin. I gave up. They were all Indian. A car pulled up and a man got out, distracting me from the brown-bread drama.
“What happen, they not openin’ the door?”
“You mad or what? The current gone; this is bandit time.”
The newcomer laughed, got in his car and sped off.
I pondered my mental state. Why wasn’t I at home, front and back doors double-bolted, windows burglar-proofed, vicious (hopefully) guard dog (next door) patrolling, keeping me safe, secure, or at least providing that illusion? I turned around and again encountered the sly-bold, unwavering stare of the dougla-rasta. I closed my eyes and sighed.
“Is not this bread ah want! Ah want brown bread!”
“Is whole wheat bread you want?”
“Ah want brown bread!” He was shouting now. A man appeared next to the girl behind the glass window with the hole.
“Look your money! Go from here! This hour, current done gone, and you want people to go in the back and get brown bread for you? The shop closed, you hear? Go from here!”
“Ah go put a lash on you! Allyou tryin’ to embarrass me or what?”
The man inside appeared in the doorway. “You always talkin’ lash! Look me here. Come and lash me, nuh!”
The bread buyer, who had begun walking away, spun around. He loomed, his muscles bulging. The skinny little man in the doorway looked up at him and screamed, enveloping me in a miasma of stale alcohol: “Yuh blasted jackass!” The muscular young man lunged for the door which was suddenly slammed shut with the little grey man on the safe side. Bystanders hauled the thwarted bread buyer away. They clutched his arms, his vest, anywhere they could hold. He was half-dragged, half-carried, still screaming obscenities.
“This ain’t done, ah tell yuh! Ah goin’ to shoot allyou! This ain’t done!”
In the ensuing silence, a laconic voice spoke from the shadows.
“Chin playin’ brave and openin’ door to fight, then he runnin’? The feller shoulda hit him a lash. He woulda get sober one-time.”
I stood and reflected. Why was everyone so angry? Why did nothing work? And why exactly was I out here in the middle of the madness, probably endangering my life? Suppose the young man came back with a “piece” and I got caught in the cross-fire…
Lord, my children. He would come and take them. After all the years of not supporting them, my goo
d, bright, beautiful children, he would suddenly appear and take them away from my mother, my sisters, everyone who loved them… Oh God, what am I doing here?
I blinked as the lights came on. A machine hummed. The line jerked forward. I paid for my purchase through the hole in the glass, grabbed my bounty and strode away. I really wanted to scuttle off but figured such cowardly behaviour would attract every human predator within a two-mile radius. I turned onto the dark street once more, my heart sinking. Would I make it through a second time? I was really pushing my luck now.
Two men were sitting on a culvert on the corner. They stopped talking as I passed. I walked a few paces, looked back, and realized they had disappeared.
That was fast. Where had they gone? I had heard no footsteps, nothing. They just—disappeared. Abracadabra.
Stop shaking! I admonished my legs, urging them to go faster still. A snatch of a David Rudder calypso began playing in my head: “Once upon a time there was a magic island, full of magic people…”
I hated when my brain did that—always providing a soundtrack like my life was some damned movie.
That was when the car decided to approach me at a snail’s pace, scaring the crap out of me, then racing away into the night. Some idiot having a laugh at my expense? As my great-grandmother used to say, what is joke for schoolboys is death for crapaud.
I made it through the long, dark tunnel of Cicada Road and turned on to Blue Basin Road. Once again I ignored the hecklers calling to me from the corner. I was actually glad to see them still there, young and harmless-seeming, standing under a streetlight calibrating their manhood. I rounded a bend. On my left was an abandoned house that had been undermined by the ravine and now teetered on its edge, deep cracks running from the driveway to the roof; on my right nothing but bush and, behind the lush tangle, what Trinis euphemistically refer to as a river.
There was a sudden crackle of bushes to my right and my mind began to skitter. Those men on the bend could easily walk up the riverbed, run out through the bushes and pull me in.
Maybe it was just a dog in there. Or a manicou. Or a—a—
I took to my heels. Raced past the bushy part, through the whispering, eerily shadowed tunnel of the bamboo patch, along the edge where the road was falling into the river, skid on some gravel, stop, grab side, pant-pant-pant, off again, don’t look back, run, run, come on feet, swing on to my street, don’t stop now, past manicured verges and shapely shrubs, arrive at last, pause, open gate, skate to a stop at own front door, drop keys twice, open the damn thing, slam it shut, double-bolt those beautiful locks.
My heart was slamming in my chest. I hunched over, rasping, opened my hand to cradle the pain in my side—and there it was, crumpled but in one piece: my precious Lotto ticket.
I collapsed on to the couch. My heart slowed as I eased into a warm, familiar place. Tomorrow I could have no worries. Fix the Mazda—no, buy a decent car. A house in a safe place. Braces for Ryan. Ballet classes for Chrissy. I sank into that familiar place, purchasing sanity with the coin of delusion.
The slip of paper drifted from my fingers. I shook off my reverie, picked up the ticket, smoothed it out and placed it under the lamp so only a tip showed.
The Sieve of Time A Poem by Afzal Moolla
Cast ashore,
along the banks of time,
whirling through the passing years,
clinging to futile scribbles set in rhyme,
Cast ashore,
thrust into an unrehearsed pantomime,
clenching slivers of joy as weariness descends,
lulled into a peaceful slumber exhilaratingly sublime.
Cast ashore,
hazily adrift, a dandelion seed on the wings of time,
trapped in the sieve of spiralling memories,
caught between pristine bliss, and reeking slime.
Cast ashore,
flung aside for no discernible crime,
my human heart thuds with elusive hope,
though battered, bruised and covered in grime,
I stagger ashore, alone,
embracing each moment of detached, oblivious time.
Intervention A Story by Cher Corbin
Heavy lids opened slowly. Residues of crusted mucous stuck to the base of the once thick lashes now set in swollen red rims.
Eric lay entwined in the dirty patterned sheets on the small cot propped in the corner of the derelict chattel house. He raised his head and felt a searing pain at the base of his skull. His eyes were burning. He inhaled in short staggered breaths. His chest hurt and he felt his heart making sudden erratic thuds in its coronial cavity. He needed her. Where did she go? He screamed her name, but the only answer he received was the high pitched squeak of the rat he mistakenly hit as his hand rolled off the edge of the cot.
He tried desperately to make some sense of what was going on. This was the worst he knew he had ever felt. He was cold and in pain. He inhaled. His nostrils were assailed with the skanky scent of sewage. He placed his right hand down his side; the sheets were damp and sticky. The room was dark, damp and cold. The smell on his digits was nauseating. He placed his index finger in his mouth. It tasted like shit. Yes, that is what it was, his shit. He had defecated and urinated on the sheets. Not knowing how long he had lain there, he needed her, he missed her, and he wanted her badly….
Lady Snow,
I found refuge in your offerings.
With you I was never alone.
I saw your sounds and heard your lights.
I became your eager student.
Dancing to the kaleidoscopic beat
of your white crystals, lifting and gliding.
On a thermal of nasal air I would rise,
riding the vector, low to high.
You gave me what I wanted, what I needed, what I craved,
bliss, freedom, oblivion.
Eric tried to pull himself out of this reverie. He knew he was in trouble this time, serious trouble. It was difficult to think straight. He needed to feel her arms around him again. Fumbling to find a space for his feet on the cluttered floor, Eric used his fingers to pry open his eyelids. The pain was unbearable and his head swirled.
He heard a gurgling noise like water moving quickly down the kitchen sink drain. With a gut wrenching heave, his emaciated body vibrated with spasms as he wretched. He wrapped his arms around himself. Every hurl brought with it searing, blinding pain.
He screamed, “Oh God! I can’t do this. Why have you left me?” he sobbed bitterly as he rocked back and forth. Eric opened his eyes wide; he thought he saw movement in the corner of the hut. He raised his arm, flicking at the cockroach that was feasting on the stained and crusty bruise that was self-inflicted; he thought he saw her. She was smiling.
“You have come for me,” he whispered and lost consciousness.
His dreams were turbulent, violent and disturbing. Eric felt a burning in his arm and a warm shield enveloping his whole being. He felt his body lifting, seemingly suspended in mid-air. He heard noises, sirens maybe voices.
“Lift him gently, be careful, don’t let that IV come out!”
He definitely was being propelled but in which direction he had no idea. There was a touch. Someone touched his forehead. Someone was close, he could feel their warm breath.
“Don’t worry son, you gonna be alright, alright ya hear!”
“Lady, Lady” he tried to speak, but there was something covering his mouth and nose. “Is that you?” A meek smile behind the mask, “You have come for me. I knew you would,” he lost consciousness again.
Eric felt a chill. This time it was not for lack of warmth in the room. This time it was from the latticed metal–type pillow he saw rotating in the corner. “What is that?” His mind tried to grapple with the images that were rapidly escorted to his brain through his eyes. He blinked and then closed them tightly. They didn’t burn so much this time. He craned his neck to the right and finally understood what he was seeing. It was a fan in th
e corner, rotating on maybe too high a speed. This was the source of the cool air.
Eric tried to pull himself up on the bed to draw closer to the head board. Even these small movements caused searing pain, especially in his chest. He looked down towards his feet. He couldn’t see them as they were covered in the sheets. He tried to lift his arms and realised they were restrained on the sides of the bed.
“What is this? What’s going on here?” he screamed. “Help! Someone help me, please!” Eric pulled and yanked at the straps securing his wrists, jerking the bed as best he could, but with little strength.
The door at the foot of the bed opened. He saw her then. It was the same smile. She came towards him. “Hello Eric. And how are we feeling today?” she asked in a most sunny way. “You gave us quite a scare back there. We thought we had lost you.”
Eric shook his head from side to side. “What was she talking about?” his mind screamed. “Lost me? How could you, I am right here,” he snarled at the lady comforter in the blue and white uniform. “Get me out of this shit! Get me out of this! I am not an animal!”
How ironic these words were. The journey this young man had embarked on had carried him to many places: decrepit, unsanitary, destitute places. He had walked a path very few of us will ever tread. Now, he was saved, or that is what they told him. Miss Comforter sat next to him on the edge of the bed and fed him a few sips of water from the plastic cup on the side table. She relayed to him the events of the last seven days. Her voice was very soothing, he had to admit and he was feeling a little better. The pain in his head was subsiding and he could sit up without the room spinning. Despite this progress he still felt lost, he felt depressed.